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.
Here I am in my handbasket
It’s possible that I just sold my soul. I finally got around to unlocking my Facebook login and Doing Stuff with it. I am so doomed. Of course, I set up an Apocalypse Blog group for a bit of shameless self-promotion, but we’ll see if anyone takes the bait on that one (besides the people I bully into joining, that is).
I did finally find an old friend of mine, whose contact details I lost when he shifted city. I have missed talking to him – I can’t believe it’s been almost two years. But I’ve hooked up with him again now, and no doubt we’ll be gossiping like crazy in no time. I looked for a few other old friends last night, but couldn’t find any traces of them online. I wish I had kept in better contact with people.
I can’t believe I’ve signed up to Facebook. Ahhhh.
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?
Happy New Year!
It’s that time again! How did that happen?
2008 was a strange year. It started off in a state of limbo and wondering if my family and I would ever make it to Australia. For a while, it was very uncertain. And then all the packing came to a head, and we upped and left the country that I had lived in for 20 years. Around the other side of the world, I had a new life to put together, a new career – everything.
It’s been exciting, it’s been good, and despite my cautions and reservations, it was the right move for me. Despite the good friends I left behind. Friends can be visited, and have been missed terribly. I think of you often.
That said, I’m not sorry to see the back of 2008. It’s been stressful too, and we’ve had our setbacks. Moving into 2009, there are a few things about my situation that are not good. I’m hoping that they will change soon.
Right now, I am looking forward. I have plans for my writing that have got me enthused and energised. Sometimes I stop and think about the amount of projects and plans I have on my plate, and I have to sit down. When did I get so busy? How did this happen?
Let’s see. I have:
- the novel – edit and submit
- the Apocalypse Blog – ongoing (the current target is six months, though I’d like to get a year out of it)
- short stories – write more, edit and submit
- the writing group – lots of stuff to do there, though most of it ticks over on its own
- Script Frenzy – I’d like to do this this year, if only because I’ve never written a script before and at one point it sounded like fun. I also have plans to be an ML for it (as I was for NaNo in 2008 and 2007). It’s entirely possible that I’m insane.
I think that’s it. Sometimes I stop and wonder how I’m going to get it all done. Most of the time I just try to get my head down and plough on through. I guess I have no excuses for being bored, huh?
It feels good to be doing something with it all, though. It’s about time. I feel like I’ve wasted enough of my life not pushing this stuff, even though it has always been my first love. Now, it’s time.
To everyone reading this, and to everyone that lives in my heart, I wish you all the best for this new year. I am thinking of you.
Good luck and good health, my friends. Happy New Year!
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. 😀
Weekend- where?
I have no idea where this weekend is gone. I had such plans! Or, well. Some, at least.
I made a start on the novel editing yesterday. It felt good to finally get going on that, and it has been long enough since I wrote it that I can come at it with fresh eyes. The beginning section is fairly solid, which is good, and doesn’t need a huge amount of work. So far.
Didn’t have a full day of it, though. I was pretty tired, and there was family stuff going on, so I decided to take a break and spend some time with the folks. Seems ages since I took a break from everything – AB has eaten up the past few weeks, and before that it was NaNo. So it was nice to take an afternoon off completely and not think about all the writing stuff I should be doing.
Today was a bit like that, too, though I hadn’t meant to do that either. We had guests over for lunch, and they only just left. It was good, though – lots of talking and (yet more) eating. I’ve done nothing writing-related today and it feels a little bit strange. Well, okay, I put a couple of posts up on the forum, but that doesn’t count.
I do feel a bit more energised with regard to my writing projects, though. I think my brain needed that break.
The next few entries for AB are starting to clutter up in my head – I should get them down into text tonight. Or at least start it, so I can pick it up tomorrow on the way to work. Time to start the Aftermath section. Wheeee.
And I feel fine
Whew. I think I’ve finally finished writing out the End of the World week for AB. That turned out to be a lot more work than I was expecting; I have a tendency to babble, and there was a lot of ground to cover. It also turned out to be a lot more harrowing than I was expecting.
But that’s fine. The end of the world is supposed to be harrowing, right? And now I’ve ground my poor little main character into a messy smear (though not as messy as some), it’s time to see how she picks herself up again. (She kinda has to, or there wouldn’t be much of a story there.)
Once I’ve edited and scheduled these last posts, I am going to force myself to put it aside so I can edit the novel some. Sounds like a plan, right? But you know what they say about the best laid plans. 😉
Merry Christmas!
I hope everyone out there has a great Christmas (or celebration of choice). Be well, be healthy, and be happy. May next year be brighter and bolder than the last!
Write on, write long, write yay!