Recent Progress for February

She's back! To write more personal stuff!

I haven't kept up with posting updates much thanks to a few factors. One of which was being sick the last few weeks. I lost a lot of time sleeping and being grumpy but managed to achieve a few things:

• Finished Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wrote a very short opinion on the book to work on my reviewing skills, and started Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
• Got to page 80 of LBW. If the ideas keep flowing and I keep up two pages a day then I'll be making sweet progress. Actually I'd be happy with just a page a day or four pages a week.
• Low standards? Nope, I'm just a slow writer with trouble getting ideas. Goal: page 90 by March 5^th 
• Started my first weekly critique after a short break. By the way, I recommend Critique Circle, great place.
• Finished the paper revision I was doing of Serpenttongue. Now I'm plugging it in and making slight revisions as I go. Still finding spots lacking something uncertain, but there's always another go-through. I haven't set any goal other than be past chapter 25 by month's end.
• Still working on a new short story featuring my vampire. It's proving difficult to write. I just don't know the story. Goal: just work on it!

I have uber faith I can succeed, especially if I spend more days getting up at three like I did Thursday. I went back to sleep of course, but I figure why not use that time if I'm up anyway.

What are your goals for the rest of the month?

New Year's Eve / Make Up Your Mind Day

Hello, and happy New Year's Eve to those who celebrate it.

Today also happens to be Make Up Your Mind Day where you...make up your mind, obviously. I'm going to observe it by picking one of three short story ideas I started and working towards completion; I think it will be the short about a certain vampire anti-hero that I began freewriting a few months ago and never finished. Silly me tried to type it out first, and that's just not how my brain works.

It's the perfect day to set those resolutions too.

So happy Make-Up-Your-New-Year's-Eve-Mind-Day to you. Hope it's productive and fruitful.

Are You Ghoul, Revenant, or Zombie (Part II)

Welcome to part two of my rinky-dink series on what I've learned from brief research about ghouls, revenants and zombies. You can click here for the section on ghouls.

The Revenant

Having a revenant sounds cool, but Wikipedia defines it as a ghost or an animated corpse similar to a vampire* so not sold.

In some folklore, it's a person who returns to harass neighbors and family*. Nothing special, like another ghost there.

I do like the other definition it offers: a dead hero brought back by a wizard to go on some quest no one else would brave, under the wizard's control. It also referenced Jason (Friday the 13^th) as a revenant, and the protagonist of The Crow. Side fact: I have never actually seen that movie.

My experience with revenants has been through the Final Fantasy series, a stronger version of a zombie (causing life-drain when it attacked. Like a vampire, if I recall). They're mentioned as spreading disease among the living, which I could make use of.

I'm undecided on revenants.

*Taken from www.wikipedia.org

Happy National Chocolate Christmas Eve Day

Yes, I did just mash two observances together, but wouldn't it make the day that much better?

- "Happy Chocolate Christmas Eve Day! Here’s your gift."
"You shouldn't have." *gasp* "My favorite chocolate truffles! Thank you so much!"

This should happen. Everywhere. Because chocolate is awesome. In fact, I think my writing reward today will be some hot chocolate.

Spread the joyful day by enjoying some chocolate, or giving chocolate, in the spirit of the season.

Don't do chocolate? Okay, we'll make an exception. You may substitute with butterscotch candy :)

National Look on the Bright Side day

Today is National Look on the Bright Side Day, where you take a not-so-positive event and give it a positive spin.

Your submission didn’t get accepted? On the bright side, you have more time to look over your work and find that one publication that’ll adore it.

Dogs woke you up early? Look on the bright side: not only did you not sleep in, but now you can get up and get more done than you originally planned (and there’s always power naps. I survive by power naps).

Today, simply try to find positives in all the negatives you encounter. It sounds cheesy, but it’s pretty neat how something so small can affect your mood for the better. I’m a compulsive complainer and epically pessimistic, but today I’m going to try and counter that so I can have one less exhausting day in my week.
Encounter your spin-worthy occurrence. Share with someone or even just in your own journal.

Here’s to the bright side!

Testing

Just trying out the Blogger app I downloaded. Here is a picture for your trouble.

Restless in October

Jerking, twitching.

Too restless.

Racing, spinning.

Too anxious.

Aching, burning.

Too much distraction.

Buzzing, whizzing,

Too many whispers,

And too much white page to fill.

Random, yes, but accurate. Halfway through October my trudging train of progress chugged right into a ditch that silly conductor me has been trying to trudge out of instead of stopping to reassess the cause.

I probably should have used the metaphor of an RC car with a dying battery trying to drive over a speed bump or something. Oh well.

I've still got no clue what caused it, all I know is whenever I sit to do any work on the novels or the short stories I get uncomfortable and anxious, jittery and-–well just see above. Maybe it's time for a new chair, one that actually began with cushion. Maybe I need to rearrange my desk and relocate it again.

(God I hope not. There's limited functional space in here as it is.)

Or perhaps I need to drop two projects and focus on fewer stories.

Possible, but this anxiety feels deeper somehow, and doesn't quite address the jitters (No, I don't drink coffee and haven't had a soda in over a month. Just not my thing.) Maybe I should think about breaking tasks down to amoeba-sized steps.

Step one: Divide writing tasks further to designate one day to one story until you get your head right. Must ponder this one.

So if I accept it's my workspace (it likely is; this chair was never meant to hold anyone for such long periods of time over two years of use), I must hunt out a replacement of ergonomic quality likely requiring self-assembly, not beyond $100 if that chair exists. Meanwhile, I've picked up a lap desk to work away from my flimsy assembly of kindling; it looks like it should suffice for short sessions on the couch or on my bed.

Does anyone have experience with a good ergonomic (or just very cushy) desk chair they're willing to recommend me? I think armrests might be nice, but they aren't the necessity.

Happy Halloween should you be one to celebrate it.

(I totally forgot to get myself candy pumpkins this year.)

New Project

I woke this morning with uncharacteristic energy and motivation to get things done, my main goal shall be to handle this clutter. A lot of it is the same information, or useless.

A part of me is considering washing down those doors. I have a few other things to do so that probably should wait.

It's too easy to build clutter and not notice as it saps your mood and motivation in miniscule increments. I'm a tidy and organized person (okay, okay, I'm obsessive) but it catches me all the time.

-Some unasked for advice: set at least a day aside every week to really look at your workspace and consider tidying up. Or washing surfaces down. A fresh smelling, allergen-free workspace is wonderful, but simply returning books to their shelves can be just as revitalizing. Setting a schedule keeps you from forgetting, so you deal with it before clutter takes effect.

I should probably go handle my clutter now.

Otakon 2012

And now I shall detail my four day vacation/journey to Otakon, where creativity runs like sweat from the skin of an armored cosplayer. I got to experience the smelly glamour Friday and Saturday in my own costume, an assortment of items I threw together to get the full Otakon experience. Worked out nice though. I even ended up on Wikimedia, somehow.

Fireworks, Flame-grills, and Fantastic Fabrications

July, here again, hot and heavy. Tomorrow will bring fireworks and smoking grills, and my least-favorite question to be asked, “What are you doing for your birthday?” That question never gets easier to answer.


I do have plans to get a fair amount of writing and revision done during this yucky month.

Techno-Fail

June was a month of epic failure for me. The spontaneous, ironic, computer kind of failure. More than once I imagined smacking a few people over the head with my dead net-book.

Darn thing didn't even live long enough for me to give it a stupid name, reflect on the stupidity, then rename it.

Reflection on Another's Post

"If a flawed novel entertains, it has done its job."

That is my biggest takeaway from the June 27th post over at The Business Rusch (Yes, I'm late, I've had a bad week of techno-failure that's kept me busy). Don't get me wrong, it's a good post, that line was the emotional face-slap for me. The whole post deals with the idea of perfection.

Do You Mind, I’m Trying To Study

Once upon a time, there was a place you could go for peace and quiet, where everyone sat with their head bowed over book or paper, or scanned shelves of books soundlessly. You could even hear the pages flipping in this sanctum of silence. We called it a library.

My Latest News And A Double-Whammy

Mother Nature definitely got the best of me today. Not only was it disgustingly hot and humid, but pollen was rampant. Frankly, I'm surprised I haven't sneezed out chunks of brain or melted into gooey writer-remains. I did not escape drowsiness and the infernal itching caused by pollen. Both make it difficult to get any writing done.

After a three day break from writing (for day long errands away from home) it's back to the plotting and catching up. I'm still working on the unnamed short story I had originally planned to finish by the end of March. I'm only a few pages from completion, at least, while revision of Little Bit Hexed is moving along and giving less hassle than I assumed it would. At the other end of that spectrum is my fantasy novel, where I can't seem to shape rough draft ideas into well rounded forms due to a missing thought in the middle.

Little Bit Witch is crawling forward. Ideas I previously gripped firmly in my mind wriggled free while I was distracted and I still haven't found most of them. Sneaky little jerks.
Tomorrow starts a new day of tasks needing to be done, starting with work on Little Bit Witch.

Here's to productivity.

And no more itchiness.

Smartphone and Me

Dear Smartphone, can't you see,
Your lies, they're just too much for me.
You boast of your capacity,
But yet, everywhere, I see "No Compatibility."
Perhaps you and Productivity were never meant to be?

-Thoughts from a worn-out worker.

At Last

Hello again, how have you been? So much has changed since my wholly unintended disappearance, I have a lot of catching up to do, learning Blogger's new features included.


Considering all the sites I use to keep up with, and the habits I'd settled into prior is fairly shocking; I had never noticed everything I was doing while I was doing it all, but I also had daily Internet access and oodles (great word, by the way) of time. That, however, has been altered indefinitely.

Busy, Busy Day

Saturday was the Walk; I began at roughly 9am and ended around 10:40am with barely a throb of soreness or exhaustion. It was a nice walk around a nice area. It gave me time to think and try to recall the sensations you get from a park (or near a lake, or in a wooded area).

That failed. I lifted my mood by taking in the scenery, but thanks to the heat it was hard to notice anything other than "It's hot!"
I figured I would go ahead and put up a picture of the team I walked with, and horrible camera pictures of the view.



Oh yes, and still working on Serpenttongue, almost to the second to last chapter. Being so close to the end of the manuscript I've worked on sporadically for the past two years gives me a strange feeling. It's not despair, disappointment, or joy just...different.

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.

This is going to be harder than I thought...

It's February 26th, 2010.
Ask me if my novel I was going to finish this month is done yet.

I had some good momentum when I first started writing it, then that gradually died down to a full stop, then it picked up again in spurts of 1k a day every day, then became 1k every two days...this week I only managed a total of 3k.

But I guess as long as I'm moving, I'm good.

I won't be able to finish the first draft at this pace (obviously), I'm now looking to March since I'm over 80k words - finally. I want to get it completed so I can bask in the glorious light of having completed something, but also because I want to work on another WIP that I started two pages of before deciding I didn't need to divide my time up like that and just focus on one WIP at a time. Scenes from this one have been leaping into my head like fleas on a dog. (Please don't ask me why that simile was the first thing I thought of.) I should be writing them down...but I think I've officially run out of empty notebooks.

I know what I'll be buying next month.

I am rather proud of my 3k for the week. It's small, but it's the most writing I've done in the time span of a week for quite some time. And it's not only at the doctor's office waiting for my turn, but also everyday at a regular time that I've scheduled. (Why did I ever leave the wonderful world of time management?)

So, if I had a glass of wine, or even just a bottle of juice, I would give cheers to everyone for what they have accomplished in February, and encourage them to keep going, because there's nothing like passing that finish line...or writing/editing that final paragraph.