Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I didn't exactly plan to skip my midweek post, I just completely forgot about it is all. Bound to happen sooner or later.

Anyway! Tomorrow starts my return to the writing grind. I actually picked up Theadia again about a week ago, but I'd done that on purpose: I chose to work on it because I wanted to and not out of a sense of duty or an attempt to force myself into a writing habit. These last two weeks have been pretty much all about calming down from the Day Job's Christmas rush and just taking it easy. This actually worked in my favor because I'm in the midst of cleaning up a scene that needed some heavy rework, and this approach kept me from getting too stressed out about it.

Meanwhile, my Day Job hours seem to be sliding into a semblance of normalcy -- mostly opening shift (or very close to it) Tuesday through Saturday, finally giving me a bit of a two-day weekend of sorts. It's mostly been upstock work at the start in addition to my two-day bookkeeping duties on Friday and Saturday, and while it can be exhausting of we have a huge delivery (those cartons of milk are heavier than they look when you have to stock several dozen of them while inside a cold walk-in fridge).

Still, as much as I enjoyed (and needed) that small break from my whiteboard schedule, I'm glad to be back!

So of course today is the first of two days off from the Day Job and what am I doing? All The House Cleaning! Heh. Well, it needed to be done as we hadn't vacuumed since before the trip and we had a lot of laundry to do as well. And then there was the shower which, yeah, still needs a secondary scrub but still looks a LOT better than it did previously. Going to relax a bit now before starting in on some revision work.

October is coming up and of course I'm going to kick off another monthly whiteboard refresh! Was just thinking about this earlier today...I'm always wanting to start off a new month with a fresh fresh start to get my creative avenues up and running: the journaling, the blogging, fiction and poetry work, and so on. There's also the fact that Inktober is starting.

When the new month comes around I'm often saying "okay, let's get back to our schedule here", fill out the whiteboard calendar, and do what I can to keep to it. I don't always make it to the other end of the month, but I've realized that I no longer focus on that particular issue as a failure. The whole point is that it's a refresh and not a doomed attempt at perfection. Seeing it in that way has lifted a lot of the self-induced stress of keeping to a schedule so that it's all about getting up and trying again.

Yes, I took an extra week off from blogging because I wanted to think a bit more about what I wanted to do with my writing. I've come to the decision that while I'll continue with the weekend update here on DW, I'm dropping the WordPress blogs down to once a week until further notice. This is primarily because I need to focus more on novel work and Day Job searching and planning. Just enough to keep the blogs consistently updated without me driving myself crazy digging for ideas. As for the novels, I've been averaging around 650-700 words a day, which is terribly low by my standards but at least I'm getting somewhere. I can get higher word count, but I'm not going to force it. It'll come eventually.

I also cleaned off the whiteboard again. Yes, I always flip-flop on that thing. It's helpful but it can also be a hindrance. It reminds me of what I need to work on, but it also stresses me out when it starts feeling like a strict deadline. So I'm going to try something different here: I have a clipboard hanging next to my whiteboard that hasn't been getting much love over the last few years, which will be used as a non-deadline Things To Do List. I already have my list of stretches and exercises here, so I can add a list of creative projects, errands and whatnot.

In other news, for some unknown reason I can no longer connect my Pixel phone to my PC to empty out the pictures (something I've been doing for years, moving them to the PC hard drive and backing them up on an external). It's weird because it's only my PC where this happens; it'll charge up the phone, but won't read it. My laptop can still read it no problem, so now when I move the pictures I need to move them there then transfer them to my PC through Dropbox. It's a pain in the butt but it's the only way I can think of doing it right now until I figure out why this doesn't work. My Dropbox is like 'what the hell are you doing' and the syncing doesn't know if it wants to spend a few hours or a few minutes screwing around.

[Which reminds me...I really need to get that non-working external over to the PC shop up on Geary to see if they can save what's on there. I don't worry about the music that's on it, but some of my personal stuff and my older pictures are on it.]

Other than that, not much else to report...we've been having weird winter weather as of late so we haven't been outside much lately, and A has been busy with Day Job stuff so it's been kind of unexciting here. I still need to work on nailing down a decent exercise/yoga regimen, but that shouldn't be too hard to do. And hopefully the weather won't misbehave too much in the coming months!


Hope everyone has a lovely week!

I feel like my writing process is in transition again. Maybe it's because I'm pretty much 90% Editor Brain at the moment, focusing on the Diwa and Kaffi rewrite. [It could also be that the Spring Cleaning bug bit me pretty damn hard this year, but that's another post.] Usually when this happens, I'll still have a serious itch to get some new writing done on the side, even if it's just exercise. But lately that itch is nowhere to be seen. Not entirely unsettling, as I've had this happen before, and I'm not worried that my Writing Chops have deserted me...just that it feels weird to feel this and not worry about it.

I think one of the shifts in the process might be that I feel like I've done enough of scheduling. Now, scheduling is never a bad thing, especially for someone like me who doesn't always remember when an event is coming up (or a vacation, for that matter), but that's what my regular monthly calendar is for. I'm talking about what I call strict-scheduling -- assigning myself a specific time or a certain project for a particular evening, for instance. This is my whiteboard calendar, pretty much. It's something I've been depending on for quite a few years now, and I put it there to ensure that I'm working every day.

Now, I'm not so sure I need it anymore. I needed it in the past when I was having trouble getting myself back on track after a long dry spell. I needed it when I was updating my blogs. I needed it as a reminder for specific projects. It was something I'd been using for years to inspire me to get working.

I think I've gotten past the needing it at this point. It's served its purpose quite some time ago and now it's feeling like a bit of a hindrance. It's no longer inspiring and feels more like a dreaded assignment.  So I've just gone and cleared it -- wiped all the scheduled items on there. It's a normal calendar now. If I'm going to use it, I think I'll use it for reminding myself of long-term deadlines and convention reminders.

Will I come back to use it again? Most likely, but I'm not going to worry about it.

As long as I remember to keep working, that's all that really matters.

I really need to do something about my Twitter feed.  It feels like lately it's been seeing the worst of me, and vice versa.  This means two things: 
I should probably do a rigorous cleaning of my follows, expand my mute list, and be a little more positive on there myself.  Which led me to the idea I had earlier this morning: to try to go a month tweeting nothing but positive things.  I don't mean just posting pithy inspirational tweets or retweeting cat pictures -- although there's nowt wrong with the latter, of course!  But I'd like to be more actively positive, this way I'll get myself out of that reactionary rut I've found myself in.

I don't want to ragequit social media, for multiple reasons: I'd be losing touch with my friends, and I'd be losing a viable avenue for publicity of my books.  Plus, it would feel like the jocks and the popular kids won and I'll be the nerd crawling back in his hole and feeling sorry for myself.  I did that route as a teenager, I'm too old for that shit now.

ANYWAY.  I'm curious to see if I can pull off this positivity thing.  We shall see!

In other news, I've also been thinking about bulking up my whiteboard schedule again.  It's fine now, but I think I need to push my boundaries once more.  Assign myself little exercises to expand my knowledge and expertise.  Drawing in a different style.  Recording the little riffs I've come up with and writing songs around them.  Get out of the 'safe' guitar chords and learn new, more complex ones.  Post here more often!  I know this is something I usually think about at the end of the year as my form of New Year's resolutions, but why not start now?

I'm curious to see where this will lead.  Last time this happened, I came up with a few new novel ideas, one of which I'm close to finishing! :)

Woo! The new year is here! A. and I had a quiet NYE, staying in and having a few drinks while watching multiple episodes of The Avengers (the show gets more ridiculous and hilarious the more I watch it). I may have also done a bit of TPoM editing as well. We were both in bed by 10 and did our usual bit of bedtime reading until we finally passed out around eleven. We were of course woken back up an hour later by the city's fireworks (both the official ones on the Embarcadero and the countless illegal ones in the neighborhood) and a few bros on the roof woohoo-ing. Hello 2016! Now shut up and let us sleep. We're old. :p

Yesterday we went for a long walk around the neighborhood, as it was a gorgeous day for it...not a cloud in the sky. We walked up Lake to about 4th Avenue, cut over to Clement, and stopped for lunch at Koja, a relatively new restaurant of fusion Korean-Japanese cuisine. We'd heard great reviews, and were not let down. Their umami fries (waffle-cut and drenched with pulled pork, coconut milk, sriracha, and onions) were amazing! Definitely a place to hit again. After that, we headed over to Green Apple Books, where I found a used copy of the new Greil Marcus book I've been looking for (he's my favorite music writer) and the new Maile Meloy YA book, which I didn't know was out. The rest of the day was spent about the house. I may have spent New Year's Day doing boring errands such as laundry and doing a bit of cleanup in Spare Oom. We also watched the classic movie Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. That movie was so much more fun than I remembered it being!

But! I also spent it doing a lot of writing-related things as well. January 1st is always when I update the writing schedule whiteboard above my desk, so I thought about what I wanted to put up there. Two of my longterm projects (Books 2 and 3 in the trilogy) will finally be finished and released out into the wild later this year, so I chose to leave them off. Instead I focused on newer projects: the Walk in Silence book, hitting daily practice words, and maintaining a schedule for my two WordPress blogs. [After WiS is released, my next focus will be on the new Mendaihu Universe novel (and possible side stories).] I purposely left the weekends open for the time being, as I was planning on using those as either days off or project catch-up. And of course post here at the LJ.

After updating the whiteboard, I made good on it: I wrote 900 practice words, updated my personal journal, wrote a few WiS pages, and updated the WiS blog. Once I got into the rhythm, I just kept going with it. I even had time at the end to sit back and goof off a bit at the end of the evening. Yay!

Looking forward to this year...it's going to be busy, but in an extremely good way. :)

So how does my newfangled whiteboard schedule look at this time? Definitely a few rough patches remaining, but other than that it's working out just peachy.

I've been hitting my daily words consistently since Day One, but over the last few days I've fallen into the trap of doing those words after dinner, which is cutting into my actual writing session time. This is a problem I've had for some time, especially since I *want* to be hitting those daily words plus my regular work; if it cuts into my session time, that's less work I actually get done. Recommendation: do what I did in the first few days, sneaking those daily words in throughout the day and getting them done well before 4pm. That seemed to work out just fine. I'm well aware there may be work days where that won't be able to happen, but I can adjust when and where necessary.

The WordPress entries have been consistent so far, and I'd like to think that's because I'm actually starting them a few days early, well before the due date. That's part of the whole whiteboard project this time out--I'm trying to wean myself off the old school habit of doing my homework at the last minute and get it all done early. I have a Welcome to Bridgetown post due on Sunday, so I'll most likely be starting up something today so I have it ready for finishing, editing and posting then.

Monday's 'storyboarding' day worked out pretty well--I let my mind wander and come up with some new angles on the Mendaihu Universe that may be worth looking into. This has also leaked into my daily words, so all told I'm happy that the well has not in fact run dry, it was merely dormant.

Everything else has worked out pretty well so far, though of course I am being super hard on myself to get something of worth out of all this. I've been playing my guitars and trying a few different things, but no recording so far. I've drawn a few preliminary visual storyboards for a personal project (more on that sometime down the line) but they're pretty much remaining very basic pencil tests. I've gotten a good amount of word count on the Beatles book revision, but it still seems quite rough. Point being, it does feel like I'm flailing and getting nowhere...but that's just it: it's only nine days in. I'm just starting out here, and I've got to be a bit more patient.

Onward and upward!