Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Did I pre-order the six-cd-plus-bluray 50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition of The Beatles when it went on sale on Monday?  Darn tootin' I did!  Do I already own the 30th Anniversary Edition cd that came out in 1998?  Of course I do. Do I already own it as part of the 2009 stereo AND mono box sets?  Of course I do!  Did I used to own it on vinyl back in the day?  Of Course I did!  

I'm actually glad I gave into temptation and pre-ordered the box set without a second thought, because an hour after it went on sale, the price zoomed up at least fifty dollars!  And if I'm not mistaken, Amazon will honor the amount I ordered it at, so go me!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, things are going well.  I'm keeping a positive attitude here, even and especially despite certain Day Job issues attempting to bring me down.  I've decided that life is far too short to continue this habit of letting things ruin my day.  I'll lapse now and again, as per old habits, but I'm catching it in time and turning it around.  It'll help me face the bigger, nastier things without feeling as much strain.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy one for me...I have to wake up stupid-early so I can drive to Concord for a Day Job visit, head back, and then go to the Masonic here in town to see The The.  Pretty sure I'll be dead to the world come Friday, but I'm okay with that...!




OH!  YES!  THAT'S RIGHT:  I finished the first draft of the Apartment Complex story last night!!!  WOOO!  It tops out at around 79k, which is around where I expected.  After the rough start, it was a pure joy to write, which makes me quite happy.  I've got some great plans for this one.  Including a title!  Heh.  But for now I'm going to let it sit and percolate for a little while.  I'll be focusing on the In My Blue World revision in the interim, so I can come back to the AC with fresh eyes.


Hope everyone has a great rest of the week!

It's a three-day weekend here, so we've been a) sleeping in for once, b) taking our time doing errands, and c) relaxing.  That of course doesn't stop me from wanting to Get Everything Done Today though!  Nothing big, just a lot of small irritations that needed doing, like getting the car washed (first time since November when we bought it!), grocery shopping, and so on.  We've interspersed that with A's binge-watching of various shows and a few college football games. Right now I'm in Spare Oom, having just culled a considerable amount of boxes and bags from the back closet that needed tossing. A took a big slice out of the mass-market paperbacks (I should probably do the same), and cleaning out my emails and catching up on blog entries.

So yeah, busy but relaxing weekend.  Can't complain.

Writing update: I've finally reached the halfway point in the revision of In My Blue World, and it's actually the same exact point where I realized I'd needed to go back to the beginning and make some serious revision notes before doing any rewriting.  It was a plot point that had always irritated me and stuck out in a bad way, but I've figured out how to fix it and surge forward.  I think the rest of the novel should be a bit clearer going for me, and I"m hoping I'll get started on the Big Rewrite in a few weeks.  If I'm not mistaken, the remaining half of the novel is much more on par with what I was aiming for, so hopefully there won't be any major surgery to do there.

Writing update 2: It's funny, but when I got to the point in the Apartment Complex story where the Big Life Changing Event In Act III begins, I suddenly found myself not writing my original idea, but instead came up with an even better one.  It fits so much better alongside the rest of the novel, and I've been kind of hinting at it throughout.  No spoilers, but I'll just say I'm glad I came up with it, an I'm really looking forward to releasing this one.  In fact, I'm so excited and proud of this one that I think I might actually submit this one somewhere instead of self-publishing it.  Not bad for a novel that I'd almost ragequit in frustration multiple times a few months ago!


Hope everyone's having a nice long weekend!

We've been doing things since the beginning of the month, so we're highly tempted to do not much of anything at all this weekend.  We're no longer exhausted, but the idea of not having any plans is a nice change.  Just some grocery shopping and not much else.

We're doing okay since A's job loss earlier this week.  A has been keeping herself busy and things are still running as normal.  I'm staying busy with the Day Job and the writing.  It feels kind of weird because I'm so used to the 'now how are we gonna survive' reaction to losing a job and having little money in the bank.  It's the opposite this time out; we're financially calm for the moment, so that reaction is now trying to find purchase somewhere when it doesn't need to be there.  I think now it's more along the lines of me having to adjust my Best Laid Plans AGAIN to make my own writing career work.  Frustrating, but it is what it is.

Slowly getting through the revision/reread of In My Blue World.  It's taking a hell of a lot longer than I'd like -- I think it's because I'm too distracted at the moment, for various reasons, some obvious -- but I'm soldiering through the best I can.  I just need to focus more, is all.

The Apartment Complex story is coming along well, much to my delight.  I'm about one or two scenes from a Major Plot Point that's been in my head for quite some time now, and I'm looking forward to writing it. Not sure when I'll finish this one, but I purposely didn't give myself a deadline.  I'm taking my time with it.  In fact, I was almost thinking of submitting this one somewhere instead of self-publishing it, I feel it's that important a story.  No concrete plans yet, though.  Just ideas so far.

So yeah.  Relaxing weekend with not much planned sounds like a lovely idea. :)

 

Hope everyone has a nice weekend!

Just a few more days until vacation, woohoo!  Can't wait!

Had my midyear conversation with my boss at the Day Job and it got me thinking again about future plans.  More to the point, thinking about the Day Job finally, after far too many years, being the writing career.  It got me thinking about multiple things, really:  the reason I've had a purposely mindless Day Job over the years in the first place (stable income, paying off bills, etc), why I hadn't yet made the jump to self-employed (stable income, paying off bills, etc...but also learning the craft to a much higher degree), and so on.  I think the most obvious reason is that I just couldn't afford it.  That reason always aggravates me on a deep level (which I won't go into at the moment)...but recently I've come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, if I make a solid plan, start networking, and stick at it, I can finally do it.

It's not that I hate the Day Job...I think it's just that I now feel that while it's steady income, it takes away from time that could be better used on what I really should be doing:  writing, offering writing services (including basic editing and formatting), offering book cover services, and the occasional short-term assignments out there.  It's something I very nearly did when we first moved out here to CA, but fell by the wayside once the national economy tanked.  It's been too long in between.

Anyway.  Time to look into this a little further.

Other news: I finally got around to collecting what I have so far of the Apartment Complex story, and much to my surprise and glee, I'm already at 54k words!!  This is from three months' worth of writing five times a week.  Not bad at all!  I think it's probably going to be around 80k from my guess, and will be firmly placed in the YA Fantasy genre.  I'm actually becoming quite proud of this particular project, for multiple reasons.  One being that I was stubborn enough to keep at it despite multiple failed attempts!  I'm looking forward to releasing this one in early 2019!


Hope everyone's having a good week! :)

The downside to keeping myself full-up with projects and Day Job stuff is that the week goes by ridiculously quickly.  The upside, of course, being that this is the level of creatively busy that I enjoy.  If I've got various burners going with novels and book cover artwork and what have you, then I'm definitely in my element and it's mostly smooth sailing.  [Mind you, the corollary is that it's also the level of business-busy that I find irritating because it's all about conflicting moments of ridiculous questions and OMFG crises.] 

The revision of In My Blue World is looking better.  It still needs a lot of work, and I'm quite sure I'm not going to get close to my original end-of-month deadline, but I'm fine with that.  I've pushed the tentative release date to mid-October to give myself a few more months to get it cleaned up.  In the meantime I've created postcards for the book (I should be getting them in the mail tomorrow) that I can use in the meantime.  I purposely left part of it blank so I can slap a 'coming soon' label on it until it's released, and then put the book/ISBN info on it afterwards, and then update the template accordingly when I need to reorder.

As for the Apartment Complex story, that one's coming along as well.  It's taken some very interesting turns, especially now that I've decided not to hold back.  By this, I mean that I'm giving the characters more freedom to do what they want to do, instead of trying to fit them into a mold.  They're still operating within the context of the story, but personally I'm letting them do whatever feels right.  This has brought up a lot of personality traits that I hadn't expected but make total sense.  So yay, major obstacle sort of cleared!

As for Project Three -- yes, a THIRD project, one I'm utilizing one of the 750Words sessions for. It's a long-term project that probably won't see major work on it until next year, but right now I"m doing some pre-writing work.  And what is it, you ask?  Well!  It's the long-awaited, occasionally-mentioned next book in the Mendaihu Universe!  It's based on some ideas I had in 2015 that I'm playing around to see what I can work with.  Right now I'm just doing character sketches and brief plot ideas, but signs are good that this may have legs.  So yay new MU story!  Will it be another trilogy?  Good question.  I'm leaving that up in the air for now... :)

Hope everyone's having a good week!

It's been kind of an odd week so far.  Monday we woke up to having absolutely no hot water for most of the morning (our landlord emailed us late last night and got it fixed ASAP, so yay!), and then at around 9am our internet went out and stayed out until around 4pm.  So basically: I couldn't shower until midmorning, and couldn't get online or do Day Job work at all.

So what did I do most of that day?  Revision for In My Blue World, of course!  I spent a good four hours or so on it, taking my time and shaping it into something that worked.  It felt good to spend that long on it, since my openings are almost always the section that needs the most work!  I'm still a bit nervous about getting this done in time for Worldcon, but I'm determined to get as far as I can with it.  The fact that I'm working on that, AND writing the last few scenes for it, AND finding time to create the cover and postcards for it, AND writing scenes for the Apartment Complex story, AND dealing with the Day Job (and and fookin and :p ) is daunting of course, but again -- I'm determined.  As long as I'm moving forward, that's all that matters.

[Oh -- and I made another mixtape that day too.  Those are always fun to make, even after all these years!  It takes exponentially less time to do nowadays, considering that I'm just taking a bunch of mp3 copies and shuffling them into an order I'm happy with and then retagging them, but it's still fun!]

We have today off, of course.  No big plans, though I do have some blog work and writing work to do later on.


Hope everyone has a nice July 4th! :)

It's a surprisingly warm weekend here in the Bay Area, already in the low 60s at 8am (that's a rarity here!).  A and I are going to do a bit of walking today, going up to Fillmore for some shopping, and perhaps down to Japantown (a few blocks away from where we'll be) for lunch.  But right now I'm watching the news and realizing just how many things are going on in the area this weekend!  A race up at Sonoma Raceway, and not one but THREE pride marches in town (Trans March was last night, the Dyke March is today, and the Pride March is tomorrow).  We take our pride seriously here, yo.

There's also the fact that I *think* I have a few books waiting for me at Green Apple, but I have yet to hear from them...

In other news, I just hit the major climactic scene on In My Blue World last night (woo!) so now I need to start winding it all back down.  I'm still on schedule for finishing the book by the end of this month!  I do feel like I've rushed it just a bit, but I'm okay with that.  I have a month and a half to get a good portion of it in shape with revision.  I've done it in that amount of time in the past, so I think I can do it again.  Added to that, I'm quite happy with the scene I just finished last night for the Apartment Complex story as well.  All in all, a really good couple of writing sessions yesterday!

The Day Job training session I had to go to wasn't nearly as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be -- it was long, but the person running it actually made it fun so it wasn't a complete slog.  [I still have a few points of contention with what they're trying to roll out here, but they're at least being realistic about it.]  One more trip to Concord next Thursday for the quarterly meeting (and yay, free food!) and I'll have made my quota for office visits for the next couple of months.  Heh.


Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

We're back!  A and I took a small weekend vacation up in Mendocino and Fort Bragg just for a bit of relaxation.   It's a long drive, but it's worth it and quite fun.  It just so happens that we were up there the same exact weekend as last year, as once again we ran into Fort Bragg's classic cars show. We checked that out, and also visited the botanical gardens up there.  Thankfully the weather stayed in the upper 60s and low 70s this time out! 

Somehow in between all that driving and mini-vacationing, I managed to update today's Bridgetown blog, but more importantly I managed to do a good read-through of about half of In My Blue World.  (I'd saved most of it to doc files, and I signed onto 750 to read more of it.)  I'm glad to say that it's solid for the most part, and that most of what needs fixing can be done quickly and easily.  A few characters that need straightening out, a few weak points that need strengthening, a few plot points that need tightening.  All is on schedule so far, so if I can get this book done by the end of the month, that will give me the entirety of July to work on the revision and post-production work.

I didn't get to read what I have of the Apartment Complex story yet, but I think it's too early for that, given that I only restarted it a short time ago.  I'm going to do the same here, just keep plugging away at it until I'm nearly done and then give it a good once-over.

*Looks at calendar*  Huh.  Unless I forgot to add something, I don't have outside events until next Thursday when I have to go in to Concord for work.  Yay!  [Well, I was supposed to go in for some training thing as well, but they keep cancelling and rescheduling it.  So no idea when I'm supposed to go in for that at this time.]  No big plans this week other than grocery shopping today because our cupboards are embarrassingly bare.


Hope everyone has a good week! :)

I mean, why not, right?  Everyone else is!  Just kicking back in our jammies and coffee, watching the Britbox replay.  Not a bad way to spend Saturday morning.  As A. just said, we should have had some Pimms as well!

Not too much else planned this weekend.  We'll be going to see the Studio Ghibli movie Porco Rosso tomorrow afternoon, but other than that it'll be a slow weekend.  I'll need to do some BayCon prep this weekend, and also get my blog posts ready, but that's about it.  We'll probably be sticking around close to home.  No complaints there.

Writing: it occurred to me the other day that I don't think I've ever actively written characters who are parents, other than Poe's parents in the trilogy -- and they only feature in one extended sequence.  With the Apartment Complex story, I focus heavily on the parents as well as the kids as central characters, which is definitely a new direction for me.  And as usual, I don't want to make them stock characters, as that's not my style.  I love creating fully-formed characters, so Samuel will show all the quirks and things that make him who he is, not just his role as Diwa's Pop.  This should be an interesting experiment!


Hope everyone has a nice weekend! :)

 Yes, I'm making a few changes around here.  I've been thinking long and hard about my writing lately, especially in regards to what processes have been working and what have not, and how to minimize the latter.  One thing in particular that had been bothering me was the fact that I had two projects in a row -- the Apartment Complex story and Can't Find My Way Home -- stutter to a halt, and both for the same reason.  And that reason being that it just didn't feel right.  I know, I know...that sounds a bit silly and I'm probably talking out of my ass, but at the same time, the last two projects -- Meet the Lidwells and In My Blue World -- DID feel right to me.

Now, I knew it wasn't just because of the story I was writing.  And I definitely had my moments of the Don't Wannas and the Oh God This Sucks with both of them.  But there's so much less drama with those two.  So I had to really think about it -- WHY was I having drama with the AC and CFMWH?

And then it occurred to me:  it could be the platform.

As you all know, Bob, I've been writing the first rough drafts of the successful stories in short bouts on 750words.com.  And I realized they were working well for many reasons:

--I'm always writing at a specific time.
--With each session I'm writing a complete or almost-complete scene arc, which also sets up the next scene arc that I'll write during the next session.
--I'm focusing only on the scene at hand.  The novel-as-whole is secondary here.
--I'm allowing minor editing as I go, when I know that I can write something better.
--Each scene or partial is on its own screen; I can only access the other scenes by backing out of the one I'm currently on.
--I need to hit at least 750 words before I can call the session done for the day.
--These sessions are often very productive, as well as fast.

And then I realized: This is EXACTLY how I wrote The Persistence of Memories.  Same exact process, just a different platform at the time.  Even the 'own screen' bit -- back then I saved each chapter of the project separately.  [That comes from the habit from waaay back, when I used MS Write back in the 90s.]

So I thought:  what if I set up another 750Words account?  I can use my other email for it.  I'll follow the same leads as above with whatever second project I happen to have going.  This can be my evening writing session, unless I decide to move it to a different time of the day.  

So that's what I did.  And I'm starting it tonight with another trial run of the Apartment Complex novel.  Despite my frustration with it, my thoughts still go back to it at least once a day.  I'm taking that as a sign that I should return to it, at least on this trial run level.  No major planning, no giant outline.  Just going to run with it this time out.

Here's to hoping this works...!