Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Been awhile since I posted this kind of update...all kinds of things in the works in Joncland.

SFWC
The San Francisco Writers Conference starts this coming Thursday and I am PUMPED to go, writer nerd that I am. I've been working on getting some simple one-sheets together of a few of my projects (primarily the trilogy and Walk in Silence), which I will be using during the "Agent speed dating" segment on Sunday. Yes, the name sounds odd, but it's actually kind of neat--you get to sit with a few agents for a few minutes and try to sell them your book idea, and move onto the next one. They suggest bringing the first page and/or a summary that you can hand them if they ask. The schedule is up as a pdf at the site now, if you're curious. There's a lot of neat panels that I'm interested in, so it looks like it'll be quite enjoyable. Plus there are some lunches included in the price!

The good thing is that I can just hop on the 1 bus to and from the conference, so no worries about transportation. The one downfall is that I found out that President Obama will also be in town on Thursday afternoon (the day it starts) and will be one block down the street, so I'll have to make sure I can get there before the vehicle and pedestrian traffic is temporarily halted. I will, of course, give him a wave if I see him going by. :)

Writing in General
My schedule is still a bit wonky, due to wanting to get a good portion of both WiS and ADoS prepared for the conference, but once it's over I'll be back to normal. I have a few things in the works:

--Updating the Wordpress blog on a more consistent basis. This would also entail taking some time to switch it over to wordpress.org so I can mirror posts and do more with it.
--More poetry to work on. This would include perhaps gathering some together into a chapbook and getting it published at some future point.
--Rewriting the first five chapters of A Division of Soul almost from scratch. This one's a biggie...I'm preparing some big things for this one, and if it goes well, I'll continue with the rest of it.

Exercise
Going to the local YMCA for a bit of treadmill walking and bike riding continues apace. [Hey! I made a funny!] [No you didn't. -- Ed.] I'm still a bit over my ideal weight, but I've definitely lost a good amount since we moved here to SF, when I was 250 or so. I'm now currently hovering around 220 or so, so that's good. Cutting down on soda and snacking on much healthier things has also helped, as has our weekend walks around the neighborhood. I'm hoping to get down to the 2-teens sometime this year.


...and that's part of what's going on. Hopef all is well elsewhere with everyone else!

Morning all...another cold morning here in San Francisco...yeah, I know, 45 degrees isn't exactly cold in New England terms, so I can't complain too much, but when it's normally a good twenty degrees warmer on any given day, that's a cold morning! :p

Our sleeping in this weekend actually worked for the most part, unlike a few weekends ago when neither of us got much of a wink. We were both happy to get up closer to 7 or 8am rather than 5-ish. The only problem was last night at 3:30am when some obviously-drunk woman with some serious issues got in a catfight with some other person who, by the time the drunk woman shut up, was all the way up the other end of the block, ignoring her. Yeah, that was special...

Also: Christmas shopping nearly done for the most part! :) I just need to pick up a few things online and we're good. We tempted fate and went to the mall yesterday and it wasn't nearly as insane as I'd expected. We got some sweet deals at Kohl's and spent way much more money than we'd expected at Target, but at least we've got a good headstart on the holiday shopping. I think the fact we ordered everything online--and early at that--is the reason I keep getting this feeling we're forgetting to order something. :p

--------

[Writing]

Geh. Now I understand why Connie Willis went on about how frustrating writing a time travel novel is, when we saw her at WorldCon. Over the course of the last few weeks I've been questioning my sanity for wanting to come up with a storyline like this. Trying to come up with an interesting time-travel storyline while keeping logic in mind is one of the most mindbreaking, aggravating things I've ever done writingwise. It's a hell of a lot tougher than one thinks. But on the plus side, the outline is nearing its end--hopefully I'll get it finished by the end of the year--and with some tweaking and cleaning up, I think it will work.

In other news...I've been bad and not doing anything big with Love Like Blood lately. Well, not entirely bad...I've heard from many editors and agents that sending right at the end of the year isn't always the best of ideas, since most of them consider this their weeks off and, honestly, a good time to clean off the desk. So as much as it pains me, I'm going to wait until early-to-mid January to send it off. I should have sent it off earlier, but I won't go into that...still, I have a few places in mind that it will get sent to.

More writing news...it's still early in the game for the Eden Cycle website, but I need to get started on that as well. I'm up to Chapter 9 in the edit/once-over, partly to fix up a few things but also partly to refamiliarize myself with the story itself...that's going pretty well, and I'm still happy with most of it. What I need to be doing is coming up with some introductory passages and/or reference posts to start with, and take a weekend (or week) where I'm not doing much else and work on the layout of the site. I'd like the site to "officially" go live in January, with some sneak-peeks this month, so I'd better get cracking on this.

-------------

[Writing: Online]

As said in the past few weeks, because of all these projects I'm working on, I'm planning on backing away from LJ and other online things for a bit to get stuff done. I'm not going to completely disappear, and I will occasionally pop onto LJ to make a few comments, but for the most part I need to get more serious about my work here. So this will probably mean a few things--some quick flyby LJ posts during work hours, and long, drawn-out posts both here and at jonchaisson written on the weekend. I won't x-post to both, since most people who read this LJ read the other, and I won't subject you to twice the boringness. ;)

-------------

[The World We Live In...]

I need to back away from the Kos for awhile...maybe not cold turkey, but I've definitely been spending more time on it than I should. Sure, I like being on top of things political and whatnot, but it's eating into my writing time. In fact, now that the election season is over, I need to back away from the news for awhile. I'm getting all worked up again about everything, and I don't need that. I'll keep on top of things, of course, but not to such an extent as I have over the last few months.

-------------

[...and Life in General]

Yes, head58, I used those headers on purpose. My apologies ahead of time. :p

Seriously, folks...things are going well. Health is good, work is okay, I'm keeping busy...there's always room for improvement, of course, but I can't complain.

Next year I'm hoping to get more serious about health. I'm not exactly ailing badly, but I can stand to lose some weight and get more exercise, and cut out or down on a lot of bad things I've been eating/drinking lately. Kind of funny how the worst and toughest habits to break are the ones that affect the body... Anyhoo, I want to get more walking in, focus more on keeping good eating habits at work, and not being as lazy as I have.

Of course, this also includes mental health. I don't have many worries, but I need to rethink how my thought processes work. I'm thinking about my plans for 2008 that I posted back in January, and while my list may have been wishful thinking (let's admit, there was a lot in there), I'd like to think I got at least some of it done. That makes me happy that I got more done that I'd expected, but I need to do more. I have a bad habit of being passive, and while that's not exactly a bad thing, it can lead to a lot of frustration. I need to ramp up my determination to get things done.

In short...while I thought 2008 was a vast improvement over 2007, I'm hoping that 2009 becomes more of a banner year. We'll see....

-------------------

[Music]

You were warned: I'm most likely going to be doing a very large music post in the next few days/weeks as the year ends. I have a few ideas that I'm working with, including working on yet another end-of-year best-of list. This being another year ending in 8, there were a lot of good albums...although I'm surprising myself by realizing it didn't stand out nearly as much as 1988 and 1998 did. Then again, my connection with music isn't nearly as intense as it was over the last few decades (sad but true), so I wasn't as involved.

That said, though, there were some great albums that came out, and I'll be going over them in a later post. :)

------------------

Okay, time to make most of my day and get stuff done! How was your weekend? :)

I want to thank everyone who commented on my last post (re: posting the trilogy online)!! I'm quite happy with the responses I've gotten, and it's definitely given me more ideas on how to move forward with this idea. At this point I'm prety sure I'll be following through with it, but it's going to take some time to plan out. I've learned from watching many webcomic artists that trying to do a daily posting, along with the bells and whistles that go along with it, isn't as easy as it looks. Especially when juggling a real-life job!

Then there's also the fact that I haven't decided where to go for creating the website itself. I could easily swipe the site emmalyon and I have from Yahoo (or I could get my own, as it's not that expensive). As tempting as it is to just use another LJ, I think it would make more sense to have an actual website than a blog (I think the article bonniers linked to mentioned this as well). There's also the fact that, despite my knowledge of how to write, my HTML is sorely lacking and is pretty much confined to your basic LJ tags. So I would need a site that offers an easy page creator, or barring that, a page creator program that's pretty easy to use and doesn't look like crapola. ;)

More on this soon...I need to get some other work done tonight too... :p

Thanks again! :)