Drunken Owls and Other Delights

[Yup, I just referenced a Porcupine Tree lyric. I'm a dork.]

So all the music blogs and the alternative radio stations have been talking about how it's been 20 years since Radiohead's The Bends came out. I was still living in Allston at the time, working at the Sony Theater and hearing "High & Dry" on WFNX and WBCN on a daily basis. I didn't get the album right away due to my perpetual lack of any funds, but by September I finally ordered the cd through my Columbia House membership. I immediately fell in love with it--I did like Pablo Honey but felt that one was a bit disjointed, whereas The Bends was solid from start to finish. I pinched a blank tape from my then job at the radio station and dubbed it so I could listen to it on the go. It was on heavy rotation when I started writing down in the Belfry, and it was also a go-to album when Kris and I used to go on our weekend roadtrips. She made fun of the fact that I could hit Thom Yorke's notes, although with absolutely none of the musicality. [For those wondering, I can nail notes with reasonable accuracy, but my tone is similar to Peter Tork's--kind of bland and flat.] If you don't yet own The Bends, I'm sure you can find it relatively cheaply in used bins by now. It's well worth picking up.

So what else is going on? Day Job continues apace...there's been a bit of an internal shake-up and some people on my team are moving to a more client-facing new team (my team, in theory, would become more internal-facing). No one lost a job, but not everyone's happy with the news. I'm ambivalent, and my horses in this race would seem to be getting a bit of a reprieve--I'll be the only person focusing on two inboxes, but it also means I'll be relieved of other unrelated issues that would come up--but I'm waiting to see how it all unfolds in the next few weeks before I say anything.

In creative news: HOKEY SMOKES I'M WRITING LONGHAND! After hemming and hawing and delaying and goofing off, I made good on my plan to do so. It's a new story in the Mendaihu Universe, and I'm not entirely sure where it's going to go, but I have high hopes. I won't reveal too much yet, at least not until I get more situated here.

Also: the Daily 750 is working out as well with the semi-serious 'Lidwells Story' project. I say 'semi-serious' because I'm writing this completely for the fun of it. It's written like a fictional music biography in interview form, though there are moments outside of the interviews that are being used as a bit of framework. As for whether I'll release it or submit it somewhere, I'm not thinking about that at the moment. I just want to write the thing for the fun.

So what, in fact am I really working on, projectwise? Everything, it seems. And I'm okay with that. :)

As of 6:30 this evening, the second rewrite/revision of Love Like Blood is DONE!

*exhales*

More rambling about it over at jonchaisson about this...


Hmm...now what to do...
--work on Can't Find My Way Home outline?
--work on Decline and Fall outline?
--start giving the Eden Cycle trilogy a once-over?
--play around with some of the LLB Universe ideas I had a few days ago?
--slack off and do nothing?

Decisions, decisions...


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(Oh, and on a side note, emmalyon is going to check on the dental plan stuff while I make plans on which dentist to go to. I already have a list of places nearby taht I can go to, which is good. Or I could sate my curiosity and go to the Ubiquitous Dr. Jang and Associates and see if he really does do that weird smile after every sentence he utters. :p )

I think I'm doing a pretty good job so far with the writing. I'm already about halfway through the next chapter of the rewrite, including some heavy editing and reworking. This is a definite improvement over last year's slacking off. And the much lower stress levels in my life is helping too. I'm convinced I'm finally back to 2004 levels of being able to balance my life with my writing and other things.

The room for improvement comes in with the fact that, though I have a pretty good idea of what I should be doing on a daily basis (and even made a decent schedule over at die_joncswerk), I should probably give myself a set deadline for things. I'll have to look and see how long it takes me to work on a rewrite chapter first, and go from there.

I'm going to be logging my writing work in a calendar book I bought last year, and occasionally posting them under the Writing Ticker heading over at die_joncswerk, if anyone is interested. I might also post about any adjustments to the schedule as I see fit.

We'll see where this goes!

First off, for those of you who don't already know, I posted some older writing at my writing-only lj, die_joncswerk. This time out we're reading the first chapter, in two parts, of True Faith, the aborted novel I wrote with an ex-girlfriend from 1994-1996. There's more detail at those posts, for those who are curious. They're friends-locked, so if someone here wants to read them and is not friended, let me know and I'll add you on. :)

Second--Sometime within the week I should be starting on yet another runthrough of LLB, filling in many of the blanks that emmalyon seems to have found. I want to do this as quickly and as smoothly as possible, so as to not dwell forever on the book, and also to prepare it for another go at agents and publishers.

Third--although I told myself I wouldn't look back on old projects, one seems to have been calling out to me lately, and it's one I've rarely worked on. It has the working title of Then... (stolen from Charlatans UK, of course), and is a sort of alternate reality story. The most I've ever worked on it is a handful of handwritten pages and that's about it, so this world is about as open to me as it can possibly get at the moment. So maybe I'll start working on that...

Fourth--the freelance thing. Er...yeah, still working on that. Gathering writing samples I've done in the past to put in one place. Also need to look over that Robert Bly book again and look for suggestions as to how to get myself set up for this. More later.

That's all for now...