Drunken Owls and Other Delights

...and as you know, by "Best Laid Plans" I mean "I have a fantastic idea that I'm going to implement immediately *crash* *implode*" plans, especially when I jinx them by talking about them online before I've even put them into action.

ANYWAY! I had a nice talk with a creative friend the other day that had me thinking: The Daily Schedule has been working wonderfully since I implemented it a month or so ago. I don't follow it to the letter, but nor do I completely ignore it unless I have a good reason (such as being on vacation or on an outside errand or New Music Release Friday) (heh). In fact, I've noticed I've been starting a few of the items earlier than scheduled lately because I've wanted to do them right away. For example, writing in my personal journal has been at 9:30 am for ages but I've been hitting it closer to 8:30 am because I just want to get the creative day started. Conversely, I find that if I start my morning writing session at the scheduled 10:30am, it feels too l late and I've wasted enough time already.

Point being, it's been going so well that a) I should update the Daily Schedule, and b) I think I can ramp it up a little more.

This means reimplementing the whiteboard calendar schedule. That for the most part has been kind of quiet on purpose as I had myself get used to focusing mostly on the Daily Assignments (so to speak). In other words, I'd focused one day at a time to get used to the micro part of my productivity, and now that I've got that down, I can return to adding focus to the macro part of it as well.

The whole reason for all this isn't necessarily to Do All the Things, even though it seems that way. The primary reason is to Get Better At It. I've gotten so much better at my writing over the last ten years and I'm quite proud of that, but I still want to get better at the music and the art, especially in certain facets of it where I can use it for Career Purposes. Better short stories so I can submit them to magazines and anthologies. Better photography so I can upload pictures to Shutterstock. Better artwork so I can create a portfolio for storyboarding work. Better music so I can write better songs to share. 

What's so different this time out, though? Didn't I go through this multiple times in the past? Well, I think this time out it's because I think I've managed to purge the admittedly toxic mindset ingrained in the past me that I Must Be The Best At It. Somewhere along the line I picked up a bad habit that I had to go further, go bolder and louder in order to be bankable. You can kind of see it in the Bridgetown Trilogy, in which it's such a BIG STORY that keeps expanding and getting bigger as the story goes on. (The released versions have been tamed back considerably from the rough drafts, but you can still see it in places.) 

Right now I'm thinking, you know, maybe I don't have to crunch everything I do? All I really need to do is write a good story, a publishable one, I don't have to break my back and brain and pour 1000% into it every single day thinking I have to win a marathon every single time. I can have fun with it too! And more importantly, focusing on the same task for six or seven hours at a stretch is actually quite exhausting, especially a creative task. So working on multiple projects -- the photography, the music, one scene each on multiple works in progress, a for-fun 750Words entry purely for working out ideas or playing out new ones, an occasional poem, and keeping up with submissions and freelance work -- doing all that over the course of eight or so hours isn't so bad. Some of it's fun, some of it's deep-focus, but doing that over the course of one day is something I can do (and have done before).

Also, let's lay this out now: I need to be busy so I'm not fucking around online wasting time. Not that I'm spending my entire day ragetweeting or watching cat videos or whatever, just that I'm still feeling the occasional level of distraction that I can do away with. I don't need to disconnect the internet, nor do I want to; I just need something else to occupy my brain when things slow down, otherwise I get physically and mentally lazy. I'm pretty sure part of that is an undiagnosed-ADD thing, and assigning myself things in this manner is the perfect workaround. It's worked in the past, so I know it'll work now.

So are you going to see more DW posts than just on Sundays? Maybe? Perhaps not right away as I get used to a heavier load, but who knows. You may even see a return of the twice-a-week blog posts over at Welcome to Bridgetown and Walk in Silence! 

And now that I've posted all this, I'm waiting for it all to implode on schedule. Heh.

In the meantime, hope everyone has a great week! :)

Another relaxing weekend of not doing too much other than our daily walk around the neighborhood. We've been averaging about 1.5 - 2 miles most days if we're just doing up Lake Street and back, and maybe more like 3 or 4 if our plans are to walk in the botanical garden in GGP (the camelias and cherry blossoms are out!) or doing some errands down the other end of Clement. 

Speaking of exercise, I'm trying to do them twice a day here in Spare Oom, once midmorning and once midafternoon. Nothing too high-intensity as my joints aren't up for that right now...it's mainly been a lot of the stretching exercises I still remember doing from my days at Yankee Candle plus a few I've grabbed from the internets. The problem with these is not the occasional pain, but the occasional forgetting to do it!!

Which brings me to my next thing: as an experiment, I've given myself a semi-rigid daily schedule that I'm going to try to maintain as closely as I can, starting tomorrow. I built it up around the loose schedule I already have (midmorning journaling, exercise, lunch, writing sessions, etc), this just gives it more stability and less chance for distraction. And yes, I did factor in points in the day for leisure time -- checking emails and social media, working on something fun, and so on. I'm not looking for rigidity, I'm just looking for structure here, because I think I need more of that.

[On a side note, I once tried to do this during my college years as a way to ensure that I'm actually doing homework, studying and not goofing around with whatever instead. Unfortunately this died a horrible and embarrassing death when a few "friends" saw it and mercilessly made fun of me for it. Sadly I gave up on it and never tried it again. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't given into mortification and lack of self-esteem and followed through, but well...what's past is past, I have no peanut gallery to shoot me down this time.]


Not much else to report! Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Every time I choose to do a bit of book purging, I find myself a bit fascinated by my decisions. It was another major 'will I ever read this/will I ever reread this' process, and this time I included not only my fiction but my music and my writing books as well.

What's this, you say? Getting rid of writing books??? *GASP!* Well, most of these were from the Writer's Digest Book Club (or whatever it was called then) where I'd ordered a handful of 'learn how to write' books. I used a handful of them, but for the most part, they've been getting more use as dust traps, so it was high time for them to go. And the good thing is that we've been donating all our books to the Friends of the SF Public Library, who run a twice-a-year Giant Book Sale down in Fort Mason, so they get to be bought and used by others who can get more use out of them. And the best part is that opened up a spot on the bookshelf near the window for Jonc's Officially Published Works. Which for now contains two titles and those two ZYZZYVA issues I was in, but hey, at least I know it'll expand over time!

As for the music books...many of these were bought between 2010 and 2012 when I started thinking about writing Walk in Silence. I did get some use out of them, but with a good handful of them, I doubt I'll pick them up again, so they too can go. Quite a few of those will probably be 'read and get rid of' as well.

But that's not all! The Spring Cleaning Bug seems to have bit hard, as I now have decided it's high time to get rid of some other things as well. I still have some old PC and laptop stuff from the last six or so years, and when I have the time, I will donate those to the local electronics recycling place down in SoMa that I usually go to. [They not only recycle the parts but for a fee will run the hard drives through the woodchipper (or whatever it is they use) to make sure they're completely destroyed.] I may have a few other things to get rid of in the next few months as well. Just one of those things where you just want to let go of things you don't need anymore and start fresh.

The downside to the book purge is that Spare Oom is once again getting a bit crowded with boxes. I'll try not to keep them here for months on end this time, though.


As for writing...new month, new writing schedule. I'd given myself most of April to relax and do some fun short-term projects (like the A to Z Challenge meme and build up a backlog of Walk in Silence entries), and so starting today and going forward, I'd like to get back to work on stuff I need to do. Primarily, starting the Epic Revision of The Balance of Light. I'm going to take my own time with this one, really...it needs a lot of work so I'd like to make sure it gets all the TLC it needs. I don't have a set date for the release of that one either...just a rough guess of late autumn.

I'd also like to return to the small exercises again as well, just to keep my writing muscles moving. Nothing big yet, just the usual 750 during the day, and also posting at the two WP blogs. I should (hopefully) have time to put up some short 500-700 words a few times a week. I still have the weekends open for catch-up and whatnot. Once Book 3 is out, I'll have much more time to spend on new projects. Speaking of which, I told a friend earlier that I'm curious as to what my turnaround time will be for my new projects...I'm not going to hazard a guess, considering I don't know what scale these new projects will be.

However, I do have some interesting writing-based plans in the works that I'm looking forward to...can't reveal them just yet, but hopefully soon!