Drunken Owls and Other Delights

 ...Not too much? Just dealing day to day, really. The Current Day Job has its ups and downs. One of the current downs being a not-busy-but-always-constant flow of customers that never seems to end. It's not the volume that's exhausting, it's the lack of let-up. [There's also the old Russian lady that tries to haggle prices (which, y'know, is not something you can't really do in a grocery store chain) with us every time she comes in. She cornered one of my coworkers for a good twenty minutes over the price of FIVE PEACHES the other day.]

Both Welcome to Bridgetown and Walk in Silence are on semi-hiatus for this month. For WtBT I'm posting outtakes and microfiction (and maybe some not-yet-self-published stuff) for a while. My announcement for that went over pretty well with those who follow me there, so we shall see where it goes. As for WiS, I have a Future Plan for it. I've been wanting to shake that one up for a while now, as I'll be honest, I've been phoning that one in for quite a while now. And as for the current WIPs, they're going. Slowly, but they're going.

Just dealing day to day.

It's been quite the long week here in JoncWorld, busy all around. Work has been relatively calm-ish, not that many clients going off the rails, so I can't complain there. Nothing much to report, really.

We made it a point to get back to heading to the YMCA on a nearly daily basis, as I tend to sit on my duff here in Spare Oom for way too long. The first four days were well taken care of, and by Friday we were twitchy from work issues and decided a walk around the neighborhood was in order instead. We headed up California, cut over around 10th Avenue and walked around Mountain Lake before heading back. They've done a really good job at cleaning up the lake this past year--it was drained, dredged, decluttered, had goats eating the overgrowth (no lie--there's a company out this way that rents out goats for all your de-brushing and de-brambling needs!), and had a lot of the invasive species of plant, animal and fish taken away. Not to mention some serious filtration work, as it's right up against the stretch of Veterans Boulevard as it cuts through the Presidio, and the lake has seen its share of litter and toxic runoff through the years. It's nearly done, but they've done a beautiful job.

Today was a roadtrip up to Santa Rosa, which is always one of my favorite places to go here in the Bay Area. It's a large small city, so to speak, population around 160k, but it's spread out quite a bit. Downtown SR is a neat place as it has a large number of restaurants and shops. On Fourth Street there's Treehorn Books, a veritable Narnia of used tomes (it's good for "oh, I wasn't even looking for this, but I want this!" shopping) and up the street there's a really cool Barnes & Noble that's in a large building straight out of the 1920s, complete with a Jazz-Age style front. And just about a mile or two up the road is Copperfield's, a small local chain that saps our wallets every time we go into one of them. So yes, today was a mini-book crawl. :)

Tomorrow? We're not exactly sure. We may head to Q for brunch or we may go to Japantown, depending on what we're in the mood for. The problem with going to Q is the temptation to stop at Green Apple and buy EVEN MORE BOOKS.

There was, of course, a bit of a kerfuffle online about WorldCon this past week, but as I said on Twitter, I really have no horse in that race, so I'm choosing to not get publicly involved. I do of course have some thoughts about it, but I felt it was probably for the best not to add to everything that went on.

As for writing...? I'm happy in that I managed to get four out of seven days' worth of 750 Words done, considering. The "Townies" idea is expanding in unexpected and interesting directions, turning into some kind of pre- (very pre-) Bridgetown Trilogy story. I figured it would head in that direction eventually, but I wanted to let it expand organically rather than forcing it into a specific shape. That's why I let the 750 lag for a short while, so I could let the ideas simmer a bit. This may or may not expand into the next major project, but we'll see.

Chapter 5 of The Process of Belief was a big pain in the ass and most likely needs another go-through, but I finally got it done early in the week, and jumped in on Chapter 6. That too needed some tough love, but less in the prose and more in the editing department. There's still a lot of stage direction to get rid of, but not nearly as much as the previous chapter, and much easier to clean up. Book 3 kind of feels weird to revise, as it's pretty much Act III in a very long story arc. While it ties in with Books 1 and 2, the overall feeling of this one seems different. There's a hell of a lot more ongoing tension, and I think that's what I'm feeling with it. In a good way, of course.

I also FINALLY finished off the Blogging the Beatles series over at Walk in Silence! Yay! I admit I lapsed a bit on it, but I like how it ended, and that leaves me free to add new posts. Starting this week I'll be working on some new Walk in Silence stuff for your reading enjoyment. I should also be starting up on the Welcome to Bridgetown stuff as well, as I have a few ideas to work on there.

Which brings us to a few other web-related things:
--Will I ever update my Dreamwidth site again? Probably not; I'm thinking I'll copy the poetry posts to a document file and then shut it down, as I just don't use it anymore.
--Will I stay here at LJ? Of course--I have a permanent account. I still check it on a daily basis, maybe comment now and again, though I'm pretty much just at the weekend updates at this point. It'll remain the personal blog. I do have the other one, Scribble Diem, which I haven't updated since May of 2012, so that one I'll most likely close down at some point, as I just don't use it anymore. Maybe create one of those LJ Books and then ditch it.
--Tumblr. Yeah, I haven't posted there in some time, have I? I need to rectify that. Thing is, I haven't taken any pictures worth posting lately. Maybe that'll give me reason to start rescanning my stuff (and maybe photographing some of the larger or more colorful things) and posting those. One of my aims this year is to reignite my love for art, so why not?
--In cleaning up the Joncblogs, that'll mean that Walk in Silence and Welcome to Bridgetown will become my main go-to websites. I will endeavor to post links here and elsewhere so others are aware, of course. I have both connected to Twitter and Tumblr so they'll show up both places.

So yes...busy week. Busy, but productive! And that's what counts. :)

This past year has been pretty interesting for me...on the one hand, I dropped the self-imposed weekly schedule and some of the side projects, and stopped updating (or closed down) a handful of my blogs. On the other hand, however, I focused solely on this current revision of A Division of Souls, which I'm finding is infinitely better than the last few revisions I'd made, and I've also made some interesting strides on my posts over at Walk in Silence, specificaly with the Blogging the Beatles series I started. I think this move was the right one, as I'm feeling a lot more confident in my output. That was the main aim this year--to focus more on the quality than the quantity, and I think the end result is quite positive.

That said, I would like to return to the weekly schedule again. It probably won't be nearly as packed as it was in the last few years, however. I'm going to remain focused on the Eden Cycle revisions, but I would also like to reintroduce more time to working on Walk in Silence, assigning myself a daily or weekly poem or passage to write (the main focus there being to work on something completely new, however small). I'm going to sit on Love Like Blood a little while longer. If I have time and the inclination, one of my other backburner projects might pop up later in the year...we'll see.

I also enjoyed the weekend/midweek posts of poetry and pictures, and I'd like to revive that again. Those were fun mini-projects to work on, and I think are worth revisiting. They only took maybe an hour or so out of my day, so it wasn't as if they were intrusive. If anything, that's the same amount of time I'd probably be wasting online or goofing off. This will help eliminate that to some degree. I don't mind the goofing off, it's quite a normal thing to do--but I feel I do too much of it.

So for now, I'm going to finish out 2012 with what I've been doing for the last few months...I'm continuing with the ADoS revision and doing the occasional blog post, and that's it. I'll toy around with schedule ideas this coming month, and post it come the first of January.


Hope everyone's had a great 2012! :)