Drunken Owls and Other Delights

It seems calling out on Monday was a good idea, because I was extremely burned out. I stayed at home and didn't do much of anything other than a bit of writing and reading, and by the afternoon I felt a lot better. I also had a good rethink about why I was feeling so exhausted, and I'm pretty sure it was day job related. There's been a few things happening that I was letting get to me in a rather unhealthy way and it just kind of all came to a head over the weekend. Long story short, I've decided I'm going to just stop getting angry about the consistent lack of assistance and the frequent assumption of managerial status from a certain coworker. I'm still annoyed that they've fucked with my pay and I'm hoping it will be rectified very soon, but I'm not going to ragequit or let it eat at me as much.

More to the point, I've decided that I need to reapproach the day job the same way I did during my years at Yankee Candle. The day job is the day job and I should only put in what I feel I want to put into it. My main focus should always be with the writing -- the day job is the day job, the writing is the career, after all. It's time to dial it back a little and rebalance my priorities here.

In other news, I've resurrected the longhand journal and the 750 Words sessions again, and the poetry/song writing might make a reappearance in the near future as well. Why? Well, because I want to, which is a fine enough reason. I'm sort of giving myself a trial run during these last few days of the month with the aim to be more consistent about them in October. We'll see how that pans out...

Okay, maybe not fitter, but no longer feeling brought down by allergies, so yay me! And more productive, which is a surprise given that I did a TON of personal stuff on my two days off this week. On Monday I did the much-needed laundry which I hadn't had time for last week, but I also finally got rid of two very big boxes. One had contained A's new treadmill and the other our new mini-freezer (more on that in a moment), which were taking up a lot of room. And while I was at it, yesterday I finally took care of that long-delayed trip to Goodwill to get rid of several boxes of books as well as my old printer (they do e-recycling if they can't fix it) and I once again have a floor in Spare Oom! There's only one box left to get rid of -- the one the new printer came in -- but I'm holding onto it for just a tiny bit longer until I know for sure it's working fine.

But that's not all! I'm writing daily entries for 750Words again! Right now I'm kind of taking the easy way out by writing -- again -- about music, going through my digital library and revisiting much of the music I listened to while writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. I'm doing this on purpose to help me focus on the remaster of A Division of Souls, and it's definitely working. I've been trying to restart using that site and been having a tough time getting started in the first place, so this was a perfect kick in the butt that I needed. I'm hoping this will also get me restarted on a few other things I've been meaning to restart as well, like the journaling and other creative outlets.

Oh, and I've installed the Squaredle app on my phone, so that should work as a way to distract me from the internets during my work breaks, heh.

Here's to hoping it works!

 As always, the start of a new month is always the start-over of the usual daily whiteboard schedule. I no longer see being unable to follow it to the letter as failure, of course...I accept there were reasons for not getting any writing work done, or whatever it was that didn't get completed. Life gets in the way now and again. The whiteboard isn't a strict errand board but a useful way of keeping my brain in working order.

I have to say I'm quite impressed that I somehow managed (sort of) to get 391 writing days in a row on 750Words, but the other day I just said nah, enough is enough and I don't need to do that anymore. To be honest I'd started running out of new things to write there early on, and instead writing a sort of Walk in Silence (the book) overview of the music I enjoyed over the years. It was fun while it lasted but by the time I reached 385 days it had become a time-consuming chore. I'll use the site again, of course. It's extremely useful for writing very rough drafts of novels! But yeah, I'm taking a hiatus on that for a bit now.

Speaking of hiatuses, the one I'd started for my blogs is now over. I want to return back to Welcome to Bridgetown and Walk in Silence (the blog) again, because it's always been fun. Do I have stuff to blather about? Who knows? I can usually come up with something, so no worries there. I'm going to try twice a week for both once again, but I'll still allow a day off if I'm just too busy or distracted.

And speaking of distracted, I think I'm up there with @anagramofbrat in that I'm feeling VERY distracted by social media again. Not so much doomscrolling as just getting that dopamine fix, mainly on Threads. I'd like to be more connected on them and not reactive, though. The difference of course being that I miss having that fun connection with other people because I've been too willingly drawn in by someone's drama thread. [And I'm ACTIVELY avoiding political posts these days, so no worries there.] How to handle that, change that? Well, I'm not sure, but I'll figure it out.

New month, new schedule, new days. We'll see where this leads.

 Looking at my writing whiteboard right now and it doesn't look any different from the last few months:

--SUN: PC clean session, post at Dreamwidth
--MON: 750 Words, post at Welcome to Bridgetown
--TUE: 750 Words, post at Walk in Silence
--WED: 750 Words, post at Dreamwidth
--THU: 750 Words, post at Walk in Silence
--FRI: 750 Words, post at Welcome to Bridgetown
--SAT: music practice

The only differences here is that I didn't put 'poetry' anywhere, as I think I've gotten myself back into the groove on that where I don't really need to schedule it anymore. I've added 'music practice' because I really need to do so again...it's been far too long. I actually write the blog posts the day before and schedule them for a 6am PT drop (I just finished writing tomorrow's WiS entry), and these Dreamwidth entries are usually quick and off the cuff.

It's the 750 Words that I'm actively trying to get back into my daily regimen. I've only scheduled them for weekdays (weekends I'm keeping it optional), but my aim here is to try to make it a daily thing again. It's part of exercising the creative brain, just like with the music practice: I'm not going to get better if I just do the minimal work. And I really do need to do better work!

Anyway...it's Day Four and I've done pretty good with the schedule so far. I've hit every beat I've wanted to hit so far!

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!

It's the long holiday weekend (and A's birthday on Tuesday so it's especially longer than usual), so we are doing All Sort of Fun Things! We went walking in the Presidio today, we'll be going to the Disney Family Museum tomorrow (they have a really neat exhibition going on regarding their animation work during WWII), Monday we may finally go to Grandview Park in the Sunset -- how long have we lived on this side of town and not gone there..??? -- and Tuesday we go to the De Young Museum AND go see Shang-Chi at Stonestown! :)

Which means I've been sliding some of my normal weekend things here and there throughout the day today. Just finished the laundry, and now working on my Shutterstock Project in which I share some of my most recent pictures on my Dropbox so I can upload to the site both here and on my laptop. I was hoping to get some uploads done today, but I think this is a good start at any rate. I updated all my blogs, and I'll sneak even sneak in my Daily Doodle later on. I've been tempted to get some words done today too, but if I don't get to it I'm okay with that.

Speaking daily words, I've said over at Welcome to Bridgetown that I've Ramped Things Up. I am now working on THREE novel projects, averaging about 800 or so words a day for each (I could easily do more but I'm easing myself into that instead), plus trying to hit other daily goals such as the aforementioned daily drawing -- I'm using last year's Inktober prompts for that -- as well as journal entries, poetry and other things that pop up. And very soon this will also include finding temporary outlets that could make us some pocket change.

So how am I doing this, you ask? Well, funny thing -- apparently when I close down social media browsers and other distractions for a few hours, I get a lot done! Yes, I have in fact implemented a long-game plan or two here! Seriously, as soon as they're cleared away, I get myself geared up to be creative and just run with it as far as I can. Some days I get a lot of words down, other days I don't, but as long as I'm dedicating time and brain space to it, I'm getting it done to my liking. My idea is that if I'm going to finally dive headlong into this writing career full-time, I'm gonna have to commit to it to the level that I know I can work at to achieve as much as I can.

I'm extremely curious to see where this leads me...!

So after months of hemming and hawing and dithering, i finally decided to cancel/delete my paid 750 Words account. It served me quite well over the last two years -- I wrote Diwa & Kaffi on that one while I wrote In My Blue World on the free account. That's the only time to date that I've written two novels in tandem, and it worked amazingly well for me. But once those projects were done, I found that I wasn't doing as much creative work there, skipping days, and writing more out of a sense of duty than having fun with it. So after exporting all the entries to my Dropbox (I figure that was the safest and smartest place to put them), I let it go.

So now I only have the grandfathered-in free 750 Words account (which, by the way, I realized I've had since 2011 but didn't really use until early 2012), and I'll keep this one because it's still quite useful when I need it. 

In other news, I FINALLY finished the D&K synopsis yesterday. It's down to five pages, which is pretty good considering. I'm torn between editing it further because I'm bouncing between the current "just enough to tell the complete story" and an even smaller short-attention-span version. Five pages is fine to me, but I understand the industry standard is "thirty seconds or less or I give up on you", which has always irritated me. [Yes, yes, I know why it's there. But it still rankles because I've never been good at brevity.]

And in other other news, I see that Bernie...dropped out? Put himself on pause? Something. But either way I'm staying out of this particular online argument because most of his stans are being really f***ing insufferable today. And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

ANYWAY! Off to do some daily words and finish the laundry!

I'm trying not to get TOO used to this new schedule of mine, because I still want to find a new position somewhere in the city.  That's taking a lot longer than hoped, but I kind of expected it. Still..I'm making the best of what I have right now. I can work at home one day a week so I of course decided on Fridays, for two reasons: one, that I get to listen to new music releases (yay!), and two, that I can treat this as a sort of three-day weekend. 

The Day Job is pretty tight on internet security (given my position, it makes total sense), which is a mixed blessing...I can't waste time on social media unless I take out my phone (which, I should add, gets about 2-3 bars because I'm in a dead spot in the middle of my building), but I can keep up on the news sites if I want. But on a VERY positive note, I can access 750Words! I'm not sure how long it'll last, but I'm going to use THAT access as much as I can, considering this whole Back To the Office Thing took away a lot of my writing time in the first place. So what am I working on with these entries? Right now I'm still experimenting with various things related to the Mendaihu Universe (Book 4 ideas, short stories, outtakes and whatnot). I can work on these during slow moments in the day so I'm not really goofing off and Not Working, am I? Heh. But yeah, this was an extremely positive thing that happened this week and I'm going to embrace it.

As for Year End stuff...yeah, I know I should be doing my musical round-up blog entries, but I just haven't had the time or the inclination. Not that 2019 hasn't inspired me musically, but right now I'm still basking in the moments where I don't have Far Too Many Deadlines hanging over my head. I still have the entirety of the month to work on them, though, so I'm not too worried. I'll be doing two, of course: the Best of 2019, and the Best of the '10s. I'm just as curious as you on what'll pop up on the latter!

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

 If I've learned anything over the course of my two-and-a-half-month hiatus, it's that I REALLY need to be doing something productive on a daily basis, no matter how small.  Otherwise I end up becoming lazy, overly introverted and a lot more moody.  (Well, more like releaning...I've gone through this cycle before, so I was well aware of what was happening once I noticed the familiar patterns.)  As much as I enjoyed the lower stress levels and the lack of deadlines other than a single novel release, I need to get back to work.

I'll be spending time this week coming up with ideas and planning out how I'd like to return to my creative outlets and be more social than I've been the last few months. I'll definitely be returning to the two WordPress blogs, but I'm going to keep it simple only do one entry a week for each of them for a while.  I'll be posting here on a more consistent basis.

And I most DEFINITELY need to get back into doing my daily 750.  I've let that one lapse for much too long.  I think it was partly due to finishing off both novels and nothing new to write, and needing to take a break so I could focus on revision work, but now that one of the two books are out in the wild, I need to restart work there.  As with before, I don't plan on forcing anything...I just want to get back in the habit, even if it's writing some random flash fiction.  I mean, I've written three novels that grew out of such exercises, so why change up what works, right? Heh.

Personal: Things are going to change up pretty soon for various reasons: A has a new job (yay!!) which is not from home at this time (boo!!), and various Day Job issues on my end may change at some future point (not sure when), so I'll need to rethink my hours and output anyway.  I'm also in need of getting back on the exercise gig again, so I'll need to carve out some time for that as well.

Anyway!  Enough blathering.  I need to take my afternoon break and get up off my butt for a few minutes.  

More soon!