Drunken Owls and Other Delights

It's...Thursday? Yes, it's Thursday. Had to work on Sunday so my internal clock is once again all wonky. Another day off so I'm using it to catch up and relax a bit. I had a busy day yesterday at the Day Job which entailed cleaning up, sorting and rearranging the dairy walk-in cooler, and while I didn't get nearly as many steps as I usually do when I'm on the floor, I did get a lot of heavy lifting. Those crates of milk are heavy!!

But yeah, that cooler looks a LOT better now, especially since the store is doing an inventory this week. That was one of my reasons for doing the clean-up -- I'd originally planned to put stuff out on the floor and do some pre-inventory inventory, but quickly found the numbers were ALL out of whack, primarily due to certain products being put away in multiple places and without rhyme or reason, and thus miscounted. [We also have holiday stuff in there that hasn't gone out yet that needed to be gathered into one single place.] At the end of my shift I let a few of the others who go in there know how I set it up and to PLEASE keep it somewhat orderly, so hopefully it'll remain that way!

So...what else am I going to do today? Good question. I don't have much planned other than catching up on writing and maybe stopping at the garden to water what few plants we have left! [Not to fear, just that most of the plants we have there have finished for the season so we're just letting the rest sit there for a bit until we redo the gopher wire, resoil the plot and and put in some winter grass to feed said soil a bit.]

TIL: My day job assignment yesterday was to be out on the floor restocking dairy and frozen, which can be enjoyable if a bit finger-numbing when you're handling refrigerated things all day long. And apparently the cooler was being temporarily used yesterday afternoon as a place to store the Flipping Ginormous Recall of Boars Head meats until it was sorted and tossed (the tl;dr is that the company found traces of listeria in one of their liverwurst samples and they chose to do the right thing and recall EVERYTHING between certain dates). Side note: the pulled stuff was all tightly wrapped and unopened so there was no crosss-contamination. So yeah, that was fun to work around!

In other less exciting news, today's my one Front End Manager shift this week and considering it's Wednesday, I'm hoping it'll be uneventful. And I get to do more restock work tomorrow, then my Friday-Saturday bookkeeping assignment, so yay for avoiding the registers for the most part this week! Heh.

Other than that, I seem to be avoiding writing work again, so that needs to be adjusted once more...

It's the last Wednesday of the year already?  Dang!  Yeah, the year did go by ridiculously quick, and there were a hell of a lot of personal ups and downs, but it was also ridiculously productive and eye-opening.  Plus it was a hell of a fine year for music!  Heh.

I'll have one last Update for 2018 either on the weekend or on Monday, depending on how busy I happen to be.  (Which, given the Day Job lately, would surprisingly be "not very busy at all, really".  Not that I'm complaining.)  I've updated the other two blogs for the next few days, and then I'll give all three of them a final update on or around the 31st.  I know I've been talking a lot about Big Ideas, Changes, Hiatuses, and whatnot, so I promise these will be the last entries in which I'll talk about them.  Just something I've been looking forward to for the last few months.


Hope everyone had a fine Christmas, and has a lovely and warm New Year!

After three or four days of allergy irritation, I'm quite happy to say that i'm no longer stuffed up and can breathe easily again!  Woo!  I even celebrated by heading to the gym this afternoon!  Now I just need to get back into my daily exercises, which I've been avoiding for the same exact reasons...

Tomorrow I'll be walking down the other end of Clement Street for a local annual holiday shopping celebration called ClemenTime.  It's a stretch of three or four blocks where the local shops will have things on sale, free refreshments, and other fun things.  I usually head down there each year to hang out at Green Apple Books for a few hours and peruse while enjoying the free beer.  And yes, there is a very good chance I won't be coming home emptyhanded, considering.  Heh.

In writing news, I've stumbled across another chapter of In My Blue World that needed a complete rewrite.  Short version is that the original had a subplot that I really didn't like and went nowhere.  The problem was that the previous chapter set up a plot point that's kind of important that I DO need to keep, so I had to figure out how to thread something in that a) made sense, b) wasn't filler, and c) could also be used/referenced later on.  It's taken me a few days to figure it out, but I figured it out!  Woo, go me!  Now hopefully I'll be back to regular speed once this chapter is done!

Meanwhile, A is having a fun time in London and tweeting lots of fun pictures and making me jealous.  She'll be heading back on Saturday, though.  In the meantime, I've tried to be good, eat halfway decently, and not stay up too late.


Hope everyone else has a great rest of the week!

Rain, blessed rain!  It's been dry and stale here for far too long.  While it's probably hindering some progress of the post-fire triage and cleanup, it's clearing the air here in the Bay Area and we're able to breathe again without feeling like we're inhaling chalk dust.  It also means that there's a bit of wind as well, pushing the smoke away.  This morning before the downpours started I was able to see the Marin Headlands from Spare Oom's window for tie first time in weeks.  Woo!

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving is nearly here.  We'll be driving up to Petaluma to have dinner with A's family this time.  Alas, I still have to work on Friday but I'm expecting it to be relatively dead.  I'm kind of hoping it is so I can finally get caught up and clear up the inboxes.  That also means I should probably start with the Christmas shopping as well, yes?  I'll have to start prodding the family and asking what they'd like.  I'm trying to be better at ordering things early on instead of last minute!  

Which of course means coming to terms with the fact that it's already coming close to the end of the year already.  I'm not even going to say 'what the hell happened' this year, because a LOT happened.  Some stressful things, some annoying things, but also some fascinating and wonderful things.  I could dwell on the fact that A was laid off from her job, but it also let her truly relax for the first time in a few decades (and let her do a lot of things she'd been putting off for too long), and made me do a serious rethink of my own career and life.  We're both still in a good place right now, so it all evens out.  I'd say despite the numerous ups and downs, I've had a pretty good 2018.


Hope everyone has a good relaxing weekend!  Don't eat too much! :)

Here we are at the end of the month already!  Man, October just FLEW by.  Mostly due to my ass being handed to me at the Day Job with the sheer amount of volume.  I'm amazed I was able to get anything else done!  I'm hoping it quiets down a bit more, because I have Other Things to Do and I hate it when Day Job sucks the life out of me like a psychic vampire.  (I say this from experience in my YC days around this time of year, when I'd be so overworked I'd get sick.)  Speaking of job things, I've been updating my LinkedIn profile the last few days and doing some serious job searching and applying as well.  I'm trying to avoid the mindset of making this move out of desperation, and think of it more as a fresh start as well as some much-needed clarity.

Clarity is a Very Good Thing, I've found lately.  Not sure if it's got to do with the exercising or coming to terms with/accepting personal things or finally exorcising the ghouls of self-doubt and pessimism.  Could be a bunch of things, really.  I'm just running with it right now, ain't complaining.  I'll have a few up and down days as normal, of course.  But I'm trying to balance it all out by remaining upbeat.


Hope everyone has a fun Halloween! :)

Oh hey, wasn't I supposed to write this yesterday?  Ah well.  It's been a week of cleaning up the aftermath of taking a vacation from the Day Job.  My fill-ins did a decent job considering (they had a perfect stom or all kinds of crap thrown at them) but it's taken me a full week to get everything back to normal.  OY.  [Side note: I was looking at another bank's careers website, and realized that I'll need to do a bit of translation, because I'm seeing listings for stuff I currently do that's under a different name there.  This actually bodes well for me.]

Anyhoo, bob-bob-bobbin' along at my usual pace with the writing.  Working through revision work for In My Blue World, letting the Apartment Complex story simmer for a bit, and doing some half-serious writing work for Mendaihu Universe Book 4.  Yes, despite my current work load, I'm playing around with the longhand work I did a few years back for that project.  I say 'half-serious' because I'm doing two things: one, I'm doing a bit of transcription into the 750Words entry, and making editorial notes after it.  A sort of 'this is what I wrote' versus 'this is what I plan to do with it'.  I'm also adding a few new ideas to the mix if it warrants it.

As for non-writing, non-Day Job?  I'm back to normal with the exercising.  I'm being a bit impatient with the weight I'm trying to lose, but it's expected and I'm not going to worry.  Besides, I weight myself for the first time in forever the other day and realized I'm down 20 pounds from where I was probably six months ago!  Go me!  I just need to keep up the exercise and the movement and the gym visits, and ESPECIALLY laying off the junk food.  The vacation kind of threw that one off a bit, but I'm back to normal again.


Have a good Friday, everyone!

Seriously, I've been up since 6am London Time, took a ten-hour flight home (which included a monster marathon of reading and making revising notes for both In My Blue World and Apartment Complex) and it's currently 5:30 Pacific Time (12:30am London Time).  So I've been up about eighteen hours and have been on a plane for most of them, and the time change has made me loopy.  I'm not tired, just not running on all cylinders at the moment.

And tomorrow is the first of four (possibly five) days of driving down to San Jose for Worldcon.  I'm hoping I'll be awake and conscious for most of it!

The IMBW revision is currently about a third of the way In (I think?) and while there are moments where it desperately needs more work, there are other moments where they're just fine and the only work needed is prose-tightening.  I'm still a bit annoyed that this one's not nearly as up to snuff as I'd like, but I'm getting over it.  It's not horrible, it's just not up to a level I'm happy with yet. 

As for AC, I'm happy to say that one has definitely exceeded all expectations.  I'm quite proud of this one, really.  A few gaps I'll need to fill in, but aside from that, it's coming out just amazing.  I can't wait to share this one once it's done.

Other than that, I'm doing okay.  I'll probably pass out later tonight, have a good deep sleep, and be ready to go tomorrow.  Hopefully!


Hope everyone's having a good week!

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!