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.
