My legend: * = I’ve read it, % = I’ve read part of it, + = I want to read it, # = I own it

1. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy *#
2. 1984, by George Orwell *
3. Ulysses, by James Joyce
4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner +
6. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison +
7. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
8. The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer +#
9. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen *#
10. Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri +#
11. Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer +#
12. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift *#
13. Middlemarch, by George Eliot +#
14. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, Margaret by Mitchell +#
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez +#
18. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald *#
19. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
20. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
21. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck +
22. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie-
23. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley *
24. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf +
25. Native Son, by Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville +
27. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin +#
28. The Histories, by Herodotus +#
29. The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau +#
30. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx +#
31. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli *#
32. Confessions, by St. Augustine +#
33. Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes +#
34. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides +#
35. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien *#
36. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne +
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis *#
38. A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster *
39. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee +#
41. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version *#
42. A Clockwork Orange, by Antony Burgess
43. Light in August, by William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. Du Bois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys %
46. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert +#
47. Paradise Lost, by John Milton +#
48. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy *#
49. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare *#
50. King Lear, by William Shakespeare *#
51. Othello, by William Shakespeare +#
52. Sonnets, by William Shakespeare +#
53. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman +
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain *#
55. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling +
56. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley *#
57. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway +
60. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut +
61. Animal Farm, by George Orwell *#
62. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding *
63. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote +
64. The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust +
66. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner +
68. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway +
69. I, Claudius, by Robert Graves *#
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence
72. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren +
73. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin +
74. Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White *#
75. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad +#
76. Night, by Elie Wiesel +
77. Rabbit Run, by John Updike +
78. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton %
79. Portney’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West
82. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett +
84. His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman %#
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather *#
86. The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams +
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao, by Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James +
90. Brideshead Revisted, by Evelyn Waugh +
91. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes +
93. Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad +#
94. Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves+
95. The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame +#
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley & Malcom X +
98. Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
100. The Second World War, by Winston Churchill +

Hmm, I don’t like this list very much. One of these days I’ll come up with my own…

Going along with the time theme, here’s a quick review of where I am on my New Year’s resolutions, along with some newer goals.

1. Go to London. Done. I might even go again in the fall. ;)

2. Listen to only classical music in January. I made it halfway. I don’t know why I don’t listen to classical more often, though. It clears my mind like no other kind of music.

3. Read 60 books. Goodreads tells me I’m at 27 so far for this year. Should be easy enough to hit. And with my new writing/reading focus, I wouldn’t be surprised if I make it to 70 or 80.

4. Write half an hour a day. I’ve decided to go with a word count goal instead (500 a day for now, but I’ll soon ramp it up to 2000, I think), and while it took a while to get consistent, I’m happy to report that I haven’t missed a day since June 11. (Excluding Sundays.)

5. Write five short plays and get at least two of them produced. I’ve written two so far (I think), and both got produced. I’ve also completed a draft of a full-length play.

6. Write 50 short stories. Um, I’m still at zero. Whoops. :)

7. Write one novel. I’m on chapter four of my Tanglewood novel; I started a new draft and plan to finish it by September 1 if not sooner. Incidentally, I printed out a copy of my Out of Time novel (NaNoWriMo 2007) via Lulu. It arrived today, and flipping through it, I cringed a lot. It’s painfully bad. That’s why I’m putting it on my desk, to motivate me to finish Tanglewood so I can finally have an unembarrassing novel to my name. ;) I don’t know yet if I’ll do NaNoWriMo this year. Probably?

8. Write and illustrate a children’s book. This is on the back burner till I finish Tanglewood.

9. Get into the habit of submitting work for publication. Still working on this. It’ll come soon, though, now that I’m writing a lot more.

10. Keep Mormon Artist afloat. Still alive and kicking. :) I just got two new editors, in fact. We’re coming out with our special contest issue and our sixth regular issue this month.

11. Complete 20 digital paintings. This resolution is nixed.

12. Stay at Inbox Zero. So-so. Right now I’m at three.

13. Get married. :P Um, a younger, more reckless Ben put this on the list. An older, hopefully wiser Ben is going to take it off now. :) (Off the public list, that is. It’s still very much on the not-so-public list, although not tied to any specific timeframe. ;)) (Yay for unnecessary disclaimers. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to become a lawyer.) (Those wonderings never last more than a few seconds. I could never be a lawyer.) (Okay, Ben, time to shut up and move on. Right now. :))

And now for the newer goals:

A. Read no more than five books at a time. Did I mention this on here? I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s mostly going well, though sometimes it’s really hard. And I’m not counting the books I read on my iPhone as part of the five. (Yeah, that’s probably cheating, huh. :)) I miss my 15-at-a-time days, but I’m finishing more now, which is better.

B. Cut side projects and focus on writing. It’s going really, really well. I’ve still got a small handful of loose ends but they should all be tied up by the end of the month, and even now I’m writing a lot more and reading a lot more. I’d forgotten how good clarity and focus feel. :)

I’ve tried most of the iPhone ebook readers (Eucalyptus, Stanza, Classics, BookZ, eReader, Kindle, Bookshelf, and Shortcovers, with Instapaper covering a slightly different niche). The ones I come back to? Eucalyptus and Instapaper. We’ll throw Stanza in for good measure, since it’s my fallback ePub reader and was my favorite until Eucalyptus showed up.

Eucalyptus

I love love love Eucalyptus. At first I didn’t think I would — I’d convinced myself that Stanza’s page-turning mechanism was best (tap on the right side to page forward, tap on the left side to page back). But it only took thirty seconds before I fell in love with Eucalyptus and pretty much everything about it. Sure, you can only read Project Gutenberg texts that are in English, but that covers most of what I wanted to read anyway — and it’s not like 20,000 books isn’t enough. ;)

Did I mention that Eucalyptus is beautiful?

And here we are turning a page (and this is now my favorite way to turn pages on the iPhone). A still shot doesn’t do it justice, so make sure you go over to the website and watch the video (under “Reads like a book”):

And I love the blue progress pie charts — brilliant:

I can’t think of any real complaints I have about Eucalyptus. It’s awesome. If you have an iPhone and you love books, go buy this app now. It’s worth every cent of the $10.

And what am I reading? Trollope’s autobiography, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, and I’m rereading both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre (both of which I adore).

Stanza

For a long time, Stanza was my shining star for iPhone reading. Now that Eucalyptus has come along and dethroned it, however, I find myself hardly ever opening it. I still keep it around to read any non-Project Gutenberg ePubs I come across, though. (Which hasn’t happened yet.)

I have to say, after using Eucalyptus for several weeks, Stanza feels almost sterile. I seriously love Eucalyptus.

Instapaper

Instapaper doesn’t really compete with Eucalyptus or Stanza because it’s not a fiction reader: it’s a way to read long-form blog posts and other web pages on your phone. (Or on the web.) You set up an account on Instapaper.com and then use a bookmarklet to save pages to your Instapaper account. The iPhone app automatically syncs with your account. It’s perfect at what it does as far as I’m concerned.

And it’s got the über-awesome auto-scroll feature — using the iPhone’s accelerometer, Instapaper can sense when you’re tipping the phone forward or backward and then scroll accordingly. It works really well.

Summary

Reading on the iPhone is great and so convenient it gives me goosebumps. I can read anywhere now, since I always have my phone with me. I’ve read the first third of Trollope’s autobiography on my walk home from work each day, for example. Dead time is dead no longer. (I also use WriteRoom to work on my novel — got a nice page or so written this morning on my way up to work.)

Will something else come along and unseat Eucalyptus? Maybe. It’s hard to imagine something better, but I’m quite open to that possibility. Competition is a very good thing here. :)

The best part, though, is what happened afterward.

I woke up.

You see, I have lots of hobbies. Lots of projects. That was how I defined myself, really: by being a many-project person. A Renaissance man.

But my real dream is to be a writer. Being one of those people like Jefferson who absolutely cannot live without books, I knew when I was younger that I wanted to be a writer. Then real life stepped in and I surrendered and made plans to do something practical with my life. Sayonara to the writing dream…or so I thought.

A couple years ago, however, I realized I really liked this blogging thing. A lot. I started writing plays, too, and before long I remembered (how could I have forgotten?) that writing was what I loved most. That feeling has grown stronger and stronger until now where I know it’s my life’s work and it’s what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. Even if it’s so dang hard sometimes. :)

But even then I was still only spending a sliver of my free time writing. Sure, I wrote twenty short plays and a 50,000-word NaNoWriMo novel, but time after time I’d get distracted by zillions of other little side projects. I thought I didn’t have time to write. And I didn’t, since I was filling up my time with lots and lots of other stuff.

After this last week of full-on writing focus — within five minutes of getting home after the conference, actually — I woke from my reverie and saw that all of those little side projects were pulling my energy away from what I want most and shunting it off in too many other directions.

Not any more.

Starting now, I’m axing all of my side projects, with the sole exception of the magazine. No more new projects (I’m finally learning how to say no), no more freelance work (which means Quillfire Studios is going to be hibernating), no more anything that isn’t reading, writing, or the magazine.

This feels right, more right than almost anything else I’ve done in a while. It feels so, so good. Like I’m coming home after a really long time away. This is what I was made for.

I can’t wait to see what happens when I take all of that energy and time I was pouring into my design work and fuel it into my writing instead. Watch for the explosions, folks. ;) It’s going to be hard — design was easy, but writing was and still is hard — but man oh man is it going to be worth it.

It’s only been five days and I’m already seeing the fruits of this new shift in focus. (Monday night I finished the first draft of my first full-length play, for example. And my Tanglewood novel is humming right along.) I still have some loose ends to tie up, but it’s like my mind is clearing up, like I’ve been lugging around a full hard drive in my head for the past five years and I’ve finally cleaned it all out.

I do have to say that it’s kind of scary, shutting down major parts of my life (especially since those were a huge part of who I thought I was), but it’s going to be okay. In fact, it’s going to be awesome.

And you know what? Within five years I’m going to be a full-time author. Maybe even within four. ;)

Disclaimer, because I’m a disclaimery kind of person: I’m not bashing on design. I’m still a designer and will always be a designer. I love design. It’s just that for me, right now, writing is more important. I expect that down the road I’ll start picking up design projects again; I just have to take a break right now and focus on what matters most. That’s all.

See, to really be a writer, you have to write regularly. You have to. That’s how you get good, by putting in the hours and making writing as much a part of your life as brushing your teeth. (Assuming you do, in fact, brush your teeth.) (No, I don’t want to know.) Gladwell gives the 10,000-hour number in Outliers, and I’m pretty sure he’s right. There’s magic in habits. (Must. Resist. Nun. Joke.)

Setting a goal merely to write every single day is great and noble and all that, but the organizational freak inside me wants to set a more specific goal, either in words or in hours. And so I have. Ever since that NaNoWriMo day when I blistered out 10,000 words in a single day (yes, you read that right), and 5,000 the next, I’ve had this uncanny belief in my ability to pump verbiage out onto the page at an alarming rate.

But wait, what about that thing called real life? Those 10k/5k days were empty holidays and Saturdays, but ordinarily I don’t have eight hours a day to write. At first, a thousand words a day seemed like a good goal, so I tried doing that. I lasted all of, oh, three days. After that came a long line of starving zero days with nary a word to my name. (Blogging and twittering don’t count towards the goal, by the way.) (And yes, on those days when I didn’t reach my goal, I realize I should’ve just doodled a picture and called it even. :P)

Brief tangent that’s not really a tangent: People like Trollope are the reason I keep thinking I need to be sizzling out thousands and thousands of words a day, because of course I need to have 80+ novels published by the time I die…right? Bzzt. It’s not about the numbers. And while prolific can be good, and writing that much does give you plenty of practice to get you to your literary Carnegie Hall, it’s silly to worry about goals like that when you’re still trying to finish your second novel. And by “you” I mean “me.”

So, my new goal is 500 words a day. It’s smallish (two pages) and almost reddens my cheeks with underachievement, but I’m coming to terms with the cold reality that writing is not yet high enough of a priority in my life that I can do more than 500 words a day consistently. (And I’d rather write a few words every day than a lot every once in a while.) It shames me to say that. I mean it: I’m cringing over here. I am a writer, so why do I keep letting myself get distracted with all these other projects? Tsk, tsk, Ben. Anyway, that will change someday (hopefully soon), but in the meantime, here’s to 500 words a day and all the books that will come out of it.

I still feel like a pansy. But at least I’ll be a producing pansy!

Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)

Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.

I want to change that.

There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus. ;))

Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.

I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.

I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.

Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go. :)

The good news is that Blender can do depth of field. The bad news is that it’s only possible via postprocessing (using compositing nodes), which isn’t perfect. But it mostly works.

I’m visual—show me what it looks like

Here’s the sample scene before adding depth of field:

And here it is afterward:

As you can see, both the foreground and the background are now blurry, leaving only the center thingie in focus.

Overview (Microwave Edition)

All you have to do is give the camera a focus point (Dof Dist or Dof Ob), add a Defocus node, and render with Do Composite.

The Gritty Details, Please (With Pictures!)

Further Reading

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/composite-defocus/
http://www.vimeo.com/1756578
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Composite_Nodes/Setups/Depth_Of_Field

Notes

This tutorial was made using Blender 2.49.

We’ll have our special contest issue coming out in the next month or so, too. (And hopefully another contest shortly after that.)

You know, it kind of blows my mind that the magazine is still around. It’ll be a year next month since I got the idea for Mormon Artist, and here we are five issues later, with eighty-five volunteers helping out. Hard to believe. :)

City of Bones is another of those books that gets rave reviews and actually deserves them. Within the first few pages I was completely sucked into the world of the story and rearranging my schedule to be able to finish the book. It was worth it, too.

The novel is a can’t-put-it-down urban fantasy set in New York, where demons (bad) and werewolves and vampires and the rest (not necessarily bad) are real, and people called Shadowhunters fight the demons. I have to admit that the premise had me thinking this book wasn’t for me (I guess I’ve developed an aversion to vampire tales), but it didn’t take long before I was won over. Everything just clicks in this milieu, from the magic system to the various societies and cultures. Nothing felt tacky or cliché or, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Have I mentioned the characters? Holy smokes, these people are awesome. Clary, Simon, and Jace are the three major characters, and they’re all drawn in ways that make them real and funny (Simon is hilarious!) and immensely endearing. These are characters you’ll want to spend lots of time with. (Which is why I’m glad there are two more books in the series. :))

Disclaimer: City of Bones is definitely for older teens. There’s a bit of language and some light innuendo. Nothing too hard, but more than your typical YA novel.

Friday

My first impression, as soon as I walked into the registration area and saw all the people in costumes, was that I was glaringly overdressed in my dress shirt and pants (which is what I wear all the time, apparently because I wish I lived in the 1800s or something). It ended up working out okay, though.

The day was a whirl of panels on topics ranging from Dollhouse (Joss Whedon’s TV show) to writing evil overlords (making them believable, that is) to YA publishing.

I haven’t watched many episodes of Dollhouse, but the following Joss Whedon has collected is fascinating and I figured I could learn from him. And I did learn some valuable things from that panel — mostly ways to deepen my own writing, seeing what makes fans go gaga.

Ditto with the evil overlords panel; we talked about things like making your overlords sympathetic (they have to think they’re the hero of their own story, for example, because hardly anyone is evil just for the sake of being evil) and researching real-life villains like Hitler and Stalin.

For me, the YA panels on both Friday and Saturday primarily burrowed their way into my brain as a rabid urge to WRITE. In all-caps. :) That basically describes the whole conference, actually: in almost every panel I went to, the discussions got my writing soul itching to write. I almost had to force myself to stick around each time — I was sorely tempted to book it and find a quiet corner of the hotel where I could pull out my laptop and write for hours.

After a great panel by Howard and Sandra Tayler on structuring their creative life (they do Schlock Mercenary full-time), my friends Josh (who told me about CONduit in the first place) and Daniel and I headed up to the boardroom so they could check out Paul Genesse’s book release party for The Dragon Hunters (which I’d never heard of). The party was over, but we ended up hanging out with Paul and some of his friends for an hour or so, mostly geeking out over Lord of the Rings.

Saturday

The YA panels on Saturday included one on the Harry Potter phenomenon and another on the Twilight phenomenon. (Ironically, most of the people on the Twilight panel hadn’t read the books.) (I tried reading the first book recently, but watching the movie apparently drained me of any need to read it. I tried. And failed. And tried again. And failed again.)

Another disclaimer: I don’t take very good notes. Most of the time I don’t take any notes at all; I used to, but then I never went back and read them, so I’ve mostly stopped. Which is why these summaries are more general than specific. :)

Anyway, one of the panels I went to was actually a recording of two episodes of the Writing Excuses podcast (by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler). I’d never listened to the podcast before, but I ended up liking it a lot. The first episode (season 3, episode 2) featured Aprilynne Pike (#1 on the NYT bestseller list right now for her book Wings) and was mostly about how to make your fantasy or science fiction novel feel real. The second episode was a general Q&A with the audience. I can’t remember much of it, but that’s okay because I don’t have to — it’ll be online soon. :)

After the conference, Josh and Daniel and I went to dinner at the Gateway food court with a bunch of people, including Aprilynne, James Dashner (whose Maze Runner book is being published by Random House), Rebecca Shelley, and Paul Genesse. My overwhelming desire to not look like a fanboy ended up quieting me for most of the rest of the evening (silly me), but even so, it was a lot of fun. Authors are real people.

We returned to the hotel and ended up hanging out till 11 p.m. with Howard and Sandra Tayler, L.E. Modesitt, Julie Wright, Eric James Stone, and others (including a brief stop-in by Dave Wolverton/Farland).

Hmm, it probably looks like I’m name-dropping. (That’s because I am. :P)

Anyway, the conference was a blast — definitely worth the $45. Writing conferences and workshops rock.