Engage catchup

So, I had myself a little hiatus. Spent time with visiting family, moved house, settled in, got back to work, caught up with the backlog there, said goodbye to my manager, started training the new one in the wonders of technical documentation…. Yeah, it’s been a crazy crazy time.

Things are settling down a bit now. I’ve managed to find enough time to get back to writing this week. I’m sure that you’ll all be glad to know that a new Starwalker post is now up! (I just got done sorting it out and formatting it all.)

I looked at where the story was and decided that three weeks is just too long between posts. I’d like to keep the real-time aspect of it, so I’ve backdated the new post to be where it should have been, if I hadn’t gone on hiatus. My goal is to fill in the missing two posts as I go – I can do about a post every two-three days at the moment, energy permitting, so by the end of next week, I should be roughly up to date. (I’ll probably post them all at once, so don’t hold your breath, but there’ll definitely be at least one going up next Wednesday!)

I’m not sure when I’ll go back to my original schedule of three posts a week. I’d like to stick to once a week for a little while, build up some buffer (oh, how I miss it) and spend some time editing the Apocalypse Blog. I also have another couple of projects I need to find time for.

I’m still getting used to this new schedule and longer days. The CFS is not my friend right now, but I’m sleeping better lately, so hopefully it’ll remain manageable at least. Maybe even improve some. So while I like my return to hour-long commutes on the train, I’m still working up to being having enough energy to fully utilise it. Sometimes, it’s just too necessary to doze all the way home at the end of the day.

I look forward to the time when I can write a post in the morning’s commute, and do something else on the way home.  Edit, rewrite, plan plots. Who knows?

In other lovely news, Kylie Chan is coming to talk to my writing group next month! (Why does everything happen at once?) I’m looking forward to that, and hopefully a good-sized group will turn out for her. Fingers crossed!

Right, back to the grindstone. More catching up to do yet – if anyone is waiting on a response from me about something, I’ll try to get back to you soon!

Hiatus

Since my last post, things have slid further into chaos. Not all in a bad way, but definitely in ways that make everything more complicated!

First, I got sick. The bug going around work decided to bite me, in a low-grade miserable way that dragged at me for 2-3 weeks. Lovely.

Then, things with my family came to a head and I decided not to renew the lease on my house. Instead, I am going to move out and shift in with my folks, taking over the bottom floor of their house. This will let me help them out and avoid some more serious problems down the track.

When I made that decision, I had three weeks to sort everything out. One week of that is taken up by my brother’s visit (he’s around the world for my dad’s birthday), so I really only had two weeks to sort the move out.

Then at work, my manager announced that he’s leaving. One week after my move finishes, he’s off. The best manager I’ve ever worked under is leaving, and we don’t know what’s going to happen after he’s gone. The department will be restructured and we have no-one to voice our needs for us at management level. I think I’m going to have to become more vocal.

Oh, and we have some redundancies coming through, too. I heard just today that my team is safe, but for the last couple of weeks, it has been a worry.

On top of that, there has been getting the new teammember settled into her work, and preparing everything for my couple of weeks off to be with my brother and then move house. We have a big release coming up just after I get back from my leave and there’s lots to sort out to make sure that that happens, too.

Just when I thought nothing else could go wrong, the bookstore where I hold my writing group emailed me to tell me that they’re not opening late any more. So now I have to find somewhere else to hold my writing group every month. Before the next meeting. Aaaaah.

That has been the past couple of weeks for me. The good news is that everything seems to be going to plan so far. The move is all lined up – everything is booked and ready. Currently giving my brother a whistle-stop tour of the area and doing lots of family stuff. Work doesn’t appear to have imploded in my absense yet.

I am bone tired. I slept most of today in the car as we drove around between pretty sights, and I’m still exhausted. I can’t remember the last time I just stopped and rested. I am looking forward to getting rid of this house and settled into my new rooms downstairs, and then sleeping for about a week.

The upshot of all this is that there’s no room for writing. I could probably squeeze in some time to throw something together, but my head is so full of everything that’s going on that there’s no room for writing. I don’t want to sacrifice the quality or story of Starwalker any more than I already have thanks to all of these distractions, so it’s time for a break.

This is why I’m taking a short hiatus. Just for a couple of weeks, enough time to get me past this visit and moving house and caught up with all of my other responsibilities. I’m going to be pretty absent from everything for the duration. I should be back up and running by the end of the month, and will update again once I have a clearer idea of how all this stuff is turning out.

Thanks to all of your for your patience. On the plus side, once I’m moved I’ll have my one-hour commute on the train each way, and will have plenty of time for writing! Or sleeping. We shall see!

Catch you all on the flip-side.

Change of plan

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of weeks. Things have not been going well for me, and if I’m honest, I’m struggling.

There are a lot of reasons for it. Work is stressful and I’m constantly fighting to keep all the balls in the air there. I’m managing more people, more projects, and tighter deadlines than we’ve had before. I’m still learning what the hell I’m supposed to be doing half the time, and every time I turn around, the goalposts have shifted six inches to the left. We’re doing all right, we’re still on-track, but that’s only because I’m busting my ass trying to make sure that’s where we are. I like clear goals. I like to know what I’m aiming for. I do not like playing catchup, especially not when it’s someone else’s fault.

There are also family-related factors at play that I don’t particularly want to get into. Let’s just say that it’s another source of concern, but not one I can do anything about (which is probably worse) except be there for them. It’s frustrating.

And then, once I’ve dealt with all of that, there’s my writing. I’m falling behind with everything. Organising my writing groups is simple – a couple of emails a month each (I have two groups), turn up and pretend to be competent, and enjoy the company and conversation. Easy, right? At the moment, it’s one more thing that I have to worry about, and the other week I started to seriously consider stopping them. Or at least one of them. But then I go to a meeting and I love it. It’s so worth it. It’s the bits in between, sending out the emails and having it niggling at the back of my head, all ‘don’t forget about this!’ Those are the parts that wear on me.

Starwalker is going really well. I keep meaning to post updates on this blog, but it’s yet another thing that I just don’t get to these days. Last month, SW had over 1,000 visitors. As in, different people, all coming to the site to read it. One thousand. And the feedback I get is amazing. People are talking about it. They’re getting excited about the storylines, and attached to the characters. I feel so lucky when I see that! I look at the stats and the comments and I’m all: “Wow. People like my stuff.” It’s a lot to get my head around!

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. I’m going to all these new places with it, juggling and adjusting things as I go to make sure it hangs together, trying to get the physics right enough to be convincing. So far, it’s all working great! I have all of these plans for it, so many avenues still to travel down. It’s exciting, but it’s hard.

I think the difficult parts aren’t entirely down to SW itself. It’s everything else that gets in the way. It’s shifting mental gears whenever I sit down to write, trying to put all the job-related and other stuff aside for long enough to focus. It’s sitting down on the train for twenty minutes at a time and trying to get part of a post down. It’s giving up three evenings a week to pull a post together, edit it into something coherent, and get it posted. And more than anything else, it’s the exhaustion.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – it is the bane of my life, once again. All of that stuff I’m juggling makes me stressed, and stress makes the CFS worse, and then I get exhausted and that makes it more difficult to deal with the stressful stuff. Fun, huh? It has been bad (and getting worse) for the last couple of months. I keep trying to take some time off, take a break, catch my breath, and that works in tiny portions. Unless it puts me behind with everything (which it usually does), in which case I have to bust my ass to catch up again, and I wind up exactly where I started – exhausted and struggling to keep up.

Last year, I set my sights high. I didn’t do everything I aimed to do, but I did most of it and I came out of it all feeling really good about how it went. This year, I didn’t set myself targets that were anything near as ambitious, I’m not doing everything I aimed to, and I’m still failing. A week ago, I had that thought, the one that says ‘something has to give’. I’ve been here before, looking at myself in a downwards spiral, and unless I change things, I’m not going to get out of it until I hit bottom and have to stop doing everything. That was five years ago, and it was a lot worse than it is now before I realised how close and inevitable that bottom really was. Funnily enough, the key stress- and frustration-factor then was my job, too.

That, sadly, isn’t something I can change. It’ll get better eventually and now is not the time to change jobs. I am in a really good position; the best one I’ve ever been in, professionally. I’m doing well, despite all the crap I’m handling. And more than anything else, I need the stability of that place right now.

And, dammit, I don’t give up on shit easily. It’s probably part of what’s made me so sick – I should have done this a while ago – but having dealt with chronic conditions of one kind or other my whole life, I’m stubborn when it comes to this kind of thing getting in my way. There’s a part of me that suspects I should take a proper break from all the extra things in my life – the writing groups, the blogfic, the novel that’s waiting for me to edit it, the Apocalypse Blog stuff that I promised to do this year. But even as badly as I’m doing right now, I’m not ready to go quite that far. Like I said, I’m stubborn about this kind of thing.

But I have to change something. I need some way to get back on my feet. Right now, I feel like I’m failing at everything, even though it probably doesn’t look like I am. I’m told that it doesn’t show in SW yet – but it will. A post was due up yesterday and I haven’t even started it yet. I’m so exhausted that it’s difficult to think straight enough to write this, let alone slide my brain into Starry and try to step forward with her story.

I’m not going to do yesterday’s post. I’m not going to force it and have it come out half-assed. It’s time to be realistic and cut back. I thought three posts a week would be easy, but when the CFS is this bad, it’s too much. I’ve been tossing around the idea of dropping down to two posts, but I have to be honest with myself – that’s not enough. I’m not going to stop Starwalker – mostly because it will be incredibly difficult to start again if I do that – but I am going to bring it down to one post a week. Take a proper breather in it. Not permanently, but long enough for me to sort the rest of my life out. I’m not sure how long that will be yet.

I don’t know how this will affect the real-time aspect of Starwalker, but I’ll deal with it if and when it becomes a problem. I still love the story and its characters. I’m still excited about sharing it with everyone. Hell, the other day, I was pondering an old storyline I created a few years ago and realised that it would fit into the SW world perfectly. My original planned plot just got extended by another story arc. I am still committed to making this story work and won’t let this CFS screw it up completely.

So there you have it. I’m not giving up, not stopping. But I do need to step back for a while. I’ll aim to post on Wednesdays, I think, because by the end of the week I’m usually so tired I can hardly see straight. I still have to look at the other things in my life and see what I can do about them. I need to fix some non-writing-related factors as well, like the exercise I’m not doing and how often I can’t be bothered to cook. They’re next on my list.  I have some time booked off work coming up, too, and hopefully that will help me get on top of things a bit.

Wish me luck – I think I’m gonna need it – and watch this space!

Post delayed

Hello everyone!

So sorry to do this again, but I’m not going to get Starwalker’s post up today. I’ve been run off my mental feet this week and have been running behind. My lovely writing group met tonight, and while the post is mostly written, I’m not going to get it finished tonight. Never mind getting it edited and readable.

In the interests of not sucking, I’m going to delay the post until tomorrow. It should go up about lunchtime (Australian time)! Please forgive me, and I shall work on more awesome stuff for you all.

In the meantime… wow, my cat has some impressive projectile vomiting. Gotta go!

Reader’s forum open!

Due to popular demand (okay, about two people said they wanted this), I have set up a reader’s forum for my work. It’s fairly boney at the moment, but I’ll be trying to fill out config and posts over the next few days, work- and life-permitting.

This forum is a place for readers to discuss the Apocalypse Blog and Starwalker – feel free to go and speculate, give feedback, etc. There are also places to discuss writing and other fiction you all enjoy.

I’m also planning to run polls and offer extras on the stories there. First Starwalker one is coming soon!

So, go sign up, introduce yourself, and get chatting!

Post delayed

I hate doing this, but it was an exhaustion-filled, vague weekend, and today has been crazy with work and my writing group. I have a post partially written, I don’t know if I like what I have, and I’ll be up until the small hours if I attempt to finish it now. In an attempt to sleep tonight, I am opting to postpone today’s instalment of Starwalker.

This is a first for me. I made it all the way through the Apocalypse Blog without missing/skipping/delaying a post, but Starwalker is proving to be a lot harder. There are various reasons for that, which I’ll no doubt blather on about in another post, but consider me unhappy with this state of affairs. Unhappy and determined not to repeat it.

I will aim to get the post up tomorrow. Then, with luck, Wednesday’s post will be on time. My apologies, everyone! I thank you all for your patience.

Fun with ships and pirates

Yesterday was not a good day for me. I was exhausted, right down to the bone, to the extent that I desperately wanted to fall asleep in the middle of my working day (which, despite the CFS, rarely happens to me), my brain ceased functioning for periods at a time, and sometimes I just sat and stared at the mountain of work I need to get through.

But it was a Wednesday, which meant that there was a Starwalker post to get up. Luckily, by the time I had got home and had dinner, I was feeling marginally more awake. Writing on the way home had energised me a bit, mostly because of the subject of the post. Space pirates! Crisis! And a mildly crazy ship.

Yesterday’s post has been coming for a long time. It’s one of those plot points that takes a lot of building up to – I love making my characters go ‘SPANG’, but I prefer to do it in a way that makes sense. Juggling all those pieces into the right place at the right time isn’t easy, but damn, it’s worth it.

I think I surprised myself with how little I had planned it all out. The write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants habit I got into with the Apocalypse Blog is continuing to work well for me as I write footloose and buffer-free. All I knew was the decision that had to be made and the ending of the post – the rest pretty much got made up as I wrote. I hadn’t planned to blow up half a moon – that grew out of the position the ship started out in, which only came about because I have that little positional information section at the top of the post. But it worked itself in surprisingly well. Don’t you just love it when a half-baked plan comes together?

Originally, I hadn’t wanted to leave it on a cliffhanger. I wanted to get right through to the end of the chase, partly for completeness but also because of the real-time aspect. But at the same time, the next portion of the chase deserves a good share of attention on its own – it’s a pivotal part of the story and seems only right to give it its own post. Plus, the damn posts are getting longer, hovering around 2,000 words each at the moment. Whoops. No wonder they’re taking me a couple of days to put together.

So, there you go. I wrote through exhaustion and confusion, got a little bit emotional in the middle of it (Starwalker breaks my heart), and wound up with something I was excited and terrified to post. That doesn’t happen often. I think the last time I felt that wound-up about a post was when I killed off Dillon in AB. Or maybe when Faith’s Dad said goodbye.

I’m glad to say that it was all worth it. I’ve had comments on it already, with exactly the kinds of reactions I was going for. Today, I am not quite as exhausted as I was yesterday, and a little bit elated at the feedback. One of the best things I did this time around was to turn comments on on the blogfic, because my readers are awesome.

I’ve been getting suggestions/requests to have some kind of discussion forum for SW, too. It’s not something I thought about before (or dreamed would actually be used/necessary!). But people seem to want it, so I shall look into it! Then readers can go and speculate about what’s happening in the story to their heart’s content.

But first, I need to get this next post written. Somehow, I have to follow up yesterday’s post with something that at least doesn’t suck. Wish me luck!

Starwalker: Into the Second Week

Phew. Another week or two has slipped by, and I am way behind in my blog posting again. But never fear! Here I am!

Starwalker has got off to a rocking start. I keep looking at it and reeling, just a little bit, quietly, to myself. Allow me to explain.

Let’s start with the comments. It wasn’t until after I had started the Apocalypse Blog that I found out comments are a good idea. It was a conceptual decision and I didn’t realise that it was a good way to communicate with my audience (be gentle, it was my first blogfic!). With Starwalker, I was determined not to make that mistake and left the comments on. (Okay, they broke and it took me two days to fix them, but they’re all working now!)

Now, I have comments. More than that: I have good, positive comments. I can’t say how much this means! I was more nervous going into Starwalker than I have starting any other project, and it’s good to know that people are liking it.

I have been getting other feedback, too, and I’m grateful for all of it.

Then there’s the web stats. I check this a few times a week, mostly because the little graphs going up makes me happy. The Apocalypse Blog got off to a slow start, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing and no-one knew who I was. In its first two weeks, it got a grand total of 177 visitors. Starwalker is a week and a half old, and it’s had 247 visitors so far (with a higher return rate, too).

I’ve also had over 100 visitors a day for the last couple of days – something that took me two months to achieve in AB. Whoo-hoo!

Part of this is my existing audience and contacts, going over because I nudged them and they (hopefully) like my work. I also know a little bit more about where to advertise, and that’s helping too. And okay, maybe I teased people about it beforehand enough that they were almost as excited (and more excited, in some cases!) than I was to see the first post go up.

I’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks, trying to get all the links and listings in place. Here’s where I’m at so far:

• Muse’s Success – done and approved (go give me pretty stars!)
• Epiguide – done and approved
• Write Blog Fiction – done and approved (go give me pretty stars!)
• Web Fiction Guide – done and approved (go give me pretty stars!)
• Technorati – done and awaiting approval
• Blog Fiction – done and awaiting confirmation

I’ve also been spreading the word through my Twitter account and Facebook. I set up a Facebook fan page a couple of days ago, and that’s going well so far! I’m using it to send out notifications whenever a new post goes up on Starwalker (and will post when the AB shorts go up, too), so please go hook up there if you want to join in!

Also, it looks like the Web Fiction Guide have changed their submissions procedure (not sure when this changed, but it didn’t happen a year ago!). Now, they are having an editor give the fiction a rating and brief (incomplete) review when they approve the listing. So I have a 4-star (out of 5) editor rating and a really positive semi-review already! (On looking at other recent listings, that’s a high rating, too!)

So. It has been a busy couple of weeks. A lot has happened, and I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten some of it. There are still places I need to advertise (some have minimum post requirements) and other stuff to sort out. I have to go back through my links to AB and make sure I’ve covered them with Starwalker.

Tomorrow’s SW post is already edited and scheduled to go up in the morning. This new project is going well, I think. I’ve even had time to start the first AB short story between SW posts.

Thanks to everyone who has encouraged me to get this far with Starwalker (and my other projects!). There is so much more to come and I can’t wait to take you there with me! I think tomorrow’s post sums up how I’m feeling right now. You’ll know when you see it.

Un-glitched

Been fighting with the Starwalker website over the past couple of days. The comments form was borking – for some reason, trying to submit a comment just sent you back to the homepage.

I checked everywhere I could think of. Compared code to the test site I had for the theme (where comments were working fine), replaced files, replaced code…. I hit up helpful friends who know a lot more codestuff than me, who pointed me in the right directions.

I wound up having to copy the theme files over to my test site one at a time, testing the comments after each one, to see which file contained the code that broke it. It took a little while, but I found the issue – the search form in the sidebar was overriding the comment form. Remove the search form, and it all works fine.

Huzzah! So now comments work on Starwalker. The one thing I didn’t think to test before it went live. Oops. Guess I won’t be making that mistake again! Thanks to those who offered help – it was much appreciated!

I might try to put the search form back in at some point (I think I know what was wrong with the code now, but, well. We’ll see). Do I really need one? Would anyone use a search on a blogfic?

The second post went up this morning. Friday’s is all scheduled and ready. Working on next week’s posts at the moment. So far, it’s going well, I think!

Starwalker begins!

The first post of Starwalker is now up and available for reading! Go, my lovelies, read and be amused!