Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Midweek Stuff

Wed, 20 May 2026 21:00:29 GMT

Stuff going on:
-- The one midshift for the week has been completed and I have today off, which means that the next three days will be opens. One 8:30am start and two store opens (4am on Friday, and 5:30am on Saturday in which I'm opening my old shop).
-- Said day off includes laundry and giving the cats more attention than necessary.
-- Finally submitted the request to get reimbursed for the dental stuff, and got an email today saying it was authorized. Yay! This makes further dental work worth the aggravation and pain. I've got another appointment on the 28th to get that one temp crown replaced with a permanent one. We'll see where it goes from there.
-- Making a concerted effort to read more of the physical books gathering dust near my bed. Current reading: Bill Janovitz's Let the Stories Be Told, about the band The Cars.

Stuff done:
-- The garage storage room has been slightly reorganized, as it seems most of it was in pretty good shape to begin with. I merely needed to move a few things such as: the old side table we aren't using towards the door (for Storage of Small Things); the holiday and wrapping stuff in one area, all artwork that isn't currently on walls safely in a box; various boxes of collectibles, tchotchkes and desk cluttering toys placed in one central office box; the remaining boxes of books stacked all together for future sorting. Empty boxes have been broken down and placed in the Empty Box Box elsewhere in the garage. The floor is now a little easier to navigate.
-- Watered the garden and front plots the other day as we've had a warm spell in the city the last few days. Might need to do it again in the next day or so.
-- I finally finished up a few new mixtapes! Woohoo! And I've even got a few more going! I miss making them, as I didn't have the spoons to do so last year. I haven't decided on any titles (series or stand-alone) just yet, as I want them to be just different enough from their forebears.

Stuff in the future:
-- I'll have to find time to go through those last remaining boxes of books to see if I want to save any. I probably don't need them, but it's worth looking through.
-- Restart the Great Longhand Writing Scan Project again. Probably in a few weeks. I think the best idea is to bring up a little at a time instead of a big honking storage bin; that is, go project by project. Finish scanning The Phoenix Effect and start in on the poetry composition books.
-- There's a good chance I might pick up the Walk in Silence (book) project again, in tandem with the more fictional The Decline and Fall of Western Massachusetts. One of the mixtapes I've made recently was for the fiction book, which carries on from its 2024 first volume with several songs from the 1984-1989 era.
-- Semi-related: I've been toying with the idea of working on the latter by waking up the 750 Words site again. No solid plans on that yet, though.

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Writing thoughts and reading habits

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 23:50:12 GMT

Okay, so I really need to stop re-re-re-rereading my WIPs at night, because my Mount Read Me pile isn't budging. I'm thinking I should put my e-reader here in Spare Oom so I'm forced to read what I have before it gets any worse. I'd rather not have a repeat of last year where I basically read like ten books because I was so distracted by my writing and lost interest in everything else. I need to get back into reading new things again!!

[Oh, and I finally recently read Pride and Prejudice, and it is indeed a brilliant and shockingly funny book. The Lizzie/Catherine DeBourg face-off remains one of my all-time favorite literary moments.]

Meanwhile, I did manage to get a bit of writing work done at the Day Job today in the form of writing a few thoughts about what to do with my space opera Theadia. I'm on the cusp of thinking that this may end up going the same route as The Phoenix Effect and being completely rewritten as a multi-book project, probably a trilogy if not a duology. As much as I'm proud of what I have so far -- and that's saying a lot considering that I've never written in that genre before -- I think the story should be allowed to breathe a lot more. I'm intrigued by what's going on offscreen a lot of the time and I think it's worth expanding to make this universe another large-scale, large-cast story like the Bridgetown Trilogy.

I haven't decided yet either way, but I'm intrigued by this, so if I can get Queen Ophelia's War done soon, then I can do a deep dive and give it a shot?

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Wed, 27 May 2020 20:20:39 GMT

Coming up on two months of unemployment here, but I'm doing fine. I've been sending in a few job applications every day or so, and though I haven't heard anything back, I'm still actively searching. I'm treating the process the same as before I quite the Former Day Job, making sure I focus at least a few hours' worth of searching, prepping, and sending out.

So what am I doing the rest of the time? A bit of this, a bit of that. Cleaning, errands, story idea research, personal things, catching up on old projects, guitar noodling, talking with a friend or two about career ideas. Sure, I'm doing a bit of goofing off, but I'm not wasting the entire day. I've also been reading some of my older stories, again, to get back into the groove of writing. No solid plans yet, but I'd like to at least be able to start writing new stories again.

I've also been listening to some of my 90s mixtapes and albums from the same era. This in turn has made me realize that it was about this time twenty-five years ago, in my broke-and-starving-writer guise, when I had the use of my then girlfriend's PC and decided to transcribe nearly all of my longhand work thus far to WRI files. In early summer 1995 on my days off from the Day Job (the movie theater) I'd gone through most of what I had on hand: the Infamous War Novel, the numerous now-trunked ideas, six years worth of poetry and lyrics, and so on. This, on top of working on the new project, True Faith. I had nothing better to do (and no money to do it with) than listen to WFNX and WBCN and stay up way too damn late working on these things. Essentially, my drive to write with a consistent schedule was partially informed by my inability to go anywhere at all other than maybe walking around Boston smoking Newports and feeling sorry for myself.

That summer pretty much prepared me for the next few years creatively. Life and finances sucked, sure, but I've already gone on about that here and I've already made my peace with it all. All the positive moments then were me watching free movies (and scoring free popcorn, soda and hot dogs for dinner) and spending all that time writing, figuring out what kind of writer I was, what my style was, and what I wanted to do with it. I'd gone from struggling and flailing to a writer with goals, and I knew that was a Long Game, so by a few years later I hit the ground running when I started The Phoenix Effect.

I say all this because I think I'm at that point in my writing career again. The last five years have been extremely fruitful creatively, and not gonna lie, I'm damn proud of myself for being able to pull it off, exhausting as it often was. I deliberately chose to take time off after finishing up the Diwa & Kaffi project to step back and take a good look at where I was, both personally and careerwise. It was a much-needed distancing so I could have a clear head and heart, and figure out where to go from here.

So yeah, it's sort of like summer 1995 again. On a strict budget, listening to a hell of a lot of music, and making some more long-term plans. Only I'm eating a hell of a lot better, keeping in better shape, not depressed AF, and not smoking anymore, heh!

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