Drunken Owls and Other Delights

WHOOF. A and I are back at home, kicking back and watching an old 2nd Doctor serial ("Fury from the Deep", which they recreated via animation) after walking about five miles today. We hoofed it up to one of our favorite local coffee shops on 8th Ave and then visited the botanical garden in GGP. After a lunch at the Republic, we hoofed it back home and now we are TIRED. Not much else planned for this weekend other than more relaxation and a run to the farmer's market tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it's been a VERY productive week in Spare Oom. I did a little math and confirmed that I'd written a bit over 16,000 words over the three novel projects -- in addition to words for four blog posts, five poem fragments, and my daily morning journal. Quite happy about all of that, really! I also uploaded several pictures to Shutterstock -- more on that in a minute -- for another side project I'm working on. This was kind of an experiment to see how much I could put on my daily work docket and still be able to handle it all without feeling overwhelmed. It was also an exercise in learning better ways to fight off distraction. Either way, I'm very happy that it's working so far, and I'm looking forward to keeping this up.

Anyhoo, about the Shutterstock thing: I recently started up a contributor account so I can upload my shots for stock (y'know, maybe make some extra pocket change if need be). I'd done a trial run with nine pictures earlier and four were accepted, but when I did a much bigger run of 37 pictures, ALL of them were rejected. Which at first pissed me off, as some of the reasons for rejection seemed extremely subjective and arbitrary -- sometimes it said the shot was blurry when it wasn't, or that it had light bleed when it didn't, and in one case stating that it was a copy of a picture I'd already uploaded (which it wasn't). I let my stew with that for a while until I finally did a bit of internet research and found that I was definitely not the only contributor to have that issue recently. In fact, some of those people said when they reuploaded the pictures at a later time they were accepted. So yeah, it was a bit of a punch to the confidence at first but I got over it. Onward and upward, yeah?

Okay, yes. What day is it? Tuesday? New album release day? Got it. Perhaps I shall do some mp3 shopping after I post this.

This past weekend I finally treated myself to having an actual weekend! That is, where I didn't head back into Spare Oom to work on stuff. Sure, I did a wee bit of TPoB revision, but other than that, it was a matter of just enjoying the day. Saturday we headed over to the de Young to check out the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit (Emm: "Come on, Georgia. You're not fooling anyone, you know."), as well as a neat mini-exhibit of photography and artwork based on the building of the Bay Bridge. They just opened another exhibit of abstract expressionism, but that'll be around for a bit longer so we'll check that out at a later time.

After the museum we headed over to Green Apple Books on Clement (who got a sweet write-up in Publisher's Weekly this past issue due to them winning PW's Best Indie Bookstore), where we spent mumbletymumble dollars on books for California Bookstore Day, including a really cool signed lithograph from Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret--a book, I should add, that I discovered in that very store. [Seriously, go buy the book. It's absolutely lovely, and well worthy of its Caldecott.] I'm so grateful we have such an excellent bookstore in our neighborhood...if any of you decide to come to San Francisco, let us know and we'll bring you there--you won't be let down, but you may leave with significantly less money in your pocket!

Also, Emm and I have started watching The Story of Film: An Odyssey on Netflix streaming the last few days. It's a phenomenal 15-part documentary by Irish film writer Mark Cousins, well worth checking out. In a way it feels like a sped-up overview of my years at Emerson as a film student, only better--it doesn't just hit on American or even UK cinema, but touches upon film in other countries--China, India, Brazil, Japan, and so on. Each episode is right about an hour long, so if you're into this sort of thing and like geeking out over creative filmmaking, it's well worth the time.

[Start Old Man Complaint Segment] In other news, my sciatica seems to have disappeared for the most part. A few muscles are a little sore for some reason, but other than that I'm no longer hobbling around like an ancient old man. Still taking it slower than usual, though, because I know it sneaks back at the most inopportune moments, especially when I think it's healed. [/End Old Man Complaint Segment]

And WRITING! Yay, I am full-blown WRITING again! Yes, I'm still working on the last couple dozen chapters of the TPoB revision on my tablet, but this past Tuesday I put my foot down and put Walk in Silence on the front burner. Over the past week I've been fashioning out a detailed outline of twenty or so chapters with all the points I want to hit. This is especially working out well, as a lot of this part of the book has been sort-of written already in the form of various LJ blog entries over the years. I'm doing it this way because in reading those blog entries, I keep finding moments I'd wanted to add to the entry after it's been posted, and building up this outline will assist to that. The music side of the book will come next, in which I'll add specific songs/albums/bands that I want to talk about and insert them almost-chronologically. [I say "almost" because the book actually starts in 1986, jumps back in time, and then moves forward again in a linear fashion.] I've hit a few thousand words over the course of the last week, which is small beans so far, but once I actually get the text going, the word count should rise accordingly.

Can you tell I'm really looking forward to writing this book? :D

I'm still not happy with my writing output at this point. And I know it's my own damn fault. I've been letting myself get distracted again. I know exactly why I'm doing it, and I've already talked about it here, so I won't repeat myself.

So...time to pull out the Big Guns again--the Schedule.

( The Schedule under this here cut to save space )


Also:

I love it when I find the perfect book completely by accident.

emmalyon and I went to Green Apple yesterday for our usual book shopping, and as I walked past the PC/Computer/HTML how-to section, a book caught my eye: Scott McNulty's Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read. This is EXACTLY what I need to get the WP site up and running correctly. This is one of the weekend projects I'd need to work on initially, just to make sure I have it up and running okay. Once I have the technical side down, then I'll be able to blog to my heart's content. I'll let you know when that's up and running.

Getting 463 words over an hour or so (again, distracted by football :D ) isn't too bad...but considering that I just finished off Chapter 35 and MAN DOES IT KICK ASS, I'm happy with it. :)

648 words in 45 minutes. I can live with that. I'd like to do more, but I've got to go to bed soon. :)

I just wrote 1499 NEW WORDS for The Process of Belief in the span of an hour and a half.

How the hell did THAT happen?!?? O_O

CFMWH Outline
--1103 words total as of 4:23pm PT
--Chapter 6 ("Work") outline DONE!
--Chapter 7 ("Safe") outline DONE!
--Chapter 8 (TBA) started

To Be Done
--read a few ADoS chapters
--read latest Writer's Digest that's staring at me on my desk
--maybe do political post (or start it)
--read/work on LLB2 outline