Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Defeated, or at best, Victory Postponed

Less than a week into National Novel Writing Month, I decided to shelve my novel.

Why?

Simply put, I have too many things going on in terms of my writing that adding another project isn't going to help me in the slightest. So I'm going to go back to focusing on editing the novels I've got that are still in the words, push myself to actually get something either published or polished enough to start investigating the traditional publishing path next year.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Migraines Suck

I have a love-hate relationship with caffeine. To the level that it feels like I should be talking about a different drug. If I'm drinking coffee, on caffeine, it helps me focus (at least a little). And it's become a relaxing habit, a part of the ritual that's hard to recapture in a way that feels right.

And it's really hard to keep on the ride. I can slip and fall off so easily. If I go a day without drinking a cup of coffee, sometime the next day I'll be hit by a migraine so hard that I feel like throwing up. I have thrown up at least once. That was my Monday. I thought because I'd felt okay for most of the day, I was okay, inside the window.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Nano Saturday 1

You'll notice I haven't posted in a few days...

There are a couple of reasons for that. Thursday and Friday I didn't write. Thursday I just let life catch hold of me in the wrong way, had to hit the grocery store and just ended up too tired to write by the time I got home.

Friday? I have better reasons for not getting time to write Friday. Not ones that are going to let me finish NaNo. It was a date night, one that I'd planned. There's an old industrial building a few blocks away from me that has a truly staggering number of artist's studios inside, and on the first Friday of every month, they have an open house. It made for a really awesome evening, wandering from studio to studio and talking to the various artists.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

NaNoWriMo, take... Who knows at this point?

So it's the start of November, and once again National Novel Writing Month is upon us.

I've attempted the sprint that is asked for in this before. And I'm doing so again. This time I'm playing with an idea that's been percolating in my head for a while.

"What if Aladdin of the Lamp didn't use magic to short-cut?"

Because, no matter where you look, the original myth or the mouse's, he lies and deceives to get what he wants. That's more than a little skeevy if you think about it. That doesn't seem the behavior of a "Diamond in the Rough." That's a con-man. Which there are plenty of interesting stories about con-men, though the best ones are usually where they end up being too invested in the person they're trying to be that they change. But Aladdin can't exactly do that. His lie is too outside of how and what he can be.

What if he asks for a chance? Not "Make me royal." but "Let me prove I'm worthy." So the idea's been filed in my head under the working title of Proving Worth. And I'm going to try and sprint through it this November. In that, I'll be going back to what I did when I first started blogging: daily words counts.

And if people are watching, I might end up posting the first draft as I go. But no promises.

And the first day's result? 1,286 words. It's not quite the 1.7k I'll need daily to make it across the finish line, but I managed to slip into the story without fighting the Blank Page for too long.

Let's see what tomorrow brings, shall we?

Monday, October 23, 2017

A Place with no History

Saturday night, I went to go see the opening night of the play "The Agitators." If you live in Rochester, please come see this play. If you don't live in Rochester, either consider making the trip or look into getting a local theatre company put on a production of the play.

It was an amazing production about the lives of Fredrick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, who both have roots here in Rochester. During the play, a thought struck me. Actually, it struck me during the prologue discussion, when the presenter talked about how native Rochesterians were probably aware of the fact that these two civil rights icons were friends. Rochester has a history and depth to it that the place I grew up doesn't have.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Bundle of Worries

Yesterday, my brother went to the hospital, with a blood sugar level over 700.

I'll give you a second to Google that, but holy fuck is it not good.

It worrying, he's my little brother; two years younger than I am. And this happens. In addition to his appendix almost bursting just over a year ago. I worry about his health.

And I worry about mine. I'm overweight, and it's always been such a freaking struggle to fight it. And It's something that I need to keep going with, if I want to live any kind of long life.

Friday, September 1, 2017

An August Retrospective

So, it turns out that if I have a writing class that runs the same day I tend to write these weekly updates, it throws my whole schedule for writing them wildly out of whack.

Something to think about and fix in the future.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

This was not the crash I expected

Today was good, but I didn't get nearly as much accomplished today as I did yesterday. I did get a decent amount of editing done, but I'm nowhere near where I wanted to be with physical activity.

And it's not that I didn't have the energy today. It's that I'm still trying to adjust to my new sandals. I strapped myself into them wrong before I left to meet a friend for lunch, and ended up with a line blister across my big toe.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Monday. Accomplished

Today was supposed to be my set-up day for the week. Yesterday I did my grocery shopping and took care of preparing my breakfasts for the week, a spicy egg salad on lettuce. That only left me with this morning to take care of the big cook that I tend to do each week, where I prep a week's worth of dinner from a single pressure cooker batch.

That ended up taking me longer than I had expected, so I didn't leave the house until almost 11 am. I made up for my late start by putting in two solid hours on my bike. By the end of that ride, I'd burned enough calories that reaching my target burn for this week (at least 4k calories a day) was dead easy.

Mind you, it also left me dead tired for a couple of hours, but I expected that. Once I recovered, I got to work on some non-paying writing. I got started with writing when I was doing recaps for a role-playing game with friends several years ago, and it's still a thing I like doing because it helps me to push certain muscles in terms of my writing.

Plus, it can be fairly easy to pump out a massive number of words. I wrote 3,000 words this evening.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Friday, July 21, 2017

Rained Out Reflections

One big thing this past weekend, a movie in the park. And it starts raining just as the movie's about to kick up, and we have to get going. How it goes sometimes.

Saturday was interesting. A print shop I used to work at six years ago had closed down shortly after I'd moved on to my current job, and the building had been sold. I'd seen that they were renovating the building, but hadn't been inside since they completed it. Finally made the time for it this weekend with a short ride down there, since one of the bike shops had relocated into the building.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Wandering the Streets, in Search of Art and Chicken

I'm kind of dreading writing this post, because I feel like I haven't been that productive.

Actually, I haven't been. Haven't written since the last time I put one of these posts together. I think some of it is I've been trying to step out of a routine that I'd trained into my head for two years while I was trying to get back on track.

It was not a great recipe for success. So I'm back to my favorite coffee shop, a cold-brew cup in front of me while I look at the past week to remind myself about the non-writer aspects of my life.

That has been a bit more fun.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

After the Explosions

I hope everyone enjoyed their Independence Day celebrations. For me, it wasn't the most productive day in the world (still working on getting back into the swing on that), but it was fun. Heck, this entire post could pretty much be me talking about the holiday weekend, since that's been the majority of the time that's passed since I last checked in.


Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Weekly Check-in

Festival season is starting to swing into full steam here in Rochester, and that means that it's time for free concerts right across the street from me and art shows.

It also means that my usual haunt is far too crowded for a couple of weeks, so I'm trying to adjust to writing in my own apartment.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Care and Feeding of your Rabbit (and the Soul)

I rent, which means that my ability to choose what kind of furry creature is part of my life are limited.

If I had more ability to choose, I would have a dog. A mid-size mutt somewhere between a lab and a golden retriever. Or what sparked my soul when I went to the local humane society to adopt (always adopt, if you can).

But so few apartments allow you to have a dog, most prefer small animals.

So I've got a rabbit.

Monday, May 8, 2017

Why Write?

Notes from the editor's desk: Going to try working back up to a normal schedule and getting at least one post a week up as I work to get things back on track.

There are people who've spent their entire lives knowing that they wanted to write, have a novel or short stories from when they were a teenager stuck in a drawer somewhere. People who go to school for an MFA in literature.

I envy them in a way.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

How quickly things explode

Or: A counterpoint to the post exactly before this one.

Sometimes life just throws itself at you with only giving you a little bit of warning. The last month+? I had a spot of warning; I knew that my girlfriend was going to go through major, life-saving surgery. I didn't fully expect all the curveballs that got thrown at me that same week.

Friday, February 3, 2017

A new kind of stability

It's been two and a half months since I've started at my new job. That, holidays, and other general worries had been tagging and dragging me slow.

But I'm getting back on track. The past two weeks I've gotten back to writing, even if sometimes I'm struggling to get up and moving in time. I'm trying to find a rhythm in a new ritual: getting up and writing in the morning before I catch the bus to work.

It's got a couple of benefits, more than just actually adding writing back into my life again. It's getting me up and moving in the morning, for something other than just getting to work. That helps. It's one of the things that's a little easier to make it up in the morning, knowing that there's coffee and breakfast waiting for me before my commute in the mornings.

In a lot of ways, my life has settled into a new kind of stability. Hopefully when winter releases it erratic grip on my city I'll be back to cycling everywhere. That will free up more time in my mornings, it takes much more time to get to work when I'm riding the bus then it does if I'm biking.