Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Weekend updatery

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 22:20:56 GMT

So things will be sort of back to normal next week, as the head bookkeeper is back from his own vacation. I didn't mind filling in as it was all early shifts, but waking up at 4:15am several days in a row did kind of wear me out. This coming week I've been given a few earlyish shifts that hint that I'll be working the dairy upstock shifts again on Tuesday through Thursday, so I can't complain. This means I can wake up at a more normal 6am for the next few days and catch up on some much-needed sleep.

Meanwhile, I'm finally prepping for more of my end-of-year posts here and elsewhere. I'll be starting the year end music reviews for Walk in Silence on Tuesday which should finish off the day after Christmas, leaving the last entry of the year as a best-of list and looking-ahead sort of thing. As for Welcome to Bridgetown, I'm not entirely sure what I'll be posting there though the last few of the year will be very similar in its looking back/looking forward theme.

What do I have planned for 2025? Good question. A few personal things and a few book releases for starters! We shall see...

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Meanwhile

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 21:51:50 GMT

Whew! Been a few weeks since my last entry here...I've been up to the usual nonsense: working at the day job, writing and revising while at home. I've kind of let myself slide into a week-by-week cycle to get used to the work/writing balance, which is always a good thing...I've been doing that mainly to fight that old habit of thinking I need to hit word count every week. I used to do this way back in my high school days as a way to deal with distraction and get my work done on time. Nowadays, though, I've just been utilizing the process just to make sure I stick to my good habits and don't slide into bad ones again.

Anyway -- I'm sure some of you are wondering when I'll ever get back to posting at Walk in Silence, yeah? Okay, maybe one or two of you at any rate. I haven't really made any solid decisions on what I want to do with that site right now, other than 'not what I've been doing for the last several years because I'm bored with it'. I do have a neat idea, but it's something I think I'll need to plan a few weeks in advance to give myself time and space to work it all out, create a backlog, and see where I can take it. You'll know soon enough.

And what about Theadia? Currently at Chapter 27 and this book is getting longer and longer...! I'm pretty sure once I finally wrap it all up, I'll split it up into a duology. It's got that Bridgetown Trilogy epicness to it, which I'm quite happy about.

Okay, back to the writing trenches!!

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Where was I...?

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:37:47 GMT

Ah yes. I was distracted yesterday (a pleasant walk in GGP's botanical garden, a drive to the garden center, laundry and so on) and completely forgot to post something here.

Also slightly nervous and distracted due to the fact that I'm running a scan on my external hard drive that contains my entire mp3 library in hopes that I can figure out why it decides to randomly go into sleep mode even when I'm in the middle of using it. I'm not *too* nervous, as I have it all (I hope!!) backed up on another external, but I'd rather not lose it just the same, thankyouverymuch. It's taking forever to finish because there's a LOT of mp3s to scan for issues and/or corruption. I had it running overnight and it's *just* nearing the finish of the initial scan as we speak. [Edit: it's now doing a slightly different deep scan of empty sectors and I'm not entirely sure how long *that* will take...] In the meantime it's made the entire drive inaccessible so it can do its thing. Hopefully there aren't any major issues... *fret fret*

Meanwhile, last week I began a slightly different approach with my writing (I go into it a bit more here at Welcome to Bridgetown) and it seems to be working, so I'm going to continue with this process and see how it plays out. I'm doing the work in smaller manageable chunks and narrowing the focus of the work in front of me in the hopes that I can process it all a lot easier. It seems to have cleared the view a bit, which is good.

Oh -- I should probably add that I've been having far too much fun sketching out a storyboard for Diwa & Kaffi!! They're rough thumbnails for the most part, but they're helping me get better at my art, which was the main goal in the first place! One of these days I'll post them up on the WTBT blog.

What else...we got a new Christmas tree? That was my doing, really. Our old one is fine but kind of looking a bit threadbare. The new one is a four-footer (the old one is a much shorter one made for a tabletop) so I'll have to plan out where to put it. The plus side is that I can hang a lot more stuff on it! Yay! Maybe I should revive my old habit of putting on a Christmas album while decorating....

Hope everyone has a good week!

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Friday Thoughts

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 22:22:07 GMT

Another downside to going into the office is that I no longer have easy access to my blogs, here and on WP, so I have to carve out time elsewhere to be able to keep them updated to any degree. And busy weekends (of which I've had many this month) have kept me from posting on time. I've been kind of lazy the last few weeks, in which I could be using afterwork time to do them, but it's tricky when I suddenly have a commute with an unstable average time-spent-getting-home. (On good days it's just over an hour. On bad days it's been more like 1.5. Thankfully I've only had two or three REALLY bad days of two hours, and those were during the Christmas season. Here's to hoping those were exception and not the rule.) I suppose I should get out of the habit of futzing around on my phone whilst watching whatever we're streaming at the moment, yeah?

Speaking of writing, I may have come up with a new project that's captured my interest. The two semi-backburner books I've been toying with don't seem to be going anywhere in particular, and this particular one grabbed me very similarly to how In My Blue World and especially Diwa & Kaffi did, and I'm taking that as a good sign. This came out of an exercise I did a few days ago on the 750, in which I just riffed on a handful of simple ideas inspired by some of the animes we've watched and manga I've read. I realized I wanted to keep going with the short-and-quick story ideas that have done me so well over the last few years, so I'd like to go further with it. I'm very curious to see where this leads...!

On a more personal note, I've been toying with the idea of selecting one day earlier in the week to head straight to the gym from work instead of heading straight home, because I really don't like this one-day-a-week (and maybe on weekends) thing. And I certainly do NOT want to pay for using the company gym when I already have a local YMCA membership. It'll be a bit of a trick but I think I can swing it. I'll plan it out with A, so that way we can have a pre-cooked dinner that we can heat up quickly.

More things on my mind lately, but I'm holding them close for now. Soon enough.

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Taking the time to think

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 01:59:12 GMT

Okay. Okay. So.

Usually about this time of year I'm running around like an idiot, trying to balance far too many projects, the Day Job, and Year End lists and everything else. Somehow I always make it through, but just barely and with a lot of stress and freaking out about the lack of time to do any of it.

This year, I'm taking the time to think.

I could do a year-end/decade-end series on my blogs, but right now I'm not going to worry too much about it. I'll do it when I have the time, and I'll remind myself that IT'S OKAY TO DO THEM IN 2020. I'll do them eventually because I really enjoy doing them.

I do in fact have a new writing project in the preplanning stage! I'm sort of dancing around it right now, making some mental notes and printing out a few old outtakes and thinking about how I'm going to approach it. What I'm trying not to do is Make Everything Perfect From the Outset, which I am wont to do now and again. Every time my brain insists that my prose needs to be at 100% the first time out, I remind myself that The Phoenix Effect was pretty damn terrible as a first longhand draft. That the first Meet the Lidwells draft looked nothing like the end result. That the first attempt at writing Diwa & Kaffi took four tries and a temporary ragequit before I got it right. But yeah...I think I have a new solid plan for The Next Writing Project and that's all that matters right now.

Speaking of D&K, I'm happy to say that I've heard back from my Tagalog assistant, and I will be making the final text adjustments in the next day or so! I'm planning on sending the story out sometime early next year.

So what about the Day Job/Possible Job Opening front? it is what it is. It's tiring and I've chosen Friday as my ~~Get Out Of Jail Fre~~e Work from Home Day (I get one a week now, woo de frickin' hoo), which works nicely because it's like an extended weekend and I get to listen to New Music Releases. I'm going to reach out to the PJO place tomorrow just to get an update on what's going on -- it's been about two weeks and a courtesy follow-up makes sense. All in all, I'm dealing with it the best I can.

On a personal note, I seem to have tweaked my sciatica this afternoon, after not having an issue with it for, well...a pretty damn long time, come to think of it. I think it happened while vacuuming today, and hopefully it'll go away by tomorrow. Other than that, not much to report...

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