Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Back again!

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 04:08:26 GMT

I didn't exactly plan to skip my midweek post, I just completely forgot about it is all. Bound to happen sooner or later.

Anyway! Tomorrow starts my return to the writing grind. I actually picked up Theadia again about a week ago, but I'd done that on purpose: I chose to work on it because I wanted to and not out of a sense of duty or an attempt to force myself into a writing habit. These last two weeks have been pretty much all about calming down from the Day Job's Christmas rush and just taking it easy. This actually worked in my favor because I'm in the midst of cleaning up a scene that needed some heavy rework, and this approach kept me from getting too stressed out about it.

Meanwhile, my Day Job hours seem to be sliding into a semblance of normalcy -- mostly opening shift (or very close to it) Tuesday through Saturday, finally giving me a bit of a two-day weekend of sorts. It's mostly been upstock work at the start in addition to my two-day bookkeeping duties on Friday and Saturday, and while it can be exhausting of we have a huge delivery (those cartons of milk are heavier than they look when you have to stock several dozen of them while inside a cold walk-in fridge).

Still, as much as I enjoyed (and needed) that small break from my whiteboard schedule, I'm glad to be back!

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New month, new plans

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 17:25:25 GMT

As always, the new month brings in newly refreshed plans. The whiteboard has been revived, and things have been started. Day 2 of Inktober has just been drawn. I even wrote a 750Words entry yesterday! I still need to properly balance it all, but I'll get it soon enough. Today's going to be a bit tricky as we're heading to the opera today and I'll probably only have an hour or so for working once we get back home, but I'm getting in what I can.

I'm still annoyed at that unknown idiot who tapped my car in the lot at my job yesterday and left a dent and a scrape but no note, but not overly angry. I've already set up a claim with my car insurance, and if needed I can get footage from work (I confirmed that our store saves footage for a good long time). It's not a huge ding, but enough that it needs fixing and touchup paint. And it's high enough that I'm sure that it's either a minivan or a truck, and someone who can't drive for shit. But the point here is that I'm not letting it ruin my day unnecessarily. It is what it is, the car is still drivable, and nothing's broken. And as I've said before: this is annoyance. You'd know if I was actually angry or pissed off.

Other than that, all is well here. Hope everyone has a good week!

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Days Off

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:18:52 GMT

So of course today is the first of two days off from the Day Job and what am I doing? All The House Cleaning! Heh. Well, it needed to be done as we hadn't vacuumed since before the trip and we had a lot of laundry to do as well. And then there was the shower which, yeah, still needs a secondary scrub but still looks a LOT better than it did previously. Going to relax a bit now before starting in on some revision work.

October is coming up and of course I'm going to kick off another monthly whiteboard refresh! Was just thinking about this earlier today...I'm always wanting to start off a new month with a fresh fresh start to get my creative avenues up and running: the journaling, the blogging, fiction and poetry work, and so on. There's also the fact that Inktober is starting.

When the new month comes around I'm often saying "okay, let's get back to our schedule here", fill out the whiteboard calendar, and do what I can to keep to it. I don't always make it to the other end of the month, but I've realized that I no longer focus on that particular issue as a failure. The whole point is that it's a refresh and not a doomed attempt at perfection. Seeing it in that way has lifted a lot of the self-induced stress of keeping to a schedule so that it's all about getting up and trying again.

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Weekend update

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:16:53 GMT

I fear I'm lagging ever behind with my writing, and it's nobody's fault but my own, really. Just me giving into a lot of distraction. So with it being the first of the month once more, I'm going to try again to reel it all in and Get Things Done. Follow the whiteboard schedule again and figure out a way to make it work around my odd Day Job schedule.

Was also thinking that I haven't used the 750Words site in a while. I purposely stopped using it when I got to the sort-of finish lines of the two novels I was working on, just to take a break. I'd like to pick it up again, though. Even if it's just random incomplete ideas or incoherent rambling. Something that I can zip out in a half hour that won't interfere with the revision work I'm currently doing.

Other than that...? Not much to report! Hope everyone has a wonderful new month! :)

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More Changes

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 23:08:20 GMT

Yes, I took an extra week off from blogging because I wanted to think a bit more about what I wanted to do with my writing. I've come to the decision that while I'll continue with the weekend update here on DW, I'm dropping the WordPress blogs down to once a week until further notice. This is primarily because I need to focus more on novel work and Day Job searching and planning. Just enough to keep the blogs consistently updated without me driving myself crazy digging for ideas. As for the novels, I've been averaging around 650-700 words a day, which is terribly low by my standards but at least I'm getting somewhere. I can get higher word count, but I'm not going to force it. It'll come eventually.

I also cleaned off the whiteboard again. Yes, I always flip-flop on that thing. It's helpful but it can also be a hindrance. It reminds me of what I need to work on, but it also stresses me out when it starts feeling like a strict deadline. So I'm going to try something different here: I have a clipboard hanging next to my whiteboard that hasn't been getting much love over the last few years, which will be used as a non-deadline Things To Do List. I already have my list of stretches and exercises here, so I can add a list of creative projects, errands and whatnot.

In other news, for some unknown reason I can no longer connect my Pixel phone to my PC to empty out the pictures (something I've been doing for years, moving them to the PC hard drive and backing them up on an external). It's weird because it's only my PC where this happens; it'll charge up the phone, but won't read it. My laptop can still read it no problem, so now when I move the pictures I need to move them there then transfer them to my PC through Dropbox. It's a pain in the butt but it's the only way I can think of doing it right now until I figure out why this doesn't work. My Dropbox is like 'what the hell are you doing' and the syncing doesn't know if it wants to spend a few hours or a few minutes screwing around.

[Which reminds me...I really need to get that non-working external over to the PC shop up on Geary to see if they can save what's on there. I don't worry about the music that's on it, but some of my personal stuff and my older pictures are on it.]

Other than that, not much else to report...we've been having weird winter weather as of late so we haven't been outside much lately, and A has been busy with Day Job stuff so it's been kind of unexciting here. I still need to work on nailing down a decent exercise/yoga regimen, but that shouldn't be too hard to do. And hopefully the weather won't misbehave too much in the coming months!

Hope everyone has a lovely week!

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Wait, it's warm here in SF? How did that happen?

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 17:47:03 GMT

It's an absolutely lovely day today (and was lovely yesterday too!), with clear skies and temperatures reaching in the upper 60s-low 70s for the first time in ages. Can't complain!

So -- what have I been up to? Good question! I've been up to all sorts of things. Against my better judgement, and not that long after I publicly whined about it on one of my blogs, I've decided to restart the whiteboard schedule ANYWAY because I'm either a glutton for punishment or I'm just a whiny doofus that really just needs to voice their complaints privately and then Just Get On With It. A bit of both, really. So why am I returning? Two reasons: One, because I'm frustrated with my output otherwise, and Two, it actually works, and it works perfectly. I really do need this bit of organization to keep me from spiraling into navel-gazing journal entries and half-assed ideas that go nowhere.

That said...I'm getting back into the morning exercise habit again. I don't remember why I let it slide a while back, but I'm sure it probably had something to do with Real Life Getting In The Way. You know how it is. I know part of it was also when A started her new job, it changed up our morning schedule considerably, and it took me a while to adjust. (Okay, let's tell the truth here: it was more like I just got lazy and the schedule gave me an easy out.) SO! This means that I'm back to my morning stretches, watching what I eat, and going for walks after work. [That's the other schedule change: a few days a week, A and I will head to the gym after she returns, which is now closer to 5pm rather than 4pm.] Now that the weather is nice again, I'm looking forward to more strolls in the neighborhood after work!

On that note...hope everyone's having a nice week!

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Tabula rasa

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 22:16:13 GMT

I feel like my writing process is in transition again. Maybe it's because I'm pretty much 90% Editor Brain at the moment, focusing on the Diwa and Kaffi rewrite. [It could also be that the Spring Cleaning bug bit me pretty damn hard this year, but that's another post.] Usually when this happens, I'll still have a serious itch to get some new writing done on the side, even if it's just exercise. But lately that itch is nowhere to be seen. Not entirely unsettling, as I've had this happen before, and I'm not worried that my Writing Chops have deserted me...just that it feels weird to feel this and not worry about it.

I think one of the shifts in the process might be that I feel like I've done enough of scheduling. Now, scheduling is never a bad thing, especially for someone like me who doesn't always remember when an event is coming up (or a vacation, for that matter), but that's what my regular monthly calendar is for. I'm talking about what I call strict-scheduling -- assigning myself a specific time or a certain project for a particular evening, for instance. This is my whiteboard calendar, pretty much. It's something I've been depending on for quite a few years now, and I put it there to ensure that I'm working every day.

Now, I'm not so sure I need it anymore. I needed it in the past when I was having trouble getting myself back on track after a long dry spell. I needed it when I was updating my blogs. I needed it as a reminder for specific projects. It was something I'd been using for years to inspire me to get working.

I think I've gotten past the needing it at this point. It's served its purpose quite some time ago and now it's feeling like a bit of a hindrance. It's no longer inspiring and feels more like a dreaded assignment. So I've just gone and cleared it -- wiped all the scheduled items on there. It's a normal calendar now. If I'm going to use it, I think I'll use it for reminding myself of long-term deadlines and convention reminders.

Will I come back to use it again? Most likely, but I'm not going to worry about it.

As long as I remember to keep working, that's all that really matters.

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Weekend Update Starts Another Month

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 16:45:32 GMT

New month, new attempt at sticking to my whiteboard schedule, as expected. I've been doing pretty good the last few months, to tell the truth, so it hasn't been a chore to keep up with it. I do need to put my stats on my spreadsheet, though...with that I'm a few months behind! I mainly keep these stats just to see where I stand in terms of productivity; it's more curiosity than anything else. I already know the weakest parts of the whiteboard schedule have been the non-writing stuff. They're not entirely important, but they're things I enjoy that I'd like to do more often. [Or in the case of document scanning; things that are long overdue.] I think too often I've been not taking them all that seriously; it'll get too late in the day and I'll shrug and say 'oh well, I'll take care of it next weekend.'

Am I going to try it again this month? Sure, why not? Something to keep me going.

That is, after we head to the movies today! :p

On a side note, I see that the A to Z Challenge is starting today. Part of me is tempted to join in, as it's a very fun blogging meme, but on the other hand, I've been quite busy and really don't have the time for it this time out. Maybe next year! Or, y'know, I can start my own sometime later in the year...

Hope everyone has a good week!

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Mixing it up again

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 22:48:35 GMT

I really need to do something about my Twitter feed. It feels like lately it's been seeing the worst of me, and vice versa. This means two things:
I should probably do a rigorous cleaning of my follows, expand my mute list, and be a little more positive on there myself. Which led me to the idea I had earlier this morning: to try to go a month tweeting nothing but positive things. I don't mean just posting pithy inspirational tweets or retweeting cat pictures -- although there's nowt wrong with the latter, of course! But I'd like to be more actively positive, this way I'll get myself out of that reactionary rut I've found myself in.

I don't want to ragequit social media, for multiple reasons: I'd be losing touch with my friends, and I'd be losing a viable avenue for publicity of my books. Plus, it would feel like the jocks and the popular kids won and I'll be the nerd crawling back in his hole and feeling sorry for myself. I did that route as a teenager, I'm too old for that shit now.

ANYWAY. I'm curious to see if I can pull off this positivity thing. We shall see!

In other news, I've also been thinking about bulking up my whiteboard schedule again. It's fine now, but I think I need to push my boundaries once more. Assign myself little exercises to expand my knowledge and expertise. Drawing in a different style. Recording the little riffs I've come up with and writing songs around them. Get out of the 'safe' guitar chords and learn new, more complex ones. Post here more often! I know this is something I usually think about at the end of the year as my form of New Year's resolutions, but why not start now?

I'm curious to see where this will lead. Last time this happened, I came up with a few new novel ideas, one of which I'm close to finishing! :)

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