Thursday, April 29, 2010

Why Yes, I AM Still Alive...And I've Done Stuff Too.

Hello, hello, been awhile of silence but I'm back-hopefully for more than three bad posts. Life kind of crept up on me, reenacting the shower scene from Psycho. I didn't die, but it halted things for some time. I've caught up, mostly: gotten used to the busy mornings, the afternoon exercises, the strange disappearance of that block of time between morning and evening. It's ironic that right after I created and printed a schedule for myself, everything kind of back-flipped, so I have to analyze my days again.

So, on April 17th, 2010 I attended a festival with my sister, the Black Heritage Festival at University of Baltimore. There were vendors and performances-mostly vendors-and it was a nice taste of what she and I are in for.
I mention the festival because our table happened to be right across from the table of an author who also runs a publishing house (J.M. Benjamin, A New Quality Publishing). He made conversation with us, gave me a little info about writing a synopsis (or at least something to tell people on the street when they ask what I'm writing) as soon as possible, and told me to try submitting work to them to see where I'm at. I made my first connection, woo!

I did something I have never really considered before on Tuesday. I always read people's suggestions on other places you can go to write and thought "yeah, that sounds good" with a noncommittal nod to myself, but for whatever reason it occurred to me to spend my free day there. I didn't get many pages, but the atmosphere was a nice change; with nothing in the environment to distract me it was a bit easier to get coherent lines on the page.
It was a nice experience for me...or maybe it was the hot chocolate. I learned two things: I need to be in the library writing more often, and Seattle's Best makes very sugary hot cocoa, or sugary vanilla, or sugary hazelnut, I threw both in so I'm still narrowing down the suspects.
It hadn't occurred to me until a few days prior that the notebook was nearly full, and I was but two chapters away from the ending...and that I'd wasted most of the month being lazy instead of working toward my goal of finishing before May.
I did the same thing in February, and March. Pattern?
I think I've made some good progress. There's a frame, but the door is still under construction...and someone painted the bottom half puce instead of white. I'm not an expert painter, but I can fix it.

Lifewise, I'm just a bit anxious about May 1st, when I participate in the NAMIWalks event: a 2.5 mile walk through a park in support of NAMI (I'm lazy, so I'm just going to post the link to NAMI's website for more information- www.NAMI.org). It'll keep NAMI functioning, which I'm all for.
It'll be 2.5 miles of me getting to know my teammates better and get a lot of thinking done. And if my sister says it's cool, I might take her camera to take pictures of the park. Should be nice.

There's my updates for the past two months, and now I have to get work done.