Getting There From Here

In my last post, I promised I would talk a bit about how I intend to proceed with my endeavors in the immediate future. My long-term goals and concerns have remained largely unchanged. Meanwhile, here's the current run-down of projects

Fitness
I did a real number on my right hand practicing parkour a few weeks ago. While it's healed enough that it no longer impedes daily function, the portion of the palm that runs from the wrist up to the little finger still feels tender to the touch, and putting weight on it is rather painful. I'm hoping to get my hand X-ray scanned soon to see what the nature of the damage is. My fear is that it could be an occult fracture, but I'm hoping it's a bruise of the periosteum.

While I'm frustrated by this, I've taken advantage of the time to start building my core and lower body up to my upper body's level. I've been doing hill sprints every other day, allowing my legs to gradually acclimate to the new stress. When I've reached the point of steadily doing ten hill sprints per session, three sessions per week, I'll throw two isometric stretching sessions into my week as well and work towards the front split, side split, pike and back bridge.

Writing
This one has been going well! As I've already detailed, my output has consistently increased each week, and I'm currently on track to hit my goal of 3,500 words/day before the end of the year. I want to pick up the pace on poetry as well, but getting inspired to write a poem is a rarer occurrence lately. I think two poems a week would be a good target, and I'd consider a three-poem week exceptional.

What needs work in the process of making writing my sole income source is my marketing. It has been three weeks since I started putting myself out there, but my Facebook page has only three followers, my Twitter has thirty-one--but God knows how many of them actually pay any attention to it--and my Tumblr has four. Part of it is being a relatively new regular content producer. Part of it is that writing doesn't often attract large audiences as quickly as music or visual art. Most of it, however, is that I've yet to make my web-presence cohesive. So, given that, let's move on to . . .
 
Building Web Presence

In the case of my two blogger pages, replacing them with a proper the mutable website is the answer, but Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr remain separate. Learning more about properly customizing those will help me make an impression, but beyond that, I need a content strategy that links them all together with a 'voice.' Presently, I post snippets of the day's work on Tumblr and Facebook, link to the Tumblr entry on Twitter, and make occasional commentary on literary culture. I intend to continue doing these, albeit striving for greater regularity. The following ideas are under consideration:

• "Word of the Day" : In which I choose an interesting word and provide the definition.
• "Song of the Day" : In which I recommend a song for followers to check out.
• Humorous tweets : Fairly self-explanatory. I do find odd stuff funny, though, so I don't know if this would build a dedicated niche audience or just get nowhere.

. . . and, well, that's what I can think of at the moment that's specific to social media outlets. The other major exposure-boosting tool would be Youtube videos. There's also a bit of a learning curve on these, as I have no video-production experience, and producing videos of quality is important in differentiating myself as a content creator. Ideas for the content itself include

• Language Learning Videos : Videos in which I practice concepts from the languages I'm learning, inviting commentary and corrections from others.
• Tutorial Videos : Covering various subjects where I know enough to walk someone through useful concepts. With the exception, perhaps, of specific technology-related tutorials, the emphasis here would be on teaching broadly applicable concepts through an example, rather than just teaching the example itself.
• Performance Art : Monologue and other forms of solo performance art.

I've also considered a podcast, though this poses the question of what I and my hypothetical co-podcasters could discuss for 45-minutes-to-an-hour in an entertaining way, something I'm not really sure of yet.

Web Design and Programming

I have a clear idea of how I'm going to go about this. While there is a true programming component to most dynamic web design, I'm going to separate these into two parallel tracks. I'll approach both with a mixture of reference material and hands-on experimentation, setting myself specific, well-defined projects on both the web and non-web tracks, and I'll allow things to develop naturally from there.

I haven't picked my first projects for each, yet, but I know that on the web side, I'll be looking to start with refreshing my HTML/CSS experience and gradually start implementing more and more Javascript functionality--eventually learning to draw on various techniques like AJAX or JSON and libraries/extensions like Backbone, jQuery and Node. I can create a portfolio page to show the results off and possibly solicit more lucrative freelance work along the way.

On the non-web side, after some consideration and pulling in advice from various sources, I'm thinking of starting with C, then learning an assembly lanaguage (MIPS or ARM), then C++. Where I'll go from there, I'm still considering. Learning Assembly, C and C++ before anything else somewhat undermines the idea of an 'increasing complexity' approach, but would build a strong foundation of following stricter standards of clean code. I would probably take a look at Python, Ruby or Java next. We'll see.

Visual Art and Graphic Design

Starting with very fundamental drawing exercises here: exercises for drawing straight lines, for judging the lengths and angles of lines. These will be more bread-and-butter for a while, until I'm satisfied with the improvement enough to move on to 2d shape and 3d form drawing exercises. I'll also start doing simple drawings of actual subject matters in parallel to these, and study on the results to determine where I need to focus more. My intention is to create a gallery for this journey, which can hopefully inspire some people who want to draw but think they "don't have talent" and therefore can't do it, to try anyway.

These efforts with visual art will innately improve my graphic design skills, but I also need to develop greater acuity for layouts, color composition and typography. I'll be rolling these efforts into my web design practice.

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That's the current state of affairs. I have a lot learn and just as much to refine, but I'm eager to do so.

Still learning,
~L