Whee!

The Apocalypse Blog broke 100 visits for the first time yesterday! I just checked the stats, and there were 103 visitors. How awesome is that? 😀

I’m gonna go have an over-caffeinated dance now. Thanks to all my readers for giving me happy-making graphs. It pleases me beyond belief to know that people are checking AB out.

Boing. 😀

Posts achieved!

Today I managed to rework the AB posts I wrote over the past week, fill in a gap or two, and schedule them up for the forthcoming week. Phew. It’s a hell of a week – I could probably have spaced the big encounters out a bit more, but I’m trying not to string out the travelling time too much.

I only got as far as the 6th Feb today – my goal was the 7th. Considering that I was only halfway through the 4th when I started this morning, and there are 9 posts over the next 6 days, that’s not too bad. I decided to stop now rather than push on too long and either burn out or write complete crap.

I’ll come back to it fresh after I take a break from it – I have novel-editing to do tomorrow! On the plus side, the big encounters that happen this week should give me plenty of material to chew on over the following posts. Nope, definitely not going to run out of material any time soon.

The scary part is that we haven’t hit any of the plot landmarks on my pinboard yet. I think the first one will be on the 14th Feb, at this rate. My goal of keeping this going for a year? Actually looking pretty good right now.

Falling behind

I’m struggling a bit with the Apocalypse Blog this week. First of all, Monday was a public holiday (happy Australia Day!), and I spent it chilling with a very good friend. It was lovely to kick back and have a relaxed day.

However, it did mean that I was missing two hours of AB-writing time, because I had no commute that day. So I was down a couple of posts by the time that Tuesday started. 

I didn’t sleep well at all last weekend, so I was fighting against the fatigue most of the week. Tired brain means slow writing (and I make no promises about the quality). So I didn’t get as much as I would have liked done in the time I had this week.

On top of that, the posts are getting longer. There are a few issues that Faith is coming up against within the group, and that leads to lengthy encounters. They’re the kind of thing that I don’t want to gloss over (this is where it sucks to be a completist), and the blog’s timeline means that some of these posts have to occur on the same day.  I’m way too pernickety about this kind of thing to just skip days and hope people won’t notice. 😉

So, as of tonight, I have five posts that fit over four days written. Argh.  On the other hand, they are long posts. I have an extra three days to write up, and then all seven days to edit and schedule up.  Somehow, I have to squeeze all of that into one day this weekend.

I’m supposed to be trying to build up more of a buffer, not lose it!  It’s so frustrating. Script Frenzy is in two months’ time, and I want at least most of that month completely free of AB posting so I can get my head down for script-wrangling. But it’s far too early to be worrying about that just yet. For now, I just have to get my head down – first to sleep (very soon) and then to work.

So much to do this weekend. Wish me luck!

Compulsive = yay

January’s posts for AB are all up!  Not live yet, of course, but they are edited and scheduled.  The blogmonster will spit them out at the correct times.

I haven’t really kept any kind of log of the posts (I’ve got all the posts saved, of course).  So I decided to put together a spreadsheet to track it all – number of posts, wordcounts, averages, totals, all that jazz.

It’s all very compulsive.  But here are some fun stats of the Apocalypse Blog, up to the end of January (luckily, stats aren’t spoilers!):

(December isn’t a full month, as the blog started on the 17th.)

I’m getting spammier!  But also getting better at only doing one post per day.  I think it’s going well.  Now I just need to build myself up a buffer of posts so I can take a break every now and then, and I’ll be golden.

Fight hard

This week, I’ve been struggling with a particular AB post.  It’s not a huge spoiler if I let slip that Faith’s group winds up in a fight in the next week – and damn, I had forgotten how hard it is to write fight scenes.  Or to write them well, anyway.

I’ve written lots of fight scenes before – the online RP gave me plenty of practice in that, but that was quite different.  That was a blow-by-blow, much slower, and pretty much worked itself out as we went along.  This is different.  For starters, it’s first-person, and that took me a while to get my head around and to be able to fit myself in behind Faith’s eyes.  She’s a lot of things, but an experienced fighter isn’t one of them.  I know that being in that situation for the first time is surprising and strange, but it’s hard to draw on that and make it sound convincing at the same time.

I rewrote the scene three times – as in, went back to the beginning and started all over again – before I was at all happy with how it came out.  I started off with dialogue between the two groups, and that just went on and on way too much, so I wound up cutting it out.  Once I had decided to lean on the rush and emotion of it rather than the actual ‘and then he did this and she did that’, it came much easier.  

When I was reworking it for the third time, I thought to myself, ‘Y’know, sex(y) scenes are way easier to write than violence.’  Pondering that again, it’s probably because I don’t write biological porn – cut out the mechanical parts and stick to the atmosphere of the scene, and it’s much easier for everyone involved.  Or easier to get the ‘feel’ and authenticity of the scene.  I guess it’s the same with violence.  I just needed to get my head around into the right place before I could even start it.

I haven’t looked at that scene in a couple of days, but today is my time to sit down and edit/schedule up the next week of posts.  So I’m about to go through and see how it looks again.  Hopefully I won’t have to rewrite the damn thing again – if nothing else, I really don’t have the time.  I’m not sure how it’s going to come out, or if it works properly.

The good news is that AB is still teaching me things.  Things are going to be violent at times in this broken world of Faith’s, so with any luck I’ll get better at handling these kinds of scenes.  Maybe I should experiment with different methods, though that’s hard to do without spoiling her voice.  Something worth thinking about, though.  The point of the blog is to stretch my writing and explore things.

Also, I need to look up details on scurvy.  Hmm.  I’m so mean.

Whipcrackin’

I had a very productive weekend, all told.  Rearranged my room to put my desk in a better corner – coincidentally, closer to one of my pinboards.  The cats are thoroughly confused but appear to like the new configuration.  I took the opportunity to sort through and organise all the stuff that had been piling up on my desk, so now it’s clean and usable again.

Got the next week’s AB posts all edited and scheduled up.  I had to rewrite one this morning after some feedback from the lovely Julie – I was having a dilemma over what to do with a couple of the characters, and changed my original plan.  It gave me the chance to throw another spanner in the workings of Faith’s little group, which is always a good thing.  Or at least interesting.

And I finally got down to really editing through the first portion of the novel yesterday.  I’m being pretty ruthless at the moment and it seems to be shaping up pretty good.  I’m shuffling a few things around, and patching up after that is proving to be a pain. 

It’s almost time to submit it for feedback, though.  I’m considering taking out one of the subplots and POV threads, but I’m really torn about that – I love the characters involved, but I need to work out if they’re really any use within the story.  I like what they add, but I don’t know if it’s really necessary, or, worse, a distraction.  Hopefully a fresh set of eyes or three will help me work that out.

Phew.  So much to think about.  I’m really tired today, but I’m determined to crack on with, well, everything.

Went to see Bolt yesterday, too.   I am in love with the hamster.  I’m gonna go get my ball.

One month in…

I just logged into the AB admin panel to upload the next week of posts, and noticed the date.  The Apocalypse Blog started exactly one month ago today!  Wow.  It feels like forever – it certainly feels like a lot more than just one month.  And looking at the stats there – there are 50 posts up.  Holy crap.

Faith’s come a long way in that time.  Not surprising, as the world ended and all of the initial upheavals had to be pushed past.  She’s still not all the way there, but the good news is that by the end of the upcoming week, she will start to find her feet a little bit more.  The hospital section is designed for hope and healing, just not in an obvious way from the beginning.

Looking over the posts again (I do try to edit them before they go up, but I also try not to obsess over them), I’m not sure they’re exactly what I wanted.  I think I covered most of the bases, though.

I need to get onto my map and start planning out the next section.  It really is easier when they stay in one place.  I’ve got the map on the wall, time to go crazy with pins and pens, I think.

I doubt the next month will have quite so many posts, but I will be doing a little dance when the 100th post goes up.  Cos, wow.

In the meantime, back to editing and scheduling.  Can’t get up right now, because I have a kitten hugging my leg, fast asleep.  OMG the cute.

Energy

Energy is an issue for me.  Thanks to the CFS, I have to watch my energy levels very closely.  Some times are better than others, and a change can actually be a lot better than a rest.

Lately, it has not been great for me.  It has been getting more and more difficult to scrape myself out of bed in the morning, and some days it has been near impossible to think straight, let alone do anything useful.  I won’t go into the other symptoms (it’s a lovely, long list), but let’s just say it sucks in many ways.

I’ve tried a lot of things to try to combat the effects of CFS in the past – magnesium, omega 3 oils, yet more iron, getting more sleep.  There is no treatment, and none of those things have worked for me (though they have for others).  

The only thing that seems to work for me at all is exercise.  Which creates a rather interesting conundrum – I have to expend energy to get more energy, but where do I get the initial investment?  Unlike business, it’s not the sort of thing you can borrow.  So yes, it bites hard when I kick the process off.  If I do too much, I just end up worse than I started out.

That’s what happened last week.  A few months ago, I got a couple of workout machines so that I can do exercise at home (with my schedule, a gym really doesn’t work).  When NaNo started, I didn’t have the energy to do both, so I let the exercise slide for a month.  With the craziness of MLing, I wound up drained and wobbly by the end of November.  It has taken me until this month to feel in a position to start it up again.

So, I tried last week.  Getting up stupid-early every day, going downstairs, working out for half an hour, and then falling into the shower and going to work.  It was a mess.  I was a mess.  

I’m trying to write (AB) on the train to and from work, and it was a struggle to think straight on the morning trip, let alone put words together.  By the middle of the week, I wasn’t doing much writing at all.  I suspect the posts have suffered somewhat because of that (it doesn’t help that I’m in the middle of a particularly harrowing/difficult part of Faith’s personal journey right now, either).

I spent the weekend pretty much trying to get over that.  Yesterday at work, I was almost useless – when I’m tired, my attention span shrinks and I get very restless.  This is not conducive to being productive.  Today was better, because I’ve been forcing myself not to do much of anything except sitting, sleeping and eating.  Ugh.

I promised myself a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let this kind of thing get in my way.  I was diagnosed with arthritis when I was 2, and I did sports all through school.  I even went skiing once (the cold is not kind to me).  I have IBS, but I still eat the things I like, even when I know my guts might hate them.  

I could curl up in bed and let CFS be my reason – my excuse – for not doing anything at all, but I won’t.  I refuse.  If I let that happen, I wouldn’t be here right now – I would have stayed in the UK and never dared to pack two houses up and fly halfway around the world.  And I’m still convinced that this is a good move for me, that this is one of the best moves I’ve ever made in my life, for me.

So I choose to push on.  But last week proved that I’m not as resilient as I would like.  It’s been a long time since the CFS has been this bad – not for three or four years, I think.  I know it’s bad when I’m seriously considering calling in to work so that I can sleep (I never call in to work except when I’m really sick, unless it’s a job I hate, and I love this job).

I have taken a lot on this year – maybe too much, but I don’t want to shy away in case it’s not.  I’m not done trying this stuff yet.  I’m not done trying to figure out how to make it all work around the obstacles my body decides to place in my way.

Baby steps, I think.  Start slower.  Try to do the exercise every other day, instead of every day.  Bring my sleeping pattern forward before I get into it, rather than trying to do it all at once.  It’s so frustrating; I’d like to chew on the pace until it moves quicker, but all the will in the world won’t change my limits, I suppose.  Push them, maybe, but not change them.

Next week I’ll start again.  This week is for preparing and resting up.  It better damn well work this time, or I’m gonna have to go kick some ass.  I just wish I knew whose.

Holy Bats, Batman

There’s this huge awesome tree about 40m from our house, just outside our fence.  The local bats love it – they come swooping in through dusk and proceed to fight with each other in it.  They’re fantastic – the big ones are a good metre in wingspan, and against the dusk sky, they have those perfect scolloped wings.  A couple of nights ago, the moon was hiding behind the clouds – it was very atmospheric. 😀 

Now I can see why a boy might look at them and think, “Fuck they’re scary, I’m gonna dress up like one of them and scare the crap out of criminals with guns.”  The family and I sit out on the deck and watch them fly around while we eat dinner.  So cool.

In other news, I am frazzled this week.  Started getting up early to do exercise before work again, and it’s beginning to get hard to write on the train after that.  Dammit!  Need to climb out of this energy hole I’m in.  Time to kick the CFS in the backside and do my own thing anyway.  Just have to keep pushing, I guess – I promised myself a while ago that I wasn’t going to let it run my life for me.

On the plus side, I almost have the next week’s AB posts written up.  I have to get them uploaded tonight, as today’s post is the last one I have scheduled so far.  I’m starting to feel like I’m rushing them – I’ll edit them over before I post them, but they seem rougher.  Not sure I’m happy with that.  I’m entering the less-plotted part of the story now; maybe that’s why.  (I have lots of stuff plotted, but it’s all more spread out now.  Gotta give Faith a chance to breathe before I drop too much more on her. 😉 )

I need to decide what I’m doing with poor unconscious Nugget, too.  Killing her off just seems like cheating, and after everything that is happening at the moment, not going to have much of a kick.  I think there should be a kick if I’m gonna do that to the kid.  I’m sure something better (and possibly more evil) will come to mind before long.

I need to draw together a plan for the writing group meeting on Friday, too.  So many things buzzing around in my head right now!  I’ll feel so much better when I get that sorted out.

Yeah.  It is entirely possible that I have taken on too much at the moment.  When is it the weekend again?

People reading!

I thought I would be proactive this week about getting word about AB out there.  So, I joined a few writing LJ communities and stuck up the link, inviting feedback.

And it worked!  How awesome is that?  I’ve had a few comments and suggestions, and at least a couple of people who seem interested enough to keep reading.  This makes me ridiculously happy.  I can has readers! 😀 😀

I’ve had a couple of comments about the style.  One person asked about blog pidgin/lolspeak, another about more blog-like quirks, like catchphrases and overused exclamation marks.  The first I thought about and decided against.  As cute as ‘omg’ and ‘lol’ are, I think using that kind of language would melt my brain after a few posts.  I can’t take that kind of language seriously (mostly because it is cute), and really, I’m not going for that kind of atmosphere.  And I’ve been trying to avoid using quirks that a) annoy me to read (and to write), and b) is likely to annoy my readers.  Because I have done a lot of copyediting/proofing work, incorrect punctuation annoys the crap out of me, though oddly quirky grammar doesn’t unless it’s overdone.

Hmm.  It’s hard to know if this stuff is turning out the way I want it to (but that’s the beauty of feedback).  Maybe I should look at the style and see if it can be personalised a bit more (for Faith, not me).  But not just yet – the whole thing is still shaking itself down.  I’ve just finished writing up the first week of January, and it’s only starting to settle into any kind of groove now that the ‘omgwtf end of the world’ part is done with (last posts on that go up today! 12 hours to the last one and counting!).  Hopefully it’ll have found its groove in a couple of weeks, and I can poke at it and see what further characterisation it needs.  The aim is to have Faith’s voice come back around to be more like the first (pre-boom) week and less shocked and bewildered, but I guess I’ll have to see how that pans out.

On the plus side, I have managed to get a week’s worth of posts done in 2-3 days of train journeys.  (There won’t be as many posts per week as there have been for the past one!  It worked out as a full 20 posts between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, counting today’s ones.  The end of the world makes me spammy, apparently.)  That gives me some lovely breathing space, and means I can crack on with novel editing this weekend (providing the family gives me some time for that).

Wheeee.  I’m so happy to have readers.  Glee. 😀