Drunken Owls and Other Delights

So ridiculously busy this week!  Went to the movies on Sunday (Apollo 11 -- highly recommended!!), first of two visits to Concord for Day Job things, and of course A starting her new job!  I've just been taking it item by item or else I'd be going insane.  I'm not worrying about missing out on writing stuff because I don't necessarily have any pressing deadlines at the moment.  Once the second Concord visit (tomorrow) is over, then I can breathe again and get myself organized.

One interesting sideline is that I seem to have been inspired by Marie Kondo lately, specifically the amusing manga that's been made out of her tidying-up/organizing style.  I'd like to think I'm relatively organized to begin with, at least for the most part, but there's room for improvement, especially with my filed-away writings, personal stuff, artwork, music and whatnot. I've been thinking that perhaps its time for me to do another heavy sort-through of these things.  It's partly tied in with our eventual removal of the old love seat back here in Spare Oom with new seating.  Thing is, I can't really do anything about it until next week when everything's back to normal again!

Anyhoo...hopefully come April I'll have some idea of what day it is...

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!

 Things I Did This Weekend:

--Learned how to rip DVDs onto my external hard drive.  I may start doing this to get rid of some of the older DVDs I rarely watch.
--Visited the in-laws in Petaluma for lunch, had a tasty pizza at one of the tiny hip restaurants in the Theater District
--Did a quick overview of the electric guitars at Tall Toad Music (in the same city), as I'm contemplating trading in my rarely-used 12-string guitar for a second electric 6-string.  Fell in love with a Gretsch that I hope is there when I return next.
--Went to the gym for the first time in a week or so.
--Had a very tasty brunch at the new Turkish/Mediterranean bistro up the street (Lokma), deemed it quite excellent.
--Three loads of laundry, surprised that no one else was using it at the moment.
--Started to prepare for FogCon, which starts this Friday.  I have a reading and I'm on a panel about self-publishing!

Oh-- and I FINALLY released Meet the Lidwells!  WOOHOO!  It's now available at Smashwords, and it's on sale this week, for only $1.50!  Go check it out! :D

So yeah, that's been my weekend.  How's yours been? :)