Monday 8 October 2012

Taking Stock, Twitter and Turkey

The word of the week is social.

October 1 - Time is Flying…

It's a new month: time to take stock of a few things.

Only a few months remain for me to find a job before my EI runs out. I'm starting to sound like a broken record( which is rather dated of me, given than I've not owned a record for decades )when I talk about this, but it IS coming down to the crunch now. In the end, I'll have to take a job of SOME kind; I keep hoping and looking for one that won't drain my creativity during the day so I can write a decent amount in the evening. Definitely not a night job though; been there, done that, never again.


Personally, I'm still coasting along. My social network here in Victoria is an oddly estranged one; I know people but I don't hang out with them on a regular basis. It's strange, but most of the people I know are busy with their lives and if I see them once a month, that's fairly good in the scale of our schedules. It SHOULD be more often, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. Perhaps it is 'natural' for a writer to be isolated to a degree, but in my case I live IN town for a reason: to socialize. A few Mondays a month are spent at the Victoria Writer's Group, true… but too many Friday and Saturday nights I'm homebound. Not having much of a budget to GO out also doesn't help; you can't do much with a ten dollar bill apart from coffee or one beer, and who wants to call it a night early?

Those are my thoughts, for now. I blame the lack of regular sleep for my middling melancholy of late. Heading into the cooler, darker season, I'll be sure to spend more time under my sunlamp - when I'm home, that is. Being out and about in this lovely city is high on my list for the Fall and Winter, now that I'm not writing my novel on a daily basis!

October 2 - How Felicia Day works

One of my favourite people in media today( and in general )is Felicia Day, queen of independent media. Being able to put together The Guild webseries with almost no budget and to grow it into a successful part of a business six years later is a testament to her abilities and her work skills.


Which is why I was very intrigued to see that Lifehacker.com did an interview with her this month, asking her HOW she worked on a daily basis. It was fascinating and only confirms the fact that in order to get anywhere, you have to work hard AND smart. In Felicia Day's case, it also helps to be cute, charming and funny, as well as humble… I can relate to a couple of those, on a good day, I think.

October 3 - Twitter?

For years now, I've resisted signing up for a Twitter account. In my opinion, my life isn't all that interesting compared to thousands of celebrities, so why should I get an account so people can 'follow' me? I post a haiku a day on FBook, which has become a nice outlet for my daily creativity in several ways. Twitter always seemed rather self-indulgent to me.


However, it does work both ways. Since signing up this week, I've 'followed' several people that I find interesting( Felicia Day, anyone? )as well as used Twitter to get a few bonuses for Borderlands2, something I hadn't thought about in terms of media crossovers.

As well, I have to be forward thinking: perhaps one day I'll have a body of work interesting enough for people to WANT to follow me; why not be prepared for that? I can always tweet from my island retreat as the zombies overrun the mainland…

October 4 - Mind Tricks

Way, WAY back in the day, I remember being tested in school at a young age for IQ and such things. I liked a lot of the tests and did VERY well at them, something that surprised my parents; I was less interested in the results than in the tests themselves. I've always had a soft spot for unique tests and puzzles since, though I've become much more interested in the results now; fascinating stuff.


One series of tests I recall doing were visual ones, where I had to identify objects that had several confusing or contradictory factors to them. This test( go ahead, click the link and try it! )is one that mixes up words and colours in interesting ways to show you how your mind works. Again: fascinating!

If YOU have any really good 'test' sites, please add them below in the Comments for everyone!

October 5 - NO MORE NOISE?

For the last five days straight, there's been nary a peep from the people upstairs. Not a thump, crash or trotting chase of little feet has disturbed me, day OR night, for the entire week.

It's been heavenly.


Doubly so because I've been able to work ALL DAY on editing my novel, with a few sanity breaks that also help prevent eyestrain.

According to the superintendent, no new postdated cheques have arrived from these people at his office. I'm hoping that this means they've finally found a place and are using October to move out by degrees, which jives with their activity patterns this week. The last message I received from them said they 'might be moving soon' and I'm clinging to the silence this week in the hopes it will be permanent.

October 6 - Novelicious

One result of being wakened early and often is that my body clock has adjusted to get ME up early.. if not so often. I'm usually asleep now well before 11pm and up well before 7am, sometimes 6am, which is a switch for me. I'm trying to look at it as a positive, as it means if an early-shift job turns up, I won't be bleary-eyed for the first month trying to adjust. As it is, there are bags under my eyes from the last month of stressful not-sleeping-nights in addition to the pressure of the novel and job-search. I'm really looking forward to the time when the bags and I will call a truce and then they'll retreat somewhat.


Today I put in a LOT of time into my novel, from well before 9am to well after 9pm. Breaks for lunch, a nap and a trip to the store notwithstanding, it was still my most productive day this week. I can see the story tightening up before my eyes as I work on many different aspects of it. At times, I do 'passes' where I search out common errors or repetitious words, or replace all instances of a word or name with ones that works better. I'm also adding in pieces from my notes to various parts of the novel, to build up the world more believably and make it less 'flat' as you read along. All this is in addition to the hundreds of tiny corrections I do as I parse each sentence and paragraph to lose a few words or add punctuation to make things really shine. Chapter by chapter, it's getting ready for submission - THIS WEEK!

October 7 - It's Turkey Bacon Stuffing Time!

It was write, write, write from the word go today; as I was up as usual well before 7am, it was a fairly productive day. I made it about 1/3 through the book on a 'fixing structure' pass, tightening things up and chopping bits out, sentence by sentence. I hope to FINISH this pass tomorrow, so that I can make some important additions to the novel to enhance it in many ways. Deepen it, if you will; a LOT of what's in my notes needs to make it into the book in ways that don't look ham-fisted, which takes time… you can't just plunk things down somewhere and hope that people won't notice the addition.


In the evening I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at the invitation of a friend; thanks Merrie! I had a wonderful time, managing to take the bus there AND back without getting lost or waiting for hours. Everyone at the gathering was lovely and fairly g33ky, to my delight. It was one of the best days I've spent out this entire year and I hope that it's the first one of many in the company of these nice folk. Definitely a perfect end to a busy week!

Yes campers, it's CRUNCH time this week! I've set myself a deadline of 10/11/12 to submit my novel manuscript this week. For no other reason than it's a cool date and I need to submit before Oct.14th, which means I'll be writing for at LEAST 12 hours a day until I'm done and hopefully happy with the results. Head down and powering through… now.