I mentioned that the Final Fantasy games were a big inspiration for my long-ago writing project, so here's the into to Final Fantasy VIII -- which is maybe not the strongest entry in the series, but it's the one I was playing around the time I wrote that book, and it has a lot of intriguing peculiarities to its world-building and its magic system.
I'm going to see if I can find a way to replay it, I think, just to look at that again.
I'm finally starting to dig my way out from the huge load of work that fell on my head with the big upgrade at the end of December, and we're bringing in some additional resources to deal with a Big Important Project that seemed to have run aground on some fairly intractable issues, so my stress levels have suddenly gone down...
...Which is weird. Like, on the one hand that's a good thing. Less stress! Hooray! I can function better! And then on the other hand, my whole system is like, Wait? What happened? How does this 'relaxing' business work, again? Overall, it's good. I'm just glad it didn't take any longer.
Burnout is a real thing, y'all.
Writing Projects: Currently working on the portal fantasy, which means that the Weird West and Horny Superteens projects have been somewhat neglected. (There are only so many hours in the day, and my energy has been going into, well, being stressed out.) But, I'm still making progress... and I wrote a completely random short piece the other morning that I'm going to try to get published, if I can find the right venue for it.
Also, with February doing its best impression of late April, my allergies have been acting up. At this point, I'd honestly prefer another ice storm. Some kind of winter weather, anyway. This time of year used to be pretty safe for my seasonal allergies...
I'm not going to talk about news or current events right now, because it's all so bleak and I will wear myself out with relentless rage. I'm limiting my exposure in an attempt to be informed without doom-spiraling, though part of me suspects that doom-spiraling may actually reflect an accurate evaluation of the current situation.
Anyway, I have good friends and a good family, and a kitten who is determined to eviscerate the mechanical toy bird he got for Christmas. Good to keep those moments in mind, too.
Well, it's done. I have finished the zero draft (i.e. essentially unedited opening version) of the Horny Superteens book. Is it publishable? Probably not at this stage. Is it coherent? Yes, it hangs together and I don't think there are any significant plot holes. Is the plot a satisfying arc? I really don't know, I was thinking about a lot of 90s-era comics when I was writing it, so it kind of moves from one conflict to another to a third related conflict, and finally resolves that one. Could it be a series? ...Yes, I could write at least a sequel to this one, and probably a third to round out a trilogy. Is it any good? Well, the sections I've gone back and re-read (either to double-check details or just because my brain was still kind of there brought me joy, so there's that. Do the Horny Superteens "get any"? Yes. Oh dear ye immortal gods, yes.
Frankly, the whole project has basically been keeping me sane this year, which is the primary reason that I wrote it. Now it's time to set it aside for a bit, get some perspective, and then go back and make a second pass at it -- and clean it up enough to let my trusted advisors give it a read and send me feedback.
Meanwhile, probably on Monday, I'll be starting on my next project: a young were-squirrel who's been sent to stop the local baron from taking over his village. I know what the opening looks like, and I know the tone I'm going for. This one is going to have more a fairy tale flavor to it, and it's definitely a coming-of-age story.
We'll see how it goes. I have a couple of others lined up behind it, so if I run aground I still have other options. And shifting to a different story sometimes makes the first story jealous, so there's that. Like I said, we'll just have to see.
I'm taking a break from writing -- as much as I ever do or can, anyway -- while mind and body recover from the horror that was the month of May. (No, I still don't know why May is trying to kill me, but the evidence is incontrovertible.) It probably won't affect the blog much, but my current Horny Superteens project is at a spot where, if I try to go back to it now I won't have the perspective to figure out how to wrap up the current scene -- and that's a surefire recipe for writer's block. Phooey to that, I say!
I'm currently taking a fun little writing class on developing secondary characters, which I'm using to fill in ideas for an upcoming project involving a tween were-squirrel who gets sent into the Haunted Forest to protect his village, but that's low-key and low-stress (and also, as I mentioned, fun -- I get to see what a bunch of other people are working on and what their characters look like).
So the blog may be seeing a bit more in the way of music, short bits, and dad jokes than usual, or I may be posting more of these "State of Me" bits of navel-gazing, but I'll still be posting. I may even have some more vignettes from the Horny Superteens project, as I build up to diving back in. Dunno; very much just going to play it as it comes.
Also, as an update to yesterday's post: I... may have been a little optimistic. I took it easy at work, actually got a surprising amount done -- following up on and closing out some tickets, looking at some other issues, and taking care of some last-minute requests -- but man, I slowed down during the afternoon, and after I got back home I crashed. Hard. For about three and a half hours. So apparently I'm at the stage of recuperation where my body is just like, "Okay, buddy, you're going to listen me, and when I say you're going to sleep you're going to sleep. You got that?"
This week has been, inexplicably but relentlessly, busy. Secondborn is trying to catch up last semester's Physics plus some late assignments in English -- and today he's having his STAAR test for Algebra, so that's going to keep him occupied -- and I've been trying to stay on him so this gets done and he doesn't wind up in summer school. Work has been -- for no good reason that I can see -- just one thing after another. Nothing particularly catastrophic or unpleasant, there's just a lot going on right now.
And, obviously, I've tapered off on the writing. Too much else going on; not enough energy left over; body needs sleep and lots of it.
I'm still working on the Horny Superteens project, which -- while absolutely 100% pulp -- is doing a lot to preserve my sanity; the snippets of things here are me thinking through what's happening behind the scenes, so I guess those would count as bonus content. I'm hoping to jump back into it as soon as my system resets, but apparently this week is for catching up on the real world and Getting Some Sleep.
Sleep is good. I like sleep. Sleep with long, weird dreams (that would be last night) is so damned refreshing that waking up from it always feels like a bit of a revelation.
So... I lost track of the previous dark fantasy project, as you might have guessed from the world-building stuff I've been posting here. Current project is Horny Superteens, and I'm... seven chapters in? Yeah. It's not smut, exactly, but it could be if I wanted to fill in the more explicit bits. So far I've been fading to black instead.
And yeah, some of that is probably because if I'm writing Horny Superteens I'm not reading the news and getting depressed about the fall of America and the fact that we're not going to have Social Security by the time I can truly retire. The chance to imagine myself as a horny teenage superhero just starting to decide how to build his powers is, well, a wonderful escape from all that.
The new job remains a profound relief -- the extent to which this is just a much better environment to be working in is hard to overstate, even if yesterday's meeting drained most of my brain of anything resembling thought. But, I mean, that was the new CFO and the Director of Finance wanting to learn more about how our financial workflows were set up, and look at some possibilities for making them more efficient. At Old Job? Gods, I'd never have been allowed anywhere near a meeting like that, and the IT folks who were allowed to talk would have spent the whole time giving them incorrect information.
I wish I was mistaken, or even bitterly exaggerating, about that.
I'm not.
This is SO MUCH BETTER.
Meanwhile, in my copious spare time, I'm plotting out a possible future book where a necromancer and a mad scientist find themselves in competition over the fresh graves at the local cemetery. So hey, I have a likely future project.
Secondborn has been doing better at school; I've also bought him some axes, and he's been taking apart some excessively large stumps that we'd brought over to our back yard. I figure, it gets him outside, in the sunlight, and exercising, and even given the cost of a good axe these days it's still cheaper than therapy. I had given him one of my old knives to work out his angst with, but, well...
Yeah. He has a lot of angst to work out.
(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I kind of fell off last year, so we'll see how I do with it this year.)
Prompt: Your Favorite Hobby And Why
It's writing. You knew it was going to be writing. Of course it's writing.
I do it constantly. I do it to entertain myself, I do it entertain other people, I do it to explore and organize my thoughts and feelings, I do it because it's cheaper than therapy. Even when the boys were young and I could barely find two minutes to rub together for myself, I was still writing. Even when I'd given up martial arts, climbing, game nights, and everything else, I was writing.
I do still enjoy climbing; the combination of physical effort, coordination, and just, well, being way up high really works for me. (I am, however, here to tell you that it is not as easy as it used to be!)
I miss doing martial arts, and the various sorts of swordfighting I used to do (fencing, SCA, etc.) I may even get back to them at some point; we'll have to see.
But writing? Writing has been part of my life since I was about twelve, and I don't see it going away.
So yeah, writing -- even low-stakes writing for the Blog o' Doom here -- hasn't been going well lately. This is not a huge surprise; I've mentioned before that May is basically the worst month of the year for me. Sometime I cope with that by writing more, but I've been trying to take a sensible, low-stress approach this year and...
...Well, frankly I think I'm just extremely burned-out. I think I have been for some time, and when I finally made a real effort to slow down it all caught up with me. And there's not much to be done about that except keep trying to take things slow and sensible until I get back to feeling like myself.
Things are going to be a little slow around here, is what I'm saying. They should get better -- I should get better -- once we're done with May, but in the meantime I'm just going to try to get through without burning out completely the way I usually do.
See you on the other side, friends.
Have I mentioned recently that I've been participating in Friday Night Writes? I might have mentioned it. At least once.
The timing is a little odd -- and it perhaps helps that I only have a social life at certain odd points in the week -- but it works for me and it's allowed me to get some solid writing done. In fact, I really need to do more of this: set some other times during the week to be dedicated writing time.
That said, exhaustion is still an issue. It's the end of the week -- usually a long week, lately -- and that isn't a time that generally lends itself to having a lot of energy to concentrate. So this week, I figured that even if I didn't make any real progress on the Dark Fantasy story, I could work on some supporting material, specifically a bestiary to look at when I need to threaten my characters. I don't want the usual sorts of vampires and werewolves and whatnot, so having a list of other sorts of beasts to deal with will be helpful...
And apparently that did the trick, because I was about five beasties in when my brain kicked over and I went back to the story. So the second half of the first writing session and both the following sessions were Dark Fantasy, plus I now have nine monsters/categories of monster to menace my characters with. Doubtless I'll add others as I go along.
Then, on Saturday, I sat down with some thoughts and drew up the central pantheon for the D&D campaign I'm running for Secondborn and his friends. (The one for Firstborn and his friends has, unfortunately, fallen victim to the vicissitudes of Junior Year and is probably permanently defunct.) This will probably become the default for my campaigns, and it definitely needs to be fleshed out further. Still, the core pantheon of the High Gods is there, and I can fill other lesser/later gods later. I've also established the relationship between the High Gods and certain other entities, like Hadar, that the High Gods defeated and destroyed or locked away during the Dawn War.
Somewhere in there, I also wrote a short scene for the D&D campaign I'm playing in, featuring my favorite True Elf, Ruin, and his king, Mythrandril.
Sunday was devoted to running laundry and playing Hades, which has certainly stimulated my thinking on the topics of divinity and pantheons. This blog post was pretty much the whole extent of Sunday's writing.
Hopefully I can put in another hour or two of devoted writing time tonight (Monday night, when you're reading this, not Sunday night when I'm writing it) and get my characters another step or two closer to their destinies.
Onwards and upwards! Nothing but good times ahead...
So on Saturday I took myself out to breakfast, and promptly got rear-ended on the way back. Complicating the matter is the fact that it was April Fool's Day, so it was difficult to say anything about it without being suspected of pulling a prank. Fortunately, nobody seemed to be injured and neither vehicle had any passengers, and both came through it all right -- by which I mean that both vehicles were still driveable, neither one was leaking anything, and nobody was stranded, not that either vehicle isn't going to need significant repairs. They are. The guy seemed a pretty decent sort, if slightly frazzled; we exchanged insurance cards and drove off. Still, on the whole, it was an event I could definitely have done without.
It's likely to make the logistics of this week kind of interesting, too.
Meanwhile, a couple of interesting situations at work, and enough going on that it's been hard to focus on any one thing. I've been working on eating less and walking more, and that seems to be helping; by the time June rolls around I should be in better shape.
Regular sleep still remains elusive.
Writing is... I don't know. I got frustrated with the Dark Fantasy project and dove into it again from another direction, but I'm not sure how well that works either; I need to set it aside for a little bit, and then look at it later with fresh eyes. Instead, I added some more to the Random High Fantasy project, which is a bit more light-hearted and also generally lower stress for me since I'm not as invested in it.
We've switched Secondborn to an entirely different ADHD medication, since at this point there's been a nationwide shortage of Adderall for about four months, owing in no small part to the DEA limiting how much manufacturers are allowed to produce based on a yearly forecast -- which was ridiculously lower than the current demand -- and then having a stupidly slow and opaque system for revising their limitations based on actual demand. (It's all but unavailable, as far as I can tell. I've been able to obtain a whole ten day's supply for Secondborn since we ran out just before Christmas.)
The new stuff seems to be working, or working well enough, so far, but he's only been on it for a week; we'll see. Anybody who wants to contact the DEA and yell at them about depriving innocent consumers of necessary medication in order to justify their budget is more than justified, as far as I'm concerned. Even if the main cause of the shortage is unexpectedly high market demand -- and that's a fair argument -- they sure as shit aren't helping.
I'm hoping things improve as we move into the week, but I'm also firmly convinced that they could still get worse.
Pallian covers the braziers and sweeps away the ash traceries of the
pattern that has covered the small clearing in front of the stone bench
at the back of the gardens. The other elements of the ritual are already
gone, devoured by the forces that answered his call. He has acquired
another initiation, the first he has chosen for himself.
His father might disapprove, and that risk is why he has kept his
actions secret. Still, limiting himself to the skills and abilities that
his father has chosen for him is a risk as well, especially here in the
heart of the court. He has chosen his path carefully, selecting an
initiation that will complement those he has already, and offer him
resources that don't rely on sorcery.
He hears footsteps along the gravel path, and shoves the twin braziers
back into the bushes. By the time the servant arrives and kneels beside
him, he is sitting on the stone bench and staring idly up at the moon: a
young man taking in the evening air.
"My lord," says the servant softly, "the Wizard-King demands your urgent presence."
His heart freezes solid for a beat, then another, then a third. At last
it begins to beat again, and he turns to regard the girl without
expression. "I attend," he says, and starts back towards the keep.
Note:
I know that those of you who've been following this story for a while have seen this scene at least twice before. That's a fairly normal part of the writing process; I like this little flashback, and it still fits with the current plotline, so I'm simply slotting it back in where I think it makes sense. We'll move on to new developments next week.
Between Daylight Savings Time, the boys going back to school after Spring Break, and Beautiful Wife being out of town for a couple of days, last week was a bit of a beating. Not horrible, just... a lot. Still, I'm starting to get the feeling that I could use a few days off.
The part where a Windows update made one of our critical systems quit working in the middle of the day on Saturday didn't help.The issue wasn't that hard to resolve, but by the time I found out about it, it had been down for over an hour and I was off picking Firstborn up from his workout. It wasn't catastrophic, but it's stressful to know that we could have resolved it much sooner if someone had phoned me directly. I did, at least, mention that when I sent the "It's Working Again" email, so hopefully next time we can get things sorted more promptly.
I mentioned that I'd been doing Friday Night Writes, and I'm still enjoying that and actually getting some work done there. (Shorter things, like I do for the blog, I can handle on my own; it's the book-length projects that I need help to stay focused on.) On Friday I found that I didn't have the -- something -- to work on the Dark Fantasy project, and went back to Random High Fantasy instead and got about 1,200 words done on it.
I'm not sure why the Dark Fantasy project is fighting me right now. Possibly it's just because that's the one I'm most serious about, so when I'm tired I start worrying that I won't be able to put my best into it. Still, I think there are a couple of structural issues -- up to and including the thought that the entire first chapter was necessary for me to fill in my background and have something to work from, but isn't really where the story should start. I need to look over it again and think that through, but that -- of course -- requires time, energy, and concentration.
Things to focus on for this week include sleep, exercise, and writing -- plus some interesting developments at work.
So let's start this week off with some music, shall we? Here's Mono Inc. with Voices of Doom:
The boys have started Spring Break, which means that I'm working in the office again. We're moving towards That Time Of Year again -- May, I mean -- and the number of projects and related stress is starting to build up. Being in the office will actually be an advantage for this, especially if I come in early -- with any luck, I can catch up on some of the things I got behind on while Beautiful Wife was out of town last week.
Writing progress is slow and erratic, at least on the longer projects, but it's still progress. I need to figure out what happens next in the Dark Fantasy project, but while I'm waiting for my brain to catch up with that, I re-opened Random High Fantasy and threw another couple of pages on there. And, of course, Dark Armor is coming along here on the Blog o' Doom. I've been taking advantage of Friday Night Writes, and having a couple of hours blocked off (even once a week) is proving hugely helpful.
I managed to get everyone else down to bed on Saturday night, and was sitting in the back reading, and apparently at some point in there I finally just... relaxed. It was a wonder I made it into the bed. I slept for about ten hours, with some really nice rapid eye movements in there, and woke gradually. (Dreams were weird, and mostly focused on making it back on time from a conference myself. Not stress dreams, though; like, things were working out and I was on my way to the airport when I woke up.)
(I do miss having monster dreams, but I think I'm just not watching and reading enough scary material.)
All in all, I think I've got a pretty good start going into this week, so the goal is going to be maintaining it: getting enough sleep, keeping my energy up, getting exercise in the form of walking (with or without the dog), and just generally being careful not to overextend myself.
Seems doable.
A little while back, I was thinking about an old writing project, with the working title of "Random High Fantasy", so I went and dug it back out... I then spent a solid four hours re-reading it, tweaking some of the original sections, adding some new sections, and generally wondering why I'd ever abandoned it in the first place. So now I guess I know what my next project will be once I finish the Dark Fantasy project that I'm working on currently.
And, actually, I know exactly why I abandoned it in the first place. It's because midway into it I got one of those Really Neat Ideas and started trying to bend the existing story to incorporate it, and the existing story didn't have that much flex. Really Neat Idea needs to be the basis for a sequel, not Kitchen-Sinked into this project. Kitchen-sunk? Whatever. Certainly sunk my first attempt.
Looking back at my attempts at actually finishing a book-length project, I think that Kitchen Sink Syndrome is actually one of my big stumbling blocks. I'll be working on something, and I'll get a neat new idea, and I'll try to work it in... and the next thing you know, I have too many new ideas and can't figure out how to work them all in (which was what happened to the last Dark Fantasy project) or I'm trying to squeeze in something that just doesn't fit (e.g. Random High Fantasy) or I actually do just cram them all in there and wind up with a bloated, sprawling fantasy adventure that has a lot of neat stuff but has really lost its focus as a story (for example, the one book-length project I actually did finish, and for which this blog is named).
Honestly, if there's one big issue that I need to work on in my writing, it's that. I've gotten a little better about it -- both recognizing when I'm doing it, and then not doing it -- but it's still something I need to work on. And the big thing that helps is to remember that I can take a break, write the new idea out, maybe even put down a scene or two to flesh it out and nail it down... and then promise it that it will get its own home someday, and go back to what I was doing.
Feels weird to be figuring that out after this many years spent writing, but I guess that's true of any sort of artistic creation: there's always more to learn, and a lot of it is going to be learning about yourself as much as your craft.
This was, in fact, a very good weekend: plenty of sleep, a date with my wife, a lovely brunch for the whole family... I even got some writing done.And, we managed to take the dog to the dog park without anybody getting eaten by coyotes.
I've also picked up with a little bit of roleplaying over at The Grey Tower, which is basically a Wheel of Time roleplaying site. I used to be very active there, a long time ago, but eventually dropped out for lack of time; it's good to see that it's still around. I made some genuine real-life friends on that site.
What else? I dunno. That's about it, I guess. So... have some music. A classic from 2NU:
So on Sunday I spent five and half hours running laundry, sorting laundry, and putting away laundry -- while also wrangling Secondborn into cleaning the nightmarish hellscape that was the floor of his room.
The laundry pile is now three times the size it was before I started this. Apparently me trying to get rid of the pile serves as some sort of cosmic cue telling people to go and find dirty laundry and come add it to the pile. Either that, or it sensed its eminent demise and began breeding.
Work is picking up the pace again, as we prepare to go live with a new payroll system at the end of the year. (This is the same one we tried to go live with last year, before backing off at the last minute.) Apparently our project leads have only just remembered that the payroll system doesn't pull everything from the financial system, and that we're going to have to set up user rights and approval workflows and suchlike for the payroll system independently. Which... a lot of that is still in place from last year, but we've had a lot of turnover and a lot of it is probably wrong. That's failing to mention some other significant changes, like an entire group moving from one department to an entirely different department.
Still no word on my job reclassification, though. It's gone up the approval chain, and apparently just... stopped there. Admittedly, some delay is understandable what with our office catching fire, but from where I'm sitting it feels like they're just deliberately stringing me along. There's really nothing about this process that should be this difficult.
Writing is... honestly, I'm not sure. I hit a point on Thursday or Friday night where I suddenly had doubts about the way I was handling a major plot element. I'd felt like the project was coming along pretty well until then, and at this point between work stress and general existential malaise, I'm honestly not sure whether to trust that feeling or not. I may try writing out an alternate opening where two of my characters figure something out much earlier in the story, just to see how it grabs me; I might just keep going with this version, with an eye towards fixing that issue in revision (if I still think it needs fixing, then). The one thing I am sure of is that I have no sense of perspective right now.
More sleep, more exercise, less alcohol, better eating habits. Yeah. That's still the plan. Onwards and upwards, my friends. Nothing but good times ahead.
So I realize that last week was, um, pretty quiet around here. That was mainly because, despite last week being theoretically only a four-day week, I was operating with about half a brain and it was a week full of disruptions. I did manage to get some things done -- work and personal both -- but it was just kind of an uphill slog through exhaustion and allergies. Hopefully this week will go more smoothly. Still, a quick State Of Me, mainly for accountability purposes:
Work: Meh. Lot of interruptions, lot of things waiting on other things. We've had a big disruption at the workplace, and everything is still settling back out from that. Did manage to cross one significant project off my list, and since nobody has called me in a panic I'm assuming that everything I set up worked correctly when they used it this weekend... though I really should check up on that, just to make sure.
Writing: Some actual progress, on both projects. "Both projects?" you might ask. Yes, well, um... I have the one project that I've been working on that I really haven't talked about in anything other than general terms here, which is sort of the next iteration of some of the thoughts and themes that went into the last two (incomplete) projects, but rearranged into something that I'm actually, y'know, making progress on. (Did that make any sense at all? Okay. I have one writing project that I've been working on. Call it the dark fantasy project, I guess.)
So naturally, right in the middle of that, I woke up with a thought about a guy who chases his rogue toddler into the Great Temple and all the way into the Court of Choosing and accidentally gets himself anointed as the Chosen of the Goddess -- and then has to go back home and explain this to his wife. Which, forgive me, I immediately veered off into writing that for a couple of days. However, I've since gone back and written more on the dark fantasy project, so this one -- which I'm referring to as Accidentally Anointed -- apparently hasn't thrown me off the other thing I was working on. Which means... I may be working on both of them, alternating; or I may be saving Accidentally Anointed for when I've finished the dark fantasy story. I guess we'll see.
Duolingo: No, not this past week... probably week and a half, actually. I was starting to get back to it, but right now it's more of a when-I-have-time project; writing gets priority.
Exercise: Some. I'd meant to start walking and a bit of light jogging -- this was several weeks ago, mind you -- and while I've gotten a lot better on the walking, I really haven't felt up to the jogging. Hopefully we're getting there, because I think that would be really good for me.
General health and family and all that: I'm having some weird allergy issues, which may be due to some stuff that I'd brought home and have now decided to throw out; I don't think there's any way to get it clean without extreme, and probably expensive, measures. It might be due to the weather changing and the plants deciding to try to kill me, too. And I've been tired, though I am working on sleeping more (and more regularly) and drinking less -- along with the aforementioned exercise. I'm starting to give up on getting the boys down before I go to bed, but Secondborn has been doing a lot better about getting up in the morning so that's less of a defeat than it might be. (Firstborn has been self-regulating for the last year or two; I don't worry about him at this point.) Beautiful Wife is well into teaching her semester and has been seriously stressed out, which isn't doing either of us any good, but I'm doing what I can to help with that.
The two D&D groups (Firstborn's and Secondborn's) are still going pretty well, though we've had to skip a couple of weekends in both cases. The two have very different play-styles, which is fun to watch - Firstborn's group is very interested in what sorts of things their characters could do, while Secondborn's group is very focused on what their characters are doing right now. And Secondborn's group survived their first major battle, taking down a half-dozen skeletons through a combination of fighting skill, negotiating a last-minute ally, and sheer determination.
Overall, if we can just stay on some kind of schedule I think it will help everything out. It would be better still if I could build some kind of Day Of Rest into the weekly schedule, but at this point I honestly don't see how that's feasible. Still, we're doing all right. And meanwhile, I'm going to make another cup of tea and start another load of laundry, because some things are never really finished.
Late update: Annnnd now both Beautiful Wife and Secondborn have
turned up with some kind of horrible tummy bug, which means that A)
we're not doing nearly well enough at masking and distancing, and B)
Firstborn and I are probably next. Yeah. I'm calling this one in as a Sick Family What The Fuck day.
Take care of yourselves, my friends, and take care of each other. It's a rough world out there.
So this past week I actually made it back into the office and I was generally, mostly, fairly productive. And with the exception of a bit of scheduling weirdness this morning, I expect that to be the case this week too. We're awfully close to the go-live date for the Big Software Changeover at work, and I expect to have to navigate a bunch of last-minute changes this week and next, as people do the final bits of testing and/or look and realize that, yeah, they're actually going to have to use this thing.
Meanwhile, we're dealing with the fact the Secondborn effectively disassembled his own bed by throwing it the heck out and replacing it with a loft bed instead... which shouldn't be that complicated, in theory. In actual fucking reality it requires rearranging his room, which involves quite a bit of sorting and cleaning and... yeah. It's a project. It's a project that will get done, but it's not a project that got done this past weekend, despite the bones of the loft bed cluttering up the floor of his room. There's just too much stuff that needs to get pulled out, cleaned and/or sorted, and put back in place first.
And we're all still recovering from COVID, or at least Beautiful Wife and I are. It takes us a while to gear up to do things; frequently, we need to stop and rest after doing them. That thing we used to do when we were younger and not recovering from a plague, where we'd just push through and then collapse after? Not really viable anymore. Plus, from everything I've read, the best way to avoid Long Covid at this point is to really take the time to recover, and not push ourselves We're doing the best we can at that, despite the fact that it's neither of our first instincts.
On the writing project, I've gone back and expanded the opening. The story is being told in the third person, and while I have a sort of primary protagonist the story itself is going to rotate between three point-of-view characters. (If you're curious about why I would do that or how that dynamic would work, take a look at the first three Jason Bourne movies -- yes, he's the title character, but what the other characters are doing and how they're reacting fills in the background and context that makes the whole thing make sense.) Once I figured that out, I realized that I couldn't stick with my original opening or approach; there needed to be more going on there. Which there will be, and hopefully all of it contributing to the story.
So... that brings us to Song #7 in our writing playlist, one which I know I've put on the blog before: Mono Inc, with Children of the Dark.
It was 4:00 on Sunday afternoon and everyone else in the house was asleep. I've been trying to keep everyone on schedule, since Secondborn has a Climbing Camp this morning and Firstborn is supposed to be working on PSAT stuff because apparently he's really, actually that old. And apparently we don't have a working login for the PSAT course because we reset the password and don't remember it and can't reset it because the school email it's associated with blocks almost everything that doesn't come from the school -- and it's a company holiday for the Princeton Review (Juneteenth) because in some states that actually happens. Not Texas, but some of them.
Instead, the whole family has gone nocturnal and they're dragging me off-schedule with them.
And I can't really blame them, since we're moving into the hot portion of the Texas summer and daytime is pretty miserable. Fortunately, our little house is pretty well-insulated and we haven't had any power outages yet, but... yeah. I'm tired, I'm cranky, I just want everyone to be on schedule and doing what they're supposed to do and not stressing me the fuck out.
Beautiful Wife is still sick, and I'm still in the late stages of recovery (I think) and honestly at this point I kind of just hate everything.
I think I'm making progress on writing, though I'd love it if I could just sit down and spend about six or eight hours being completely focused on it. No idea what's going to go up on the blog this week, but... eh, I'll figure something out. Weekly Wednesday blogging challenge for Wednesday, maybe just some music for tomorrow? And paladins on Friday, which really only leaves Thursday... and Thursday is usually horoscope day, isn't it? Fine. If I don't have enough brain for that, I'll do some sort motivational post, but only because I love my readers with all the dark and hungry void that passes for my heart. So yes... writing.
Where were we on the book-writing soundtrack? Ah, there we go -- I think I'd left off with Rag'n'Bone Man. Which means the list so far is:
...Which brings us to our next song in the sequence:
I'd mentioned, back on Monday, that "fits and starts" wasn't exactly the way to describe the writing dynamic for the current project. Because it is, and seems to be working (for a gods-damned change) as a seat-of-my-pants no-plotting-in-advance tell-myself-a-fucking-story project, I thought I'd take a moment and describe how it's actually going.
It's a process.
I said earlier that "I've been working and reworking the opening couple of scenes of the new writing project, which means I'm not moving as fast as I'd like but also that I'm pretty happy with what I've got down before I move on to each new section." And that's really the dynamic that I'm trying to describe for this story: I make various attempts to write a section, decide on the one that I like, nail that down, and then move onto the next. I am, basically, feeling my way through the plot and discovering more about the characters as I go.
It's not efficient, and you might not believe the number of false starts that I've had for each particular section, but -- however slowly and even painfully -- it's working. I know who my characters are; I know where the plot is going. It's just a matter of making everything fit with the characters and the fundamental story dynamic.
Still, telling myself a story I enjoy hearing seems like a workable strategy -- even if I have to figure it out as I go.
So, the fifth song on the playlist:
