Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I'll admit, I've been slacking off the last few weeks. I've written in my journal, but somewhere in there I took a break from new words and artwork and hadn't picked anything up. I didn't even finish Inktober. [Granted, that was post-vacation and I got sidetracked by Day Job foolishness, so I'll let that one slide.] I had a few personal thoughts and issues about the trilogy, but I worked those out (thanks to queenoftheskies for the Twitter chat!), and I'm feeling better about it now.

How did this trip-up happen? Good question. Vacation distraction, submission rejection contemplation, other words that end in -ion, and other things I won't bother to get into here. I had to let my brain take a breather and catch up.

Time to get back on the horse.

The last few days I've been getting back up to speed. I'm picking up Two Thousand again and getting a few hundred new words a night again. The count is still low for my standards, but I'm determined. I think the issue here is that I need to remind myself--again--that first drafts are supposed to be crap. Or as kateelliott posted recently, "Don't think, just write." The first run is to get the story out. Worry about the details and the fixes later.

Anyhoo. Other than that, it's been a blur. Family visits, operas seen, dayjobbery, and possible jury duty next week. It's still busy with various things going on, but I'm back on track.

Onward and upward.

So yeah. I'd completely forgotten I had Monday off until about ten minutes before logging off last night, when a coworker reminded me. D'OH! So that means I have an extra day in which to do stuff! And I've already decided that it was high time to bring in our car for a maintenance check-up. There's a Honda garage on 9th in the Sunset, which works out perfectly, as I plan on hanging out in the Haight for some shopping at Amoeba and elsewhere. Woo, day off!

Meanwhile, writing has been going really well! I'm not exactly hitting stupidly high word count, but there's a lot of forward motion going, which is good. Two Thousand is going well, as I've just started Chapter 4 a few days ago. I'm also playing around with a story idea with my daily 750 Words--it's in the Mendaihu Universe, but quite early in the history. As for Walk in Silence, I'm still working on that on the weekends. That one's slow going, but it's getting there.

Writing-related, I had a very slow work day the other day, so I had a bit of fun with Photoshop and a great picture of foggy Dubai that I found online, and created a mock-up cover for A Division of Souls. It's not the official cover, of course--it's out in the wild at this time--just a made-up one. The back cover copy is a bit clunky and I may fix it, but I like how it came out. Check it out at my Welcome to Bridgetown blog and let me know what you think! :)

I'm also keeping up with the Inktober meme on Tumblr, creating various doodles and whatnot. I had a five-day theme going in which I showed how I draw my imagined maps, which seems to have gone over quite well with the cartography-minded (it's been reblogged a few times too!). Murph has been popping up, as have some fun caricatures that are coming out a hell of a lot better than I expected. Perhaps my art skills aren't nearly as rusty as I expected...?

So let's see...not too many other plans this weekend. We have shopping to do as we are out of pretty much everything right now. We have the Blue Angels WOOOOOOOOSHing over our neighborhood as they do their show later today. We may have a visit to Japantown as well. It's very up in the air at the moment, but that's okay. Weekends are for relaxing. :)

Sunday is here once again. These weekends go by way too quick! Ah well...at least I'll be on another vacaction in another few weeks, in which we're going to Portland OR for a few days. [I promise I won't come back home wearing a trilby, a beard, tight chinos and singing Lumineers songs.] That'll be our last vacation week for the year (well, for me, anyway), so I'll consider that my own official start of Q4...slogging through the remainder of the year with nary a day off and too many ridiculous requests coming my way at work.

Yesterday was quite productive, actually. A road trip to Half Moon Bay for picture-taking (part of a writing project I've taken part in), we also got some shopping done at HMB's farmer's market as well as a few other stores. I zipped out again for more shopping at TJ's, with a side trip to the bank for funds and quarters, and finally forced myself to stop at Jiffy Lube on the way home to buy new wiper blades for the car. Heh--man, when the guy at the garage took the old ones off, the look on his face was priceless, they were so bad!!

Also, yesterday was the day Jonc gets CDs in the mail! I'd found a sweet deal on the new George Harrison box set (The Apple Years 1968-75) on Amazon and ordered it for the collection. [Will I need to get 2004's Dark Horse Years box set now...? Maybe...] It's a nice package and the cd packages look pretty sharp, with some interesting recent commentary on it. Best one is George's son Dhani talking about the cover of Electronic Sound, with George explaining exactly who the people in the painting are!

Today? Not too much planned. Going to try to sneak in some artwork and other things that I didn't get to last weekend. I've also been doing pretty good with the 750 Words lately, so I'll be able to sneak that in as well, in amongst the football games and other things going on.

Writingwise, Two Thousand is coming along quite nicely. I like the characters I've created, and I'm having a hell of a lot of fun with the dialogue. After the (admittedly startling) realization that Chapter 1 could sit alone as a short story (more on that in a sec), I came to the conclusion that this book would grow in the same way, each chapter a standalone that ultimately ties in with all the others going on. The Dickens way of writing a novel, I suppose! I know it's been done before, but this is a new way of writing for me, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Related, I did my first read-through of what I have so far, and while I have the bones of an interesting story, it definitely needs some revision and expansion. Not too much, but enough to tighten it up.

I'm also revisiting my old writing habit of minor future outlining, which I used for the trilogy--coming up with ideas just a few scenes or chapters ahead, and using that as a guidepost for what I need to write. That was always the best process for me, so coming back to it felt good and right.

OK, time to get ready for the day and get things done. Even if it is only 9:30!

Me, sixth grade, reading the sheet music for ELO's Face the Music during inside recess:
Teacher: That's a great album!
Me: Yes, I like their stuff.
Teacher: Do you know what 'face the music' means?
Me: ...standing in front of a stereo?
Teacher: ...

Actually, I knew what the phrase meant by that time. I just couldn't pass up a good, painful joke. :)


So yes, music. There was a LOT of it this past week. Lots of new albums released that I couldn't wait to download. Interpol's El Pintor, Robert Plant's Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar, Sloan's Commonwealth, and my friend Dae's Digital Scars (under her new band AnaDaenia--seriously, go check it out), for starters. And of course the surprise release of U2's Songs of Innocence, which I think is probably my favorite of the lot so far. [And amusingly enough, I recreated two further new releases--the Icon collections of John Lennon and Ringo Starr--via the mp3s I already have!] I also grabbed a earlier releases via eMusic, such as the Scruffy the Cat anthology.

And speaking of 80s-90s Boston bands, I made the mistake of ordering a few used cds from a third party vendor through Amazon. I grabbed two Raindogs cds from 1990-91 I've been looking for, and two Cavedogs cds (more on that in a second), plus a few non-Boston early 90s releases. The mistake lies in the fact that Round3 has to be the worst third-party vendor I've ever used...cracked jewel cases, a wrong cd in the case (one Cavedogs album had a Bobby Fuller greatest hits in it instead), lack of tracking, and missing another cd I'd ordered, which they said "oh, it got lost in the mail", which I'm pretty sure is bullshit. Ah well...lesson learned.

In other music news, yay, I finally figured out (sort of) how to play the "Dear Prudence" riff! Okay, I'm nowhere near playing it exactly like John does, but still...I've at least figured out a variation of the chord fingering! The trick now is to teach myself the fingerpicking style. It's gonna be hard because it's definitely not the style I'm used to. Some fingers are plucking the low notes while the others are plucking the highs as a counterpoint. This will take a bit of time, I fear.

In writing news...currently working on the second chapter of Two Thousand. It's a bit of a chore because I'm still not entirely sure where this particular scene is going. That's not to say I'm making it up as I go along...more that I have a very vague idea of what I want the chapter to do, but I currently have no roadmap on how I'm going to get there. I'm pretty sure this is going to cause problems down the road, so I think what I'll do is what I did with the trilogy, and map ahead a few scenes and/or chapters, just so I know where I'm going. Yeah, I know, this is Novel Writing 101 and why didn't I do this already, yada yada. But this is often how I start novels: the first chapter or so spills out and is completed, just to set the mood and get the plot rolling, and only then do I sit down and preplan the rest of it.

So! Busy weekend awaits! Hope everyone has a relaxing time! :)

So it's the end of August...the end of summer vacation, the time to head off to college, the end of Q3 and the start of Q4, or just the end of another month, depending on who you are and what you do. It's a long weekend with Labor Day letting us get away with one last day of slacking off.

Our apartment is near a few schools, both high and elementary, so we've been seeing a lot of neighborhood kids getting ready for the new semester (or already disappearing off the streets and into the schools--I never know when the first day of school is around here). It got me thinking about the various things I used to do over the course of my school years.

Each year I'd start off with a weak but well-intentioned goal of "doing better this time out". I'd end up doing my usual slightly-above-average grades, but I could never quite push myself to ace the courses. There's many and varied reasons for that--inattention, distraction, emotional issues, frustration, boredom, what have you--but I managed to pass each semester and move on to the next grade. I graduated in the top quarter of my high school class and somewhere in the middle of my college class. As long as I didn't stay behind.

I recently thought about some of my personal tics and habits when it came to school. By fourth grade I was one of those people who wanted to have their desktop clean. A little compulsively so, to be honest, but I would get twitchy if I'd accidentally marked the desk with a pen or something. And in a fit of irony, the inside of my desk was embarrassingly cluttered. I mean cluttered, stuffed with homework and papers and what have you dating back to the beginning of the semester, so much so that at one point when the teacher wasn't looking, I moved some of it to an empty desk across the room. It was wacky mixture of obsessive cleanliness and compulsive hoarding, come to think of it. My bedroom was always a mix of clean and clutter, depending on where you looked. It pretty much explains my music collection--always in alphabetical and chronological order (and cassettes almost always rewound back to the beginning), and always growing. [Thanks to my collection being nearly all digital, I have no reason to obsess over the order, as my music software does it for me. I have had a years-long project going on where I've been cataloging my entire collection, though, but I'm taking my time on it. I'm two-thirds through "R" at the time of this writing, and it will probably be completely caught up by early next year. It's both an exercise in obsession and tempering the same.]

During the HMV Years I had the schedule of Wednesday comic runs across the state and the daily longhand writing before my shift. During the Yankee Candle years I had the schedule of the same comic run and the Newbury Comics cd purchasing, and writing the trilogy on a daily basis (usually 7-9pm). I kind of lost direction for a few years when we moved out to California, but I'd say once we moved again to the Richmond District in 2009 I got my groove back. My job has been 7:30 to 4pm without change. We hit the gym by 4:15. We have dinner upon return. By 6:30 or so I'm in Spare Oom, ready to write until about 8pm.

I still get a bit OCD about things, but I've managed to balance everything out. I'm okay with letting some things sit for a while. My writing time fluctuates but I always manage to get around 600 or 700 words a night, more if I'm in the zone. I let things pile up and then do a mass cleaning. My desk is relatively clean, but I do have the need to tidy up now and again. I miss some writing sessions, and I get lazy and distracted during some as well. But I'm okay with that.

It's also why I have the calendar whiteboard for my writing--if I didn't set myself a schedule, well...I'd get stuff done, but at a much slower rate, and I'd forget to do things for weeks at a time. I don't follow it to the letter, but use it as guidance. And it being September tomorrow, I've decided I shall start fresh again with a new schedule.

I'm returning to the Busy Creative Schedule of Many Things, because I want to work on a lot of output again. Adding music, drawing and poetry one or two days a week, journaling every day (or at least every weekday), timely posts at my two WordPress blogs, working on Two Thousand as my primary project during the week and Walk in Silence on the weekends. Posting pictures, especially now that I have my shiny new camera. We will (hopefully) be getting back to the gym schedule again, after a month of rarely going due to one thing or another (read: two weeks in the UK, me dealing with a slight cold, and just plain laziness). September is San Francisco's summertime, and the weather is gorgeous. Not to mention football is back in season!

All things to look forward to.

emmalyon and I have been visiting various Boston landmarks the last few days during vacation, so I decided I'd take some pictures of things and places that have influenced my writing over the years, or were at least important to my writing. Enjoy!

( There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed... )

I wish I'd have taken more pictures (I would have liked to have gotten pictures of Charlesgate, my apartment in Allston, and a few others), but we didn't have the time. I may grab those pictures from the internet later on and post them in a follow-up, however.

We'll be heading out west to my parents' house tomorrow, so I will most likely be taking more reference pictures as the week progresses.