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.

Billions, Baggins and Befuddlement

The word of the week is belief.

September 24 - The Hobbit

Only a few months to go until the first half of The Hobbit is released in theaters! I was one of those folks who stood in line for the LOTR trilogy when the movies were released and I have a feeling I'll again be standing in the front ranks come December when the tale of Bilbo Baggins hits the big screen.

The Hobbit is the first fantasy story that fired my imagination as a child. We took it as a class project in Grade Six, having it tied in with the recently-released 1977 animated film along with a copy of the Deluxe Movie book that contained still images from the film:

For me, that film is a wonderful memory and my first step into Tolkien's world as well as the many others that awaited me as I discovered Fantasy literature. It ignited a passion that remains to this day and I'm glad to see others doing their best to pass on these treasures to new generations:

September 25 - Job? Nyet.

I'm feeling somewhat better today, but I still have no energy. I've been napping on and off as best I can, given the activities upstairs and outside. Earplugs, headphones and determination are the order of the day.

Jobs however, seem rather scarce. I've combed through the advertised ones and come up empty, save for the usual basic retail-sales-service jobs that pay a pittance and ask a lot of your soul. To find the jobs that aren't advertised and that I might actually find a better fit to my wants, it's going to be a grind. Networking will be the key, so I'm extending some more feelers this week and seeing what comes up.

Freelance work is always an option, though it won't work well if my wrists can't keep up. The burning pain in my left arm only returns if I type for too long or too often, so the specialist's prediction that it might take up to two years( or longer )to heal seems on the money. Learning to type with my voice means I'll have to find the time to practice more over the next few months and also means I'll be tied to my PC at home; the laptop doesn't have the power to run the voice-recognition software. I'm toying with the idea of recording articles and then having them translated after, but that doesn't work well with the writing process; nobody I know of does a perfect take the first time. It takes editing and time.

So we'll see where I am in a month's time.

September 26 - More Tiny Homes

The trend towards smaller homes continues, as designers and creative folk get on board the movement. One home by designer Jessica Helgerson is used as a weekend home by her family. It's simple and makes use of every bit of space inside as well as integrating a lot of outside space into the home's use.

There's quite a few tiny houses all around the world, but so far it's been hard to get images of more than a few at a time. However, I've found a site that seems to be collecting images of tiny homes from all over the globe: TinyhousesWoon.com. There's quite a few designs in there that I haven't seen; one and all, they look fairly comfortable for a few people to live in - large families excluded, of course.

September 27 - Mail-Order Monsters

You know, it's strange… I had a lot when I was a kid growing up in terms of video game systems, but I never had a computer. At least not until the Coleco ADAM, but that barely counts as such - which probably explains why I was so excited to get an AMIGA 500 in my teens, as it was my first 'real' home computer. My friends all had Commodore64's and Apple IIe's but neither made their way into our household.

So it's doubly strange that my favourite video game of all time( before I discovered NWN, that is! )is Mail Order Monsters for the C64. I loved that game, played it at my friend's houses as often as possible and saved my monsters on a floppy 5.25" disk that I toted with me, which was rare back then. Being able to design monsters and pit them against the creations of my friends was incredibly fun and I went at it with gusto. Which didn't last over a year as I just wasn't any good at it, aside from providing sport for my pals to pummel electronically. Yet the sheer sense of FUN from the game has stuck with me all these decades and I'm hoping that someone out there will update the game one of these days, maybe as a phone app.

I mean, what could be cooler than a dinosaur with a cybernetic brain and a pair of machine guns? C'mon!

September 28 - Fallout

The people upstairs and I have had a falling out, which I'm frankly surprised didn't happen before now. I'm tired of being involuntarily woken around dawn most days and they're tired of my leaving polite notes and / or texts about it. So today I was told not to leave any more notes, just to contact the landlord and / or the police - that's that. I had hoped that opening lines of communication would work, but it seems they can't control their kids well enough or just aren't willing to spend the energy. 

Which, having kids, they likely don't have a lot of; I understand.

Rather than try to sleep past when they usually start banging about, I'm doing the next best thing: modifying my own sleep schedule so that I'm up around the same time as them: 6am. It stinks, no: galls me that I have to cater to THEIR schedule due to THEIR inconsideration, but that's life. They're thinking of their family first and I can't blame them and who knows? By no longer fighting the inevitable, I may get rid of these dark circles under my eyes and start feeling human again. As well as proving the old adage "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" - now I truly know what that means. I might also order one of these to stick my head into and modify it with a lot more stuffing:

I just wonder how long I can hold off until making a noise report. I hope I don't have to, really; they're nice people, just under a lot of stress - same as me. Maybe they'll move soon, as they'd been saying… In the meantime, I'm editing my manuscript despite a lack of decent sleep or a quiet workspace. It's certainly causing me to focus and use what energy I have efficiently, especially in the quiet moments.

September 29 - Progress!

Whew! I managed to get a LOT done on my manuscript today, as for whatever reason the people upstairs were gone for most of the day. I've been using excellent feedback from several sources to comb through my text and correct many minor errors, completing a pass on the first half of the novel by dinnertime today.

It's just write, write, write for the next while. Once I've given the novel a full run through, I'll start to add in parts from my own notes, tighten things up and generally step beyond the technical bits into the 'make the story better and richer' part. I've set a deadline for myself a few days BEFORE the submission cutoff date by Harper-Voyager, to give myself a touch of breathing room. Which means it's heads-down, run-for-the-finish-line every day for the first half of October: I'll be working HARDER than I was at the end of August, to make this work.

I want it to be worth the effort. Here's hoping!

September 30 - A Billion-Year Plan?

I've often thought about the future of the human species, where we'll be in a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million… but a BILLION? That's… a little TOO far for me to conceptualize as any of our descendants bearing any resemblance to the word 'human' after so long.

Yet this was part of the discussion at the recent 100-Year Starship symposium. In truth, the discussion ranged all over the place but this topic caught the attention of more than a few folks, originating as it did on the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence Blog - a lot of smart banter there, also. Check out the highlights as posted on Centauri Dreams and wonder again at the wonder of our species, that we can look so far away AND so far ahead into our own future.

That's all I have for today, really. I thought about this a fair bit when I was much younger, but I didn't get very far as I didn't have the breadth of reading I do today. After reading through parts of the blog and the Centauri site, I realized yet again I'm still not as widely read as I could be. Maybe when I retire…

It's been a rough, rotten-at-times week that's drained a lot out of me. But I'm facing the new week with new determination, to plug ALL that I have into creating the best damn manuscript I can to submit in a few week's time. Once it leaves, it's literally out of my hands and I don't want to regret wasting a minute on such trivialities as a lack of sleep, no job prospects or a lack of a social life. 

Minor things, all, when it comes to being an author. Right?

Feedback, Flushed and Freebies

The word of the week is opportunity.

Sept 17 -Feedback!

As I've already mentioned, yesterday I sent out my novel's manuscript to a few people to get some feedback, vital to making a good draft into a GREAT second draft. I'm hoping to get enough feedback that agrees on the good parts AND the bits that need improvement, but not so much that I can't handle it all. Hence only a few people, for now - too many and I'd spend more time reading feedback than implementing the recommended changes.

In the evening I received some other feedback from my writer's group, who I hosted in the SkyLounge. It was a sub-group, focusing on a novel we had each written, going chapter by chapter. I received some very positive feedback on the first and second chapters of my novel, which was very uplifting and useful. I also gave some solid feedback on the works of the other four people there, who are all solid writers and more used to this sort of thing than I am, as it was my first time in such a group. Which means they were rather forgiving of my gaffes and errors, for which I was grateful. We'll be meeting again in a month's time, when I am expected to have re-worked my first and second chapters using their critiques.

Sept 18 - An almost-free NEW printer?

It's very odd that Providence has been providing me things of late as needed; I'm in NO way unhappy with it, but today was a good example:

For about six months now I've been looking for a good, inexpensive laser printer, as I knew I'd likely have to print a manuscript or six once my novel was finished. Well, I finished my novel and did print up half a manuscript on the HP P1102W that I'd bought as a one-day special( only $30!!! )at the end of 2011. But the little tyke can't handle extended print jobs and my manuscript is almost 400 pages right now. So I've kept my eyes peeled but there's been nothing I'd want to lay out money on for less than $200.

Today while traipsing through Value Village, what should I spot but a sleek HP printer on a shelf? A quick look confirmed it to be a P1606dn, a solid home office laser that only came out in 2010 and in great shape! For $20 it was worth taking a chance on, despite missing two paper trays; there was no toner cartridge either, but that's to be expected. I got it home and ordered an aftermarket toner for another $20, which arrived just two days later from Vancouver; plugging it in, I powered the laser up and to my delight it worked perfectly. The print count said that NO pages had been printed; it was an UNUSED and BRAND NEW printer!!! So instead of paying  upwards of $300 for a new 1606dn plus around $80 for an 'official' toner, I got it all for only $40 - talk about luck!!!

The printer is networkable, meaning I can print to it using its own email address from ANY device( like my phone )no sweat. It's also full duplex, which lets me print on both sides of a page automatically. I printed out the final 200+ pages of my manuscript in less than twenty minutes, which is incredibly fast. The print quality is HP-excellent as always and I'm just thrilled that I found such a PERFECT local bargain!

Sept 19 - A Publisher in October ???

Speaking of signs from the universe:

Today I JUST found out about an opportunity to submit my novel to a publisher!

It's BIG news, as a well-known publisher is making an OPEN call, allowing ANYONE to submit a manuscript to them - even if you don't have an agent, like me! Incredibly, they're VERY keen to get scifi or fantasy submissions… it's like someone heard that my novel was done and popped up this opening!

So I'm under another self-imposed deadline now, to whip my first draft into as close to second-draft shape as I can in LESS than three weeks! While the submissions to the publisher don't have to be in absolute-perfect shape, it cannot hurt my chances to weed out ALL the major bugs, fix a lot of the little ones and add as much as I can from my notes into the novel before I submit it. It's THE BEST chance I'll have to get my novel in the hands of a publisher in the industry and I WILL NOT miss this chance!

Sept 20 - Colds and Job Searching

The universe works in mysterious ways.

Yesterday, I found out I have a chance to submit my novel to a publisher fairly easily, IF I work HARD for the next three weeks on the manuscript… and today I discovered that I've picked up a cold.

CRAP. But so it goes…

My job search is progressing slowly; there's not all that many jobs I'm keen on applying for locally, at least that are listed. I'm going to REALLY push trying to find those 'hidden' jobs, the ones that I'd likely be better suited for and enjoy more than I might a 'standard' job in retail or somesuch. I'm really just looking for something to  a) Pay the bills and let me get ahead a little  b) That won't suck the energy out of me so much daily that I don't have anything left to write with   c) That I might enjoy doing   - none of which are unreasonable goals; I'm certainly not trying to pay a mortgage or raise a family with my pay.

I've thought about putting together a video resume`, but it just seems like overkill. However, THIS guy takes the cake for awesome creative video resumes. He's trying to get in on the just-announced TV series S.H.I.E.L.D. with Joss Whedon:

Sept 21 - Sick Stinks

Whatever bug I've picked up is now in full swing, having gone from my throat to my nose and sapping all my energy to boot. I did very little during the day today save domestic tasks, sleeping when and how I could. Which wasn't much.

One thing I did do was to discover an online repository forElfQuest! This was a comic I remember coming across when I was growing up in the Eighties, a hybrid mix of fantasy and scifi which caught my interest.

Now you can peruse EVERY ElfQuest comic ever made, for free! I'm not all that familiar with the series, but there's a devoted following out there so that does tell me there's more than a few good tales to be had in these comics. I'll peruse them more thoroughly when I have more time and more energy…

Sept 22 - Feeling Absolutely Awful

The people upstairs woke me four separate times last night, so that by the time morning rolled around I felt inhumanly exhausted. Not to mention feeling the cold in full swing. I managed to get a couple of hours sleep before they woke me again; at that point I just gave up and tried to get on with my day. I didn't end up doing much and had to leave soon after lunch due to the people upstairs moving a LOT of stuff around. I felt horrible, like I was walking around in a waking dream; even sitting on the patio at Moka House for an hour did little to restore any feeling of humanity. Or energy; I've almost never felt this close to being beside myself. Most of my evening was a blur of spot-naps for fifteen minutes and TV; thanks to some chicken soup for lunch and dinner I managed to get a little writing done but the words kept blurring. My feet and hands are cold, which tells me that the bug is sapping my reserves of energy…

However, my fortunes reversed themselves after dinner: in the morning, I had texted the couple upstairs about the noise levels keeping me from sleeping. Turns out the noises around lunch were them rearranging various bits of furniture upstairs! After dinner, they texted me, having VERY generously put forward making changes to their sleeping arrangements to deaden the sound of tending to their young kids in the night. They mentioned making other changes too, all of which added up to a 90% reduction in the sounds from overhead. It was wonderful and a testament to having a polite, open dialogue with your neighbours instead of letting emotion get the upper hand. I went to bed with a VERY changed mood, no longer a sleep-deprived zombie but just a tired guy hoping for a better night's sleep…

Sept 23 - Recovery Day

Last night I slept wonderfully, all due to the people upstairs after talking with them yesterday evening. It wasn't a perfect night's sleep but I did feel somewhat rested, even given my cold-wracked head. I spent the morning writing up part of my blog and then napped for a bit, which actually helped as my nose cleared up and I could smell my lunch, which was a pleasant change. I even went out for the afternoon for a few hours to sit in the sun and just try to enjoy the day, which was easier as my nose no longer looked like I'd been using sandpaper on it. Apart from the dark circles under my eyes, I felt closer to human today than I have for the last forty-eight hours. More chicken soup for dinner also helped, as did watching Flushed Away, a cute animated yarn that I've enjoyed a few times over the years; English accents always make a movie more enjoyable for me for some reason. Weird, eh?

I'm really hoping to dive into editing my manuscript tomorrow using the feedback I've received so far, if I get my energy levels back. Even if I don't, I NEED to, as the clock is ticking to make my novel the BEST it can be before I submit it in less than three weeks. I HAVE to get it done, to the exclusion of all else; this is an incredibly rare opportunity and one that may not come again for a LONG time. No pressure…