Bricks, Breaks and Bemusement

The word of the week is gregarious.

June 30 - Squinting

One day of work, then a holiday: my kind of start to the week!

Speaking of work, today I was very careful about how long I went between visual breaks. A few times an hour, I exercised my eyes using the 20-20-20 Rule:

As a matter fact, I quickly dropped the time down to taking I break every 15 minutes, focusing elsewhere for 30 seconds minimum and I found this to be even more effective. By the end of my workday, which was a busy one, my eyes felt tired but not overly strained and nowhere near as bad as they were by the in the day on Friday.

I did order a pair of computer glasses from an online optician, which should arrive here in about two weeks time. I'm really looking forward to getting the glasses and alleviating my lingering eyestrain, so that I can really enjoy my job as well as continue to write my second novel in the evenings.

This particular evening, I took a break for a little while and set out on the patio at Moka House. I chance to run into a lovely young lady by the name of Mary, who ended up engaging me in a wonderfully varied conversation that revolved around the concepts of writing fiction and the many precepts that involves. By the time I left to go home for dinner, I was quite enthused about my book all over again.

Meeting nice people, well: that's good too.

July 1 - Sunsick?

I went out of town for Canada Day today.

Not too far out of town, however: just over to Sooke, about an hour to the North along very winding roads through very lush forest and valleys along the western coast of Vancouver Island:

The coastline is why people put up with Sooke's crazy winding roads...

From noon onwards, I was at a friends house along with the rest of my gaming group and later on, their families. Although we arrived a little late due to my ride having to divest himself of a bad headache in the morning, we still got in about three hours of gaming. I definitely held down the puns this time and focused instead on the fun, which was probably the right decision given the close quarters.

The evening was wonderful, albeit rather hot; dare I say, unexpectedly so. While I kept myself hydrated in the shade, it was still well over 30° by dinnertime and I was definitely feeling the effects of the heat. Fortunately, I was able to cool myself down and avoid having to rest inside; I definitely should have worn shorts. Or something like this:

What I did forget to do was to moderate my food intake. A full afternoon of gaming munchies combined with hotdogs and hamburgers plus assorted sides from the well-laden table outdoors meant that I need a lot more than I should have. Seeing as I'm missing my gallbladder, my poor stomach has trouble dealing with large amounts of food eaten in short amounts of time and that was the case tonight. After I got home, I was up for hours well after midnight, trying to coax my stomach to deal with the overload. After a lot of stretching and other internal calisthenics which I won't go into, I finally managed to get comfortable enough to go to sleep.

Happy Canada Day!

July 2 - Writework

Don't tell anyone, but I've been writing a little bit at work during the day.

It's part of my process, I realized today: little snippets of scenes will come to me almost fully formed and I have to write them down as quickly as I can before the concepts drift get away from me. It's like the visuals pop into my head and I have to record them before they fade into the ether once more.

That's not to say that I spend a lot of time at work writing bits of my novel; I'm not a security guard at a desk or an accountant with only half a night's work to do on a midnight shift. I have a lot of work to get through and today, more than enough to keep me occupied, but at the same time when my Muse taps me on my shoulder, I ignore it at my peril.

So far, I've been extremely pleased with what popped into my head each day. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but without fail each little snippet has moved me emotionally. It's a sure sign that my subconscious and my Muse are working together harmoniously to help the novel evolve naturally.

Part of the process is an almost continuous and unconscious review of all the salient points that I've come up with so far for my second book. Hundreds of small details need to be sorted out in my mind, put into their place so that foundations are built to structure the following chapters in a coherent way based on the previous ones. It's similar to weaving a large rug from 100 different strands of thread: the big picture will emerge only through a combination of patience, skill and determination to see that each thread is in its proper spot while not hurrying to finish but just letting the details settle into place.

July 3 - Unicorns

Well, it happened: I finally chose a wallet.

A combination of overwhelming choice and an underwhelming budget meant that I sat down today after work with the intention of picking a wallet from an online vendor before getting out of my chair again.

It's not an easy thing, choosing a wallet. Heck, making wallets is apparently an exercise in entrepreneurial frustration, according to the folks at Kickstarter:

… and if you walk into an ordinary department store in search of this unicorn, you will be very disappointed. “The wallets are all the same, they’re falling over, they’re in a corner of the store that nobody cares about,” says Dimatos. “And you kind of think, that’s why there are so many on Kickstarter — because this sucks!” Sargent agrees: “All the wallets you see in stores are pretty much the same. They’ve all been copying each other for the past hundred years.”

Additionally, I found myself not needing to carry around all my various loyalty cards these days. I've made do very well with my banking cards, credit cards, basic ID and some cash. All the rest can be digitized onto one of several apps on my phone, which considering that I don't do all that much shopping in varied locations makes all sorts of sense to condense things in this digital age. Have a gander at what I finally picked:

Rather than keep spinning my head around, staring at hundreds of wallets and picking a few dozen that have a personal appeal to me, I narrow the list down to three, all of them Star Wars themed. I ended up choosing one that was fairly straightforward in terms of construction, but had the added feature of being a bright color so it's much less likely that I'll leave it on a counter than I might a plain black leather wallet.

Hopefully, it'll arrive in time for my birthday!

July 4 - Perspective

Here's a story that speaks for itself.

Today is the American celebration of their country's birth, a day that stands for freedom.

In 1939, as war was breaking out in Europe, one man decided to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis approached.

Nicholas Winton organized an evacuation of nearly 1000 Jewish children, leaving their families behind to be shipped by train towards distant safety only hours before the Germans took control of their home towns. Some 669 children made it to safety, surviving the war and owing their lives to Mr. Winton.

Now aged 105, Sir Nicholas Winton has again been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for the second time. Tens of thousands of people around the world have signed petitions asking the Nobel commission to consider Sir Nicholas for the prize, one that I personally consider him more than worthy of having.

It makes you wonder what kind of difference you're making in people's lives in the world today, doesn't?

July 5 - Renting Bricks?

It looks like you can rent almost anything these days, including Lego.

Which makes sense, given that a lot of the larger Lego sets go for hundreds of dollars apiece and most people only use them once or twice - how many times can you assemble a 3000 piece Star Destroyer, given the time requirements to put the thing together piece by piece?

For people like me, it's unlikely that I'll be able to either afford the massively-expensive yet massively-cool big sets like the Death Star or Star Destroyer, but I would like to try my hand at assembling one or two of them just for my own edification and enjoyment. 

The cost though, will likely keep me from purchasing any sets of substantial size as I simply can't justify the expense for me to own anything that pricey on my budget currently, even with the new job's better pay.

Just for fun: a virtual 71,000 piece Super Star Destroyer and escorts...

Which is where Pley steps in: they're aiming to be the Netflix of Lego sets.

It's an interesting idea that they've come up with. You sign up with them for a monthly fee, pick the sets that you want to rent and then the fun starts. Each set is sent to you( and returned ) free of charge and you can keep them as long as you like, provided that you pay your monthly rental fee - one set at a time, of course. Sets that are returned are sanitized and the pieces checked to ensure their are not missing, though Pley states that up to 15 pieces can be missing from returned sets before a fee is charged.

This idea means that you can rent a set of your choice, assemble it at your leisure and enjoy it for as long as you want to keep paying the monthly rental fee. There is a catch though: to get the larger sets, more substantial monthly fees are applied and in the long run, it'd be better if you just purchased a large sets though some of the rarer ones will run you much more than retail cost, even if you can find them.

Yet even if I had money in the bank, the many hours needed to assemble such a project are just not there for me at the moment. I'm sure some people that do have the time will enjoy renting Lego sets from Pley, which is currently only available in the UK but they're thinking of expanding to the USA soon.

July 6 - A Day Off? Nope!

I had an unexpected meeting this morning.

An 8am Staples meeting, for tech training, which is no good reason to get out of bed, really.

But I still went, as it was both expected of me and also a chance to see a large number of the staff I've worked with again, all at once. Considering that my only shift in the last two weeks was yesterday, it's definitely a weird feeling stepping through the door, almost as though I've been on an extended vacation. But without the can or the relaxed feeling of having done very little on a beach.

All the same, it was amusing and made me wonder yet again when I'll be able to go full-time at my new job. I've started studying for the tests that I'll eventually have to write at some point in the near future in order to qualify for the position as a full-time employee. 

Once that happens, I won't be doing any more meetings at Staples, early in the morning or otherwise.

Later in the day, I switched over to a different project: editing my Third Draft for eventual publication. I move text around a little bit, formatting here and there to and trying to work out how many pages the book would be compared to my Second Draft that I printed back in the summer of 2013. That draft worked out to a solid 306 pages from cover to cover, which made for a decent-sized breed. My work today on the new draft pulled out to 415 pages, which means I've added over 100 pages and increase my word count by adding 30,000 words to my second draft based on the feedback from my critique group for the past year.

Considering that most authors are encouraged to reduce their first drafts by at least ten percent, I seem to have gone in the opposite direction by wide margin. However, the way I look at it is this: I've now got a novel draft that I am very happy with and feel is a substantially better book than the second draft in almost every way. From this point onwards, a professional editor can help me to reduce the draft to its essentials and get the book down to a fighting weight, so to speak. The story now contains all the essential elements and the many supporting details in a smoothly-flowing read that, considering the very positive feedback I got on the second draft should blow the socks off people who read this new version.

As of this evening, I have up to Chapter 5 of my second book outlined in detail, scene by scene. There is also a rough outline of Chapters 6 to 10 in place, with some other key plot points filled in at various points for the rest of the novel. Considering that I had a very basic outline for the first novel, the detailed outline for this second book will make things easier, as I've already mentioned in past posts.

Knowing where you're going and how a book will end makes an author's journey much easier and frees his muse to fill him in on all the details as he goes along. 

My eyes have given up the game well before 11pm tonight. Fortunately, I've finished the blog and put the final touches on it to boot, so it's off to rest with a cool cloth for a bit before bed and and early morning as has become the norm of late. Have a great week!