Oh man... my week so far from Thursday

Oh man. It's such a beautiful day today, and I have CONCERNS.

This week I helped Kate move from next door to here to Ascot Park three suburbs up. From my neighbour Steven I borrowed a trolley to lug furniture, and then left it locked into the Ascot Park house until Friday.

Poor Steven! He's no intellectual giant, and he behaved exactly as I expected him to: he got angry. I took the blame and now there's tension between us. He feels ripped of because I can't return what I borrowed.

So immediately I asked one of the girls to ring the landlord and he agreed to put it out for me last night "after work". At ten thirty last night I went to Ascot Park and... no trolley. So I walked home and was really tired when I got here and slept til eleven.

Then I realised I had missed an interview at ten. Oh man. I wasn't prepared so it's not like it could possibly have gone WELL.

So let me enumerate a few of the marvellous things that HAVE gone well this week:

Yesterday I wrote a SF story, which I think is pretty damn good. It's called Gaiaforming Mars, and it's about high frontier capitalism and post-singularity biology. The plot: two kids get called out from the biodomes on earth by Gaia and into orbit where colonies of humans live, and told they are going to help Gaiaform Mars. Their exploration of their different cultural backgrounds - one a mystical gene-engineered half-human Dreamer, the other a practical elite altruocrat - soon reveal their purpose in space, and aid in the opening of a new market and ecology on and around Mars. I calibrate the story's level of power on the Hawkins scale at 360, which is excellent news, since most SF test weak (below 200), and only one SF story tests above 500 (Kim Stanley Robinson's remarkable "Short History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations.")

At ten thousand words it is actually classes as a longer story, I believe. I spellchecked the tale and immediately lined it up on the queue for crits at www.critters.org. Seven thousand words in a day is GOOD.

I have written a sent three crits, which I recognise are one of the best things I can give to ensure a regular flow of ideas.

The challenge today is to clear out the mounds of paper in my life, to make way for the new and get rid of the old.

In the last few weeks I have learnt some REALLY interesting things about goals.

- Desire, it turns out, doesn't come from you. It comes from agreement between the various aspects of you as to what is desireable. In other words, by writing down a desire and the contemplating the various "uh-ohs", you can forge an incredibly powerful force for good and source of power.

As a result, I have experienced desire without the normal restraints of fear and sadness and other negative emotions. This is pretty exciting for me, because it signals that I'm mastering the anxiety problems I have suffered, and finding a new way to general will and willingness. It is a sign of recovery.

- The way to act: the way to act, I have learnt, is to do EVERYTHING YOU CAN, with the sense as you do it that it is all that needs to be done for the attainment of long term goals. This is not an injunction to overwork but rather to appropriately do what can be done in a day, today, and to leave tomorrow's work alone. Also a major lesson for me.

- Working on goals. The proof that goals are well done is DESIRE. A feeling of wanting to act. If the goals are personalised enough, then you want to act, not just on them, but on all of life, more and more. A good goal brings you into engagement with life in the now, presenting immediate ways to contribute and things to do. Or so I have learnt.

That's my news at the moment.