Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I very rarely work on Sundays, and when I do it's usually because our head bookkeeper took the day off and I'm pretty much the only one to take his place. Today was such a case, meaning my weekend will be tomorrow and Tuesday instead. Thankfully the last few post-Valentines shifts have been extremely laid back and uneventful (and fully-staffed!) to the point where I could do what needs doing, take my own time doing it, and not have to worry about doing five other equally important things at the same time.

Unfortunately I haven't quite been on top of my writing schedule these last couple of weeks. Some of it is due to my work schedule, but a lot of it still boils down to distraction. I'm definitely on track for the Trilogy Remaster work, but I feel I could better utilize my time elsewhere as well. I'd rather not keep Theadia sitting there doing nothing. So again -- I need to readjust my time. I'll admit it didn't help that I had that neck pain followed immediately by a week's worth of head cold, but now that I've gotten past both I think I'm more than able to do so.

So what am I doing the next couple of days, aside from the writing? Not much other than laundry and relaxing. After six straight days of the Day Job I need the break!

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.

Wow, that weekend was much too short. Then again, we had all sorts of things going on... Saturday was about going to see the Benedict Cumberbatch eat up the scenery in the National Theatre's production of Hamlet at the Kabuki, making a mad dash* down to the Mission thereafter to say hi to kateelliott at Borderlands. Sunday was shopping and laundry day (the old washing machine in our building is still kaput, so I've been hoofing it over to the laundromat down the street). Granted, I did get a bit of TPoM editing done, and I even got a page or so of longhand work done for WiS as well. I'm getting better at the time management again.

Speaking of writing, the new whiteboard schedule is working out quite nicely. Since the TPoM work is done at night, I don't need to worry too much about that. It's the other bits, the blogs and the 750, that I've needed to make sure I hit. My trick to make sure I do them has been simple: bring up the webpages and keep them open as tabs, so I can't help but see them. And once I'm able to get to them, I close the Twitter tab and jump right in. No opening Twitter back up until I'm done. And so far, that's worked pretty well for me!

As for WiS, even though I've given myself the full weekend to work on that project, I think I need more time on it. That'll be a bit tricky, but I think I might have found a spot for it. I have two fifteen-minute breaks during the day apart from my half-hour lunch, and during the morning break I've been writing in my daily personal journal. The afternoon break has been empty with not much happening, so I think that would be a great place for it. We'll see how it works out.

Meanwhile, back to the Day Job. Woohoo! :p



* Said mad dash included leaving the Japantown parking lot and getting stuck behind a car moseying along at walking speed up Post and taking half a block to change lanes; turning at Gough and a few minutes later getting stuck mid-intersection behind another car with an old lady and her daughter yapping away and not paying attention to the car-and-a-half length they're keeping between them and the car in front of them; making it to Mission only to have to weave around multiple illegally double-parked cars and a major fleet of parked MUNI buses; not being able to turn at the street I needed due to PG&E maintenance; and finally going around the block and turning at the street to get to the parking garage...only to be stopped mere yards from the garage entrance by an extremely ancient man with a walker cane jaywalking across the street at snail speed. I was in tears laughing at that point, it was so comedic.

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!

The official return of Jonc' Whiteboard Writing Schedule worked out pretty well for September, all things considered. The output was a little lower than I wanted it to be, but on the other hand I am using the non-project exercises to a good extent. The numbers below give me a good idea where my strength is and where I need to adjust.

( Numbers and Plans below this here cut )

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.

This past Sunday I started up the beginning of my 80s college rock book Walk In Silence AGAIN, and I think this opening's the winner. I'd been toying around with how I was going to write this book for a good couple of months, debating: was it going to be a memoir? A history? A bit of both? Would I reach out to other listeners, deejays, and musicians like I'd originally planned? And if so, what part would they play? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I didn't want to write was a lifeless history, nor did I want to write about a scene I wasn't a part of (I only obsessed about the music, not the scene or the fashion. Well, not much, anyway).

I came to the conclusion that I could write it like I'm doing with the Blogging the Beatles series on my WordPress blog. To wit, I've been handling that project by way of going through the band's discography chronologically, giving a brief history of the song, and exploring my reaction (and others', historically) to the song and/or the album. One of the most pleasant results of doing this is that I'm hearing each song in a new and sometimes unexpected way. In effect, it's both a refresher on the music's history as well as a personal study of it.

Over the last few weeks I'd debated if that could be a feasible route for Walk in Silence, and the more I thought about it, I realized that was how I'd intended it to be in the first place. My personal experience with college radio in the 80s was a solitary one, for the most part--I certainly shared my obsession and my purchases with my closest friends, but most of the time was spent listening to the music and letting it affect me in a personal way. I can't say it was the same for everyone else out there, but I'd like to think that this would be the viewpoint for others out there, especially those in the northeast US college area who may not have gone to the shows or followed the fashion and the mindset, but certainly fell in love with the music and had it affect them in some way. I'm thinking that this book, at least in its first draft, will be mostly a solitary work. I may end up reaching out to others for input and filling in the blanks.

So now that I have that cleared up, I think I'll have much better time of writing this on the weekends. I specifically have Sundays open for this project, so I think from here on in, I'll get some serious word count done on it.

The whiteboard calendar makes a return after a half-year hiatus with a spankin' new writing schedule for 2013. I played around with this one this morning with the aim of the year being both fun and creative, as well as productive.

The first thing you probably noticed in the picture is how frequent the acronym ADOS pops up--it's there on every weekday. The main focus and goal this year is to finish this revision of A Division of Souls and prep it for submission sometime in Q3, thus most of my writing time will be dedicated to that. Once that goal is achieved, that acronym will change to TPOM (The Persistence of Memories, aka Book 2). I purposely didn't put it on the weekends in order to keep time available for other things. That's not to say I won't use the occasional weekend to work on it, just that it's not scheduled.

We also have the return of poetry and photography to the schedule. These were placed in the middle of the week, as they don't take up too much time and are a good distraction to the regular work schedule. The photography will show up on the Tumblr site, but the poetry will most likely stay offline, at least for now.

We also have Walk in Silence popping up on Sundays--this is the same as previous, as that worked out really well for me. This way I can spend a good long afternoon/evening working on it while listening to music. I may of course work on it during the week if time permits.

You may also notice that Saturday has "Art", and both weekend days say "Music." I'm really looking forward to this, actually. Saturdays I'll dedicate a bit of time to learning how to master my new Wacom tablet, not to mention getting back into the groove of drawing. I also want to spend a bit of time practicing my music. It's high time to pick up the guitars again, not to mention learn how to play with my new synth. I put these both on the weekend because I want to have fun! These two activities are things I've always loved doing, yet I never seem to give myself any time for them.


I also mapped out some of my goals and intentions this year, which aren't on the whiteboard but are on my mind nonetheless. There's a lot of personal and creative things going on in 2013 that I'm looking forward to. This year's mantra is "positivity"--time to focus on the things in my life that bring me peace rather than things that set my blood boiling and/or waste my time. This means creativity, community, learning, and forward motion. It might be a bit busy this year, but as said, the main aim is to have fun, be creative, and be productive.

I'm definitely looking forward to all of it.