wonderbink: Kermit the Frog making a crumpleface (crumpleface)
I’ve probably quoted that song before on this blog, but, hey, it sums things up.

Top order of business—I’ve set up a site to publicize my friend Lake’s fundraiser so she can keep her house. Have a look, and, if you can, please donate. If you can’t donate, at least spread the word. Her house is a treasure, and it would be a shame if it were lost. Click here to have a look.

I’m doing okay. Still working at the Big Green Grocery Store, with limited hours so I can devote time to earning money in other ways. I’ve landed a gig ghostwriting romance novels, and it’s been pretty fun so far. It’s a different experience writing to spec instead of going where inspiration wanders. I’m working on revising and adding to last year’s NaNoWriMo project for when my inspiration needs wandering. Right now, I’m at the part where the narrator is talking to a guy she used to write fanfic about and telling him the story of How She Met Her Boyfriend.

I’m doing another scoring project for Standardized Testing Company. It’s been pretty easy to score, which I am simultaneously grateful for and horrified by, because the reason I don’t have to think too hard about it is because they didn’t either.

I found myself making a list of things I thought—and occasionally said aloud—while scoring.

1. That’s nice. Off-topic, but nice.
2. What a perfect tautology!
3. No. No.
4. Let’s play “Count the Mistakes!”
5. Entertaining, but wrong.
6. Commas. You need to use commas.
7. Whut?
8. Seriously, whut?
9. No, it doesn’t!
10. *Hysterical laughter*
11. I can make that out, but it’s wildly irrelevant!
12. Lovely. Now, let’s look at your argument.
13. *Buzzer noise*
14. Are you sure you didn’t get that mixed up with some anime you saw?
15. I…I…I…I don’t even understand what you’re trying to say.
16. Madness, I tell you! Madness!
17. Gaaaaaaaaaah!
18. Okay, we’ve got seven errors in the first paragraph. I don’t think this is getting a [top score].
19. Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi!
20. No. No. No. No. No!
21. *Hysterical laughter, followed by coughing fit*

I fell a little behind on my hours, so today was run-to-catch-up. I’m putting in a couple more hours tonight, so maybe I can pull a little ahead and get some breathing room. Yay education!

Today I took pleasure in an unhurried shower.

Today I learned that Norway is the happiest country in the world.
wonderbink: "I'm way too busy being AWESOME right now" in black letters on a red background. (awesome)
Okay, I'll just say that John Barrow lost the runoff and I am pissed (and worried), but I've done all I can.

Meanwhile, in the rest of my life . . .

I made it through National Novel Writing Month with most of my sanity intact. I hit 50,000 before November 30, and I ended on a reasonably graceful cliffhanger at the 54,527 word mark. I probably could have gotten farther ahead had (a) my part-time job not suddenly decided that I needed full-time hours, in the form of brain-meltingly long (nine or ten hour) shifts and (b) I'd not gotten involved with a fellow I met through one of my writers' groups, who shall be hereinafter referred to as the Gentleman Caller.

The novel is still incomplete--I had a detailed outline that I worked on over the past year and I cut things off about two-thirds of the way through it. My plan is to work on it as a leisure activity over the next few months and then toss it in the same trunk that all my NaNoWriMo efforts go. I'll be shifting most of my writerly focus back to The Two Kinds of Magic, an urban fantasy novel I've been working on for more years than I want to calculate. I found a terrific writers' group that specializes in genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy and horror, specifically) and it's been great to get insight from people who can grasp where I'm coming from. It's also more thorough feedback, because people are going from written submissions instead of (as in other groups I've been in) read aloud.

I was talking to the Gentleman Caller about Mod Boy the other night, and I did the math and realized that it had been years since I'd seen Mod Boy. So I sent him an email asking how he was. Keep in mind, that emailing him is like (and I have told him as much) dropping a stone down a deep well and waiting for the splash. (He agreed with me!) Because of that, I was genuinely startled to find an email back from him the next day. He caught me up a little on what he's been up to--he's going to be a father again soon and he's working on another book. (Did I mention that he wrote a book? One that he was working on when I met him? Did I mention that this was one of the big reasons I fell for him like a thing dropped from a great height? Yeah. Anyway. Consider it mentioned.) He said he was well and wished me the same. I wrote him back to tell him about my NaNoWriMo victory and to congratulate him on his impending fatherhood. I didn't leave a single question or conversational hook to try and drag him back with, I just sent it out and let it go.

If you're new here, check out the "mod boy" tag on this journal. It will fill you in on what a big step that is.

I'm still slugging it out at the Big Green Grocery Store and I'm doing another project for Standardized Testing People. I'm working on acquiring a new workplace to give a weird name to, preferably with full-time hours, benefits and a generous salary, so I can pay my own mortgage without parental help.

The Ten Thousand Flowers Project continues steadily. I set it aside for NaNoWriMo, but now that that's over now, I plan to resume at my two-flower-a-day pace.

I think that's about it for now. See you in three months.
wonderbink: "I'm way too busy being AWESOME right now" in black letters on a red background. (awesome)
Maybe I should update it or something.

Went through another rough patch a few weeks ago--a pointed reminder that my condition is not one that vanishes into normalcy with a magic combination of pharmaceuticals--but my moods have improved since then and now all I'm dealing with is the low hum of frustration at being unemployed. I've found jobs to apply to and even gotten a call back on one pretty recently, but there's only so much I can do from my end in that department.

I've been doing what I can to keep myself useful (in some way) in the meantime. As I mentioned previously, I have finished the draft of The Two Kinds of Magic and after I do an initial pass of tweaky-fixy revisions, I'll be sending it out to a few select folks for review. I'm already sketching out ideas for the next novel in the series and I'll start work while I'm waiting to hear back from my Panel of Experts.

I've been taking voice lessons from a friend whom I will call Red Boots and guitar lessons from my friend Captain B. Having a place I need to be twice a week has been helpful and being responsible to another person has pushed me harder than I can typically push myself. I'm still in kind of a muddly stage of things where I can kinda play and kinda sing and even perform in public before a sufficiently forgiving audience. I'm still painfully aware of how far I have to go, though, so I'm not all that cocky about it.

Yes, I'm still drawing ten thousand flowers. I'm just kinda crap about the giving-them-away part.

I took a class (of sorts) in process art and now have an old book that I'm slapping acrylic paint and lipstick on the pages of and turning into art.



All I really need is a reliable source of income to support all this nonsense, and I'll be fine.

Today I took pleasure in Eggs Benedict for Easter brunch.

Today I learned that the labyrinth by the library has gotten weedy in my absence.

Drafted

Apr. 15th, 2014 06:25 pm
wonderbink: The outline of a star surrounded by tiny (illegible) writing (riter)
Let it be known to all and sundry that I have finally have a complete draft of a novel with the tentative title of The Two Kinds of Magic. Let there be much rejoicing!

(And after that, let there be much revision, but let me enjoy my little victories for now.)

Today I took pleasure in filling in the one last gap in the manuscript.

Today I learned that the self-service kiosk at my post office stops being self-service on tax deadline day.
wonderbink: The outline of a star surrounded by tiny (illegible) writing (cleanthings)
So, in the wake of the incident that we shall hereinafter refer to as The Unpleasantness, I've been taking advantage of my newly-freed time to do things like an archeological dig through the accumulated stacks of paper in my designated inbox, the re-folding and re-organizing my T-shirts in alphabetical order and taking a pair of suede shoes I picked up for free in a swap meet and dying them black because the original color was a shade of pale aqua that I have no interest in. (Any of you who recall what my place looked like before I painted the pastels away on my walls might recognize the shade as what the bedroom used to look like.) It's taking more than one coat to eliminate the aqua but they should be complete and dry by DragonCon, I hope.

Speaking of things I hope to have finished by DragonCon, I still have it in my head that I want to finish a workable draft of The Two Kinds of Magic by then. So what did I do last night? Pour out an entire longhand scene for AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT BOOK. Seriously, subconscious, why you gotta do that to me? However, I did, on one of my long walks, figure out something about the hero's past which I think will help the love story portion of the program. (The plot is fairly sound, but the love story is a bit shaky, which I think is one of the blocks I have on proceeding.)

I've been getting out a bit more here and there--saw Megan Jean and the KFB at 529 and 1964-The Tribute at Variety Playhouse over the past weekend. This coming weekend, Joel Hodgson of MST3K fame is making two special appearances at the Plaza and you bet yer sweet ass I'm going to both of 'em.

I'm seized by a lot of restless energy that makes it hard to sit still and work on one thing for long stretches, so I'm working on a lot of little things in short stretches. I think I'm going to go and dab suede dye on some shoes now.

Today I took pleasure in slightly melty ice cream.

Today I learned the MARTA app now shows the approximate locations of buses on their routes as they travel.
wonderbink: The outline of a star surrounded by tiny (illegible) writing (cleanthings)
There's not much May left, is there? I'd better get my crap together before June hits.

The first weekend in June is officially booked with my latest niece's baptism on Saturday and Rock and Roll Monster Bash on Sunday. (For those of you on my list asking "do WHAT?" about the first item--yes, I'm an auntie again to Miss Isabelle Grace O'Shea, the second daughter of my younger brother, Patrick, and his lovely wife Carrie.) Both events should provide quite the contrast to each other.

The following weekend, I will be hosting the 21st Anniversary of my 21st birthday in the usual style. Unfortunately, pulling the plug on Facebook as abruptly as I did has left me occasionally scrambling for contact information I thought I had. The past few weekends of shows (I have a job! I can afford cover charges again!) have seen me pulling people aside to extract email addresses from them. Only one has bounced back so far and it was kind of a long shot anyway.

The next two weekends, I'll be in Italy on a family trip. The last three days of it will be spent hurled in the general direction of Venice before I fly out. I'm trying to coordinate a meet up with [livejournal.com profile] freecloud13 at some point, because it would be a darn shame to go all the way there and not see her after so many years of knowing her.

The last day of June has already pretty much been written off as recovery time.

Meanwhile, I have work to do at the law firm. Boy howdy, do I have work to do. I'm making an effort to pace myself, keep stress to a minimum and do the best I can with what I have and what I know. As precarious as life as a temp is, it comes with certain advantages, and one of those advantages is the ability to say, "Sure, I can work overtime, but you know it's gonna cost you, right?"

I'm poking along at a romance novel and I need to restructure the way I work on it since I decided that using the MARTA commute to get work done, while surprisingly productive, was too much strain on me to be worth it. They let me park for free at the office and I can get there faster in my own car, so I did that for a week and I may never go back to MARTA to get to this job unless my car can't get me there for whatever reason.

The only thing I want to say about Mod Boy right now is that I sent him an invite to the birthday party. We'll see if he shows. (It's a long damn drive from where he lives, so I'm not hanging too heavy a coat on that hook. Low expectations, high hopes, as [livejournal.com profile] azewewish would say.)

Today I took pleasure in plucking cherry tomatoes from one of my patio plants first thing in the morning.

Today I learned a few more nifty things about how to fill out immigration forms.
wonderbink: The outline of a star surrounded by tiny (illegible) writing (make-believe)
So. I got it in my head that I should really re-read The Lord of the Rings because I've had a one-volume copy that I picked up on swap.com and never actually sat down and read. I keep getting all choked up at odd bits and needing to set the book aside and sniffle a bit.

I am Aragorn son of Arathorn; and if by life or death I can save you, I will.

*meep*

Anyway. One thing that's been slowing my progress is the fact that I keep getting clobbered over the head with all these other ideas for a whole other book that is, funnily enough, a subversion of quite a number of quest tropes though I hope subverted in a way that still retains what it is we gain from them. We'll see if I pull it off.

The working title, which I came up with today, is Fool's Chess. I also dusted off my glass chess set, because I will undoubtedly have need of it. Right now I'm sharing a lot of headspace with a manic pixie dream, erm, being called Zinzidor (among other names) who is something like Tom Bombadil by way of Chuz, Lord of Madness with a side order of Pippi Longstocking. Zin also hops back and forth between genders, making pronouns confusing and pretty much marking the work for doom in school libraries. But perhaps it will be a more enlightened age by the time it sees print. It's going to be a long time writing it, I can already tell you that and I've only just started hashing out notes for the thing.

So, er, that's what I've been up to today. Or, by the time I post this, yesterday. It's been a weird day.

Today I took pleasure in coming up for a tune for a song.

Today I learned that insomnia has not yet left me.

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wonderbink: The outline of a star surrounded by tiny (illegible) writing (Default)
Sheila the Wonderbink

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