Drunken Owls and Other Delights

The weather's been kind of odd here in the Bay Area as of late, kind of warm but not? It's pretty much clear skies out there right now, and it was cool but pleasant when we walked up to the bank earlier today.  But given that Spare Oom faces north and thus doesn't get any sun at any point in the day, it's one of the coolest rooms in the apartment.  I had the window open briefly to get some fresh air in, but had to close it as my fingers had started feeling numb from the cold!

Anyhoo...I've been keeping myself busy for most of the week while A was away on her mini-vacation.  I've been continuing on my run of dealing with small errands and Stuff I've Been Putting Off in lieu of spending all that time writing and whatnot.  I'm okay with that, considering that I'm not exactly wasting time doing frivolous things.  Just getting things cleaned up, put in order, and so on.  I'll most likely keep up with that for the rest of the month, just so I have a shorter to-do list come January. 

So yes...as a matter of fact I do have a few ideas of what I want to do with 2018.  I suppose the phrase du jour for me is 'upping my game'.  Not so much with the writing process -- I think I'm FINALLY at a level I'm happy with and can consider professional -- but with the business end of things.  It's something that kind of fell by the wayside in '17 due to writing and editing priorities, so that will take a much higher priority come the new year.  Still not entirely sure how I'm going to approach it, but I'll definitely be more proactive about it.  As A once said, the "I've tried nothing and it doesn't work" is not being proactive.  So yeah...that's another reason I'll be kind of low-key about writing projects until the new year, so I can get a head start on this stuff.

Looking forward to a busy, productive, and proactive 2018. :)

I'm thinking of taking another internet hiatus for a little while.

This time it's not because of the news or irritations with social media or needing to disconnect from the world for a while to get my head straight again. I'm doing just fine on that end of things.

No, this time it's because I need to make some concrete plans. Important plans. Plans that will change my writing career, hopefully for the better.

I've got two books out in the wild that are doing jack. They're out in a void, doing absolutely squat. Why? Well, I have only myself to blame. I just put them out there, gave them a bit of a nudge, but that's it. I haven't bothered to sell them up since. Why? Hell if I know. Could be that the Day Job has kept me busy (or that I've been using it as an excuse not to spend my free time on selling the books). Could be that I'm feeling a bit of fatigue because this third book has been such a f**king bear to edit and I just want to move onto something new already. Could be a case of the Don't Wanna's, or a case of feeling like I'm a hack.

I've also got two very big publishing-related plans that I'd like to initiate, and keeping them in my head and saying 'this would be a neat idea' isn't going to make them a reality.

In short, I need a hiatus, because I need to do one hell of a big refocus on being a writer.

I can't let these plans stay on the sidelines any longer.


Will that mean I won't be posting here or elsewhere? Not exactly. I'll still be posting and tweeting now and again. It just won't be high up on my priorities, at least for now. I'll be finishing up the Walk in Silence posts over at WIS because I'm almost done. Welcome to Bridgetown will go on hiatus because it needs a retooling. I'll still be here at LJ on the weekends.

But it's time to make some changes.

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. :)

It's Saturday morning and we're on our second pot of coffee while A. catches up on some Day Job work and I keep myself busy with things and stuff. Tonight we'll be heading to the Symphony again (another of $15 a ticket deal, this time featuring Thomas Adés and Dawn Upshaw). Tomorrow is...up in the air. A. may need to do a bit more Day Jobbery stuff, and if I've nothing better to do, I'll once again use that day as Errand Day. Such excitement, very wow. :)

Last night was spent writing query letters to potential agents to get A Division of Souls out and about! This will be attempt numbers 2 and 3 for 2015, as one of my primary aims for this year is to find a home for the Bridgetown Trilogy. [This does include indie publishing if it comes to it.] And speaking of the Mendaihu Universe, I will freely admit that my writer brain is absolutely clamoring to get another MU story up and running. Even as I'm attempting to work on Walk in Silence and Blogging the Beatles, the ache to return to that universe and start writing more stories within it has been nagging at me for quite a few years now.

It all boils down to tricking my mind.

On the one hand, while I can easily multitask, I don't always find multitasking an entirely positive thing to do. It comes from my Day Job: I hate having to stop in the middle of one method of problem solving so I can jump to another issue that has risen to Threat Level OMGWTFONOES. That is due to the fact that many clients have differently tweaked setups, so what might be logical for Client A may be highly illogical for Client B. I waste time and energy adjusting myself to a different situation which, in my mind, should be similar but isn't.

On the other hand, with my creative endeavors, I can switch easily from one to another without a problem. I can do my daily words, do some drawing or squeeze in a blog post, and work on my main project at the end of the day, with little frustration and not that much time in between.

I realized this was due to the number of things I was working on, and which kind of thought process I was using. I've a good analytical brain which helps me in manuscript revision and plotting, but gets rather annoyed when I have to stop on a dime and restart in a different direction. Or in a different light...I'm happy when I'm in charge of my thought process.

My point being, it's a matter of tricking my mind into switching from one writing project to another. This is why I have the whiteboard; it's a deadline schedule to make sure my multiple projects are getting done in a reasonable time frame. And from my point of view, I should have the time to balance WiS, BtB and the possible new MU story.

Now? It's a matter of getting and staying off the damned internet and DOING them.

I blame the cats, I tell you. Evil, cute furry things!

It's Sunday afternoon, so here I am in Spare Oom, cleaning out the week's emails while listening to Garrison Keillor. We'll be going to see him and his gang again this January along with my in-laws. I'll try not to schedule a symphony and lose my umbrella this time out.

This week's schedule has been weird to the point where I'd forgotten what day it was more than once. I had jury duty this week and had to go in during the afternoon on Monday (in which I shoehorned a few hours of work that morning before heading out). I went in again on Wednesday for jury selection, in which I was let go midmorning, and chose to use the rest of the day for errands and contemplation, including getting a smog check done on the car and avoiding the rainfall whenever possible. The day and a half off, and my sense of time went all out of whack!

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm choosing to unplug myself from social media for a bit to clear my head. More than a few times I was catching myself refreshing my overburdened Twitter feed for updates and dropping by various other sites, and I started to realize I don't want to be that kind of person. It's a waste of time that could be better used with creative endeavors that I keep "wanting to do" and "never have enough time for". Yes, I'm calling myself out for time management whingeing. Time to shut up and make good on it.

First off was the trimming of the Twitter feed--at last check I noticed I was following 500+ users, and I really don't need to follow THAT many. A lot of users who haven't updated in months, some I chose to follow but in reality never read, and so on. Time to thin it out. I got rid of 100+ so far, and may drop a few more. I read it via the website and rarely if ever use lists (read: can't be bothered to take the extra steps to do so, and I find I really don't like the multifeed setup of Janetter), and it's now much easier to read without all the extraneous stuff I know I've been skipping.

And really, do I need to waste my time visiting the same random websites on a daily basis?


So about this creative endeavor thing.

Well. A bit of a shake-up there. Two Thousand has come to a stop and may be so indefinitely, or at least until I decide to rethink it. It's been bothering me for a while now--I thought it might have been my lack of concrete outline, but I came to realize it was more than that...MUCH more than that. To wit: one-note secondary characters that are boring as hell, scenes that go nowhere other than the characters saying "I don't know what I want to do" in various ways, and a budding relationship that's interesting in idea but quite uninteresting in plot. But the worst part? It suddenly dawned on me, to my extreme distaste: I'm writing a pathetic Mary-Sue story, aren't I? [I'm not bothering to use gendered "Gary-Stu" here, as I'm sure you get my gist.] I was trying to write what I wished happened in 1994 when I lived in Boston, and in turn it sounds like a whiny, one-note story of characters that sit there smoking at a park bench and contemplating just how much life sucks in the sucktastic economy of the mid-90s.

And this is decidedly NOT what I want to write. I don't want to waste my time writing crap that's not going to sell or be interesting to anyone else. Or more to the point--I know instinctively that Two Thousand was not going to be worth continuing in the direction I was going in, so I stopped while I was ahead. Thankfully it was only about two and a half months' worth of work, so I don't feel I wasted my time. I'm considering it fiction practice.

So what now?

First off, I'm switching the daily project back to Walk in Silence for the time being. I'm going to work on that one until I have a more concrete idea of what major project I'll work on next. I've a few plans there, but I won't go into details just yet. Besides, I'm pretty far ahead with WiS and have a solid outline for that one, so the turnaround should be rather quick.

Second of all, I'm going to shut up about the whiteboard schedule. As in, Stop talking about it and just f**king DO it already. Daily 750 Words, music playing, poetry, WordPress posts, art and photography, and whatever main project I'm on. Time to STFU about it already.


Okay...three, two, one, let's jam.

Yay vacation! Currently enjoying my last week of days off before I jump back into the excitement of bank work for the rest of the year. We had no real travel plans this time out and decided to take a quick flight (just under 2 hours) to sunny rainy Portland OR for a few days. We had no real plans other than to drive around, see the sights, and spend way too much money at Powell's City of Books. Much fun was had, many pictures were taken, and we saw quite a lot of fun things. I've come to the conclusion that Portland very much has the same "college town" feel as Boston, maybe with a bit of a Pioneer Valley feel for flavor. We also drove up Route 84 to the start of the Columbia Gorge, which is absolutely lovely (and would have been more so if it hadn't been raining).

So what are we doing for the rest of our vacation? Not much of anything, really. Go see a movie, do a bit of walking, dread heading back to work on Monday. The usual. :)

I'm a few days behind on Inktober due to being busy during vacation, as well as being superlazy yesterday, so that means I'll have to play catch-up for the rest of the week. The fascinating part of taking part in this meme is that it's definitely reawakened my love for drawing. I've always wanted to devote more time to it but never got around to it, and the meme reminded me that I can still pull it off. In a way it's the same as my music playing--I never played all that much until I bought a few more, and now I'm noodling around on my guitars a bit every day. [Same with working on my daily 750 Words--that's been a great writing exercise for me.] I've even done a bit of shopping for art pens and found a great pack that I think I'll love using (which I bought at Powell's, no less)! I'm curious to see where this goes. Will I ever go pro with it? Probably not...but I think I'm back at the level I was at in college, and I'm really liking that feeling, and that's what matters.

In other and more pressing news, this morning I got an email from Angry Robot. They've turned down A Division of Souls, but I'm okay with that. In fact, I have to appreciate their not only giving me an update email during their business shuffling, but in this one stating one of the reasons why they turned it down. [More on that in a Welcome to Bridgetown post later.] I'm understandably bummed, but at the same time I'm relieved and excited. Someone not only read it but took the time to say something about it upon return, and that's given me food for thought. Does this mean more revision? Possibly. Does it mean weighing self-pub versus professional publishing again? Perhaps. I don't think I'll be spending nearly as much time on the trilogy as I have in the past--most of the possible revision would be cosmetic at this point--and besides, I have two (possibly three) other projects that I'm juggling at the moment that I really should not put off any longer. It'll be interesting and busy for a while longer, but I can handle it, as long as I keep myself focused.

I've a feeling 2015 is going to be quite intense for me, but in a good way.

Really, there's not much to report here in terms of creativity...I've done little except revision work for The Process of Belief, which has been taking most of my focus. Chapter 4 was good plotwise, but extremely clunky when it came to the prose, so it need a lot of tough love. The 'Townies' experiment I was working on with 750Words (I'm calling it that for lack of a better reference for now) hasn't been touched but it's still in my mind, popping up now and again.

Admittedly, part of the sparse creative output has been due to spending most of my problem-solving time pulling double duty last week. One of my coworkers that works in tandem with me on specific things was originally supposed to be out only on Thursday and Friday, but ended up calling out sick on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. And of course we had the few fires to put out. As much as I did want to dedicate some time for things other than revision, I just didn't have the mental energy to do so. I'm hoping I can turn that around in the next few days.

I've also been thinking a lot about the output on my two WordPress sites. As you can obviously tell, I haven't been updating properly. If at all. I could just chalk it up to "oh well, I've been busy with other things", but to me that always feels like a cop-out. I know I can bang out a writing article or a music article in a day...I've done it countless times before. Even if I'm truly exhausted, mentally or physically, I can't help but think I'm just letting it slide, and that's not professional. And I'm not going to get any new readers if the blogs are stagnant.

SO:

Here's the plan.

It's time to make a schedule. Not the whiteboard guide, though I will continue to use that. An honest-to-goddess schedule, with deadlines. I will make a list of articles that I want to write. I will make a list of deadlines of when these need to be written, and when they should be posted. I will put this list on a clipboard that I will hang in front of me in Spare OOm so I don't f**king IGNORE IT. In fact, I have just nailed the damn thing to the wall, eye level, right next to this monitor. And I will adhere to this schedule to the best of my abilities.

And as for non-revision creative endeavors: It's time to create a backlog of prompts. I will buy some sort of container, some sort of Tupperware type jar. Any time I actually have a random scrap of an idea--even if it's just a phrase or an image--I will throw it in that jar. I will place this jar in a place where I will not forget about it. And I will make it a point to use at least one prompt a day, either for the 750 Words, or a poem, or something else.

And as for non-writing creative endeavors: I will make it a point to do some sort of drawing, even if it's a doodle. Do something at least once a day, even if it's a five-minute sketch to get rid of my work frustration. And I will use the Wacom tablet every weekend. And by year's end, I would like to at least start with some sort of small-scale painting. [I already noodle around on my guitars on a daily basis, even for a few minutes a day, so I'm good there. Later this year I will expand on that and maybe do a bit of recording--that's not a priority.]


Yes, I know. I know I said something in my previous LJ post about not forcing it if it doesn't want to come. I know. I have a disgusting habit of giving myself easy outs. Well--let's not be too hard on myself; that was more in reference to not forcing the story when it's not there, and not about forcing creativity. For some, creativity needs to be forced. Like me. I need to nudge myself out of complacency to get things done, or else I'm futzing around with my mp3 collection and watching YouTube videos. I'm always itching to write or draw or play music, but I make excuses not to, and that's not a good thing.

More on this as it unfolds.