lizvogel

In looking back over the past decade or so, I don't have a good sense of what went on when, not just this past year, but for quite a few years running. I mean, I remember events if the subject comes up, but I've been too busy scrambling from thing to thing to form any kind of coherent overall timeline-impression. This realization comes out of a conversation with the housemate recently, in which we started stacking up major events and came to the conclusion that fuck, it's no wonder we're exhausted. So, for my reference/enlightenment/reassurance/future planning (i.e., don't do this!), here's a timeline of the last something-or-so years, in bullet-point form. (Subject to updates/correction as I remember stuff.)
( cut because, good grief! )

I ended up taking three days off to fix the front privacy fence. (Two broken posts to dig out, including what looked like two separate pours of concrete, then new posts to set, holes to fill, and pickets to reattach/replace, plus miscellaneous other repairs.) That was a lot longer than anticipated; I'd originally written off Saturday, but was hoping to have a little bit of Sunday left, never mind Monday. Very glad to have the job done; the posts broke in a bad windstorm a year or two ago, and I don't think the fence would've survived another winter propped up with sticks.

But three days, it turns out, is a day too long to take off without losing momentum, and I had a lot of rereading to do to get back into the book today. Got there, though; plugged out over a thousand words this afternoon. And then I sat down and did another thousand this evening!

I wish I could attribute it to virtue, but frankly it's the impending doom of the calendar. I'll hit 30K no problem, unless something very weird happens. But my other goal this month was to finish the book, and that one's in peril. I didn't have those three days to spare for that; I'm looking at the five now remaining, one of which I'll probably lose to Thanksgiving, and the five post-it notes of events that still need to happen, and I just don't see it getting done. Even if I ( outline spoiler ) I honestly can't tell if that's appealing because it would be more dramatic/better pacing, or if it's just that it would get the thing done sooner. Contemplating it did shift me from oh-god-is-this-scene-still-not-done to being excited about the end of the book, so I'll probably give it a go; we'll see what the words do when I get there.

Whatever happens, I did 2129 words today, and that ain't bad at all.

28,076 new words and counting.

Had a kick-ass writing session yesterday (2045 words!), and still finished in time to ice the cookies I'm taking to family turkey-day. That was after a morning where I absolutely could not get started; it helped a lot when I finally realized I'd forgotten my morning Red Bull. *facepalm* That, and throwing myself at the page. (But maybe mostly the Red Bull.)

That was the lead-in to the Big Thing I've been looking forward to writing. So today was the Big Thing, and... four hours to barely drag out 1092 words? C'mon, brain! This is supposed to be the fun part!

Probably didn't help that I'd prewritten a bit that turned out not to fit ( spoiler ), so I had to rework that and try to save as much of my clever wording as possible. And then figure out how to get everybody where I needed them when they wouldn't naturally be there. And it didn't help that I had a bunch of tasks to do this morning that put me in a non-writing headspace. And that LittleGirl really wanted to sit on my lap and purr. (That "help", I'll take.)

Still, it's another thousand words. That ain't crap. Maybe tomorrow I can manage to have fun with the rest of the fun part?

22,086 new words and counting.

Tuesday is a designated writing day, and I've been looking forward to it. (I finished chapter 7 last time, and got my characters to a workable place. I also admitted that the book really is going to need another 30,000 words and possibly as much as 50,000, which will make it by far the longest thing I've ever written, but I just re-read the whole thing from the beginning and there's really not any fat to trim, and there is a lot more territory to cover. I'm wailing and gnashing my teeth at the amount of work yet to do, but so be it.) Anyway, so I got up today and set up all the writing stuff, the laptop and the giant whiteboard and the coffeemaker, and settled down to get some wordage done.

And nothing happened. I can't focus, I can neither come up with the first line of chapter 8 nor work backward from the snippets I wrote ahead, my brain feels like a wrung-out sponge at the very thought of constructing a sentence, never mind laying the groundwork for the Next Thing. I can see the rough structure of the rest of the book, but it feels like an amoeba looking at a flight of stairs; it can probably be done, but I don't see me being the one to do it. None of my usual tricks made any dent.

Oh.

Sick day.

Because yesterday, as I was leaving to meet up with some friends for a walk, I discovered someone had hit a deer right in front of the house. Since he wasn't going to claim it and I hate waste, I filled out a DNR salvage form and texted my friends that I was going to be late (and later, not coming at all). And then, while everybody else had a nice walk and a pleasant conversation, I spent six and a half hours butchering a deer. Much of it bent double, because that was the best angle, and the rest sitting/kneeling on hard concrete in positions that made one leg or the other go numb. And went to bed past midnight on a day where I'd woken up at 7:00 am, with my back failing and my hands shaking, so tired that I was literally light-headed and in danger of falling over.

This isn't a story problem or resistance to the amount of work to be done or some other writing issue. This is fatigue.

So much as I hate to give up a writing day, I'm taking this one off. I will find something productive but unchallenging to do, and maybe plink at some words on another project later, but mostly I'm going to rest. Because while the back is working again and the hands are functional (if not as strong as usual), the brain is still recovering. And that's okay.

Our kitchen has a wall with the stove and a tiny chunk of counter, bracketed by two built-out bays, one for the fridge and one presumably for an indoor freezer. Since like most of the house the kitchen is a large room but desperately short on storage and work space, we opted for putting the freezer in the garage and building shelves/temporary counter into the freezer bay. (Temporary in this case means about a quarter of a century, of course.) Assorted mishaps in the past year or two led to the "temporary" stuff being pulled out, and the bay just sitting there.

Yesterday I (finally!) took down one of the two walls that forms the freezer bay. I'd previously confirmed that it wasn't structural, so it should have been a quick bash-and-pull. And it turns out it wasn't structural... but it was interwoven with the structure in a way that just makes me completely baffled as to what they were thinking, or even in what order it was all built. I'd assumed the room walls were built first, and the "bay" walls were tacked in later... but I think those bays must have gone up when the rest of the room did. And why was that 2x4 cross-hatched that way, and who puts a board up there to nail the ceiling drywall to that's being held down by the wall framing, and....! And one part of one layer of the bay wall (there were two layers, making a double-thick wall sticking out into the room, I have no idea why) is part of the support for one of the hewn-wood beams in the ceiling. So that's staying; I can knock it back flush to the adjacent bit of wall, but I can't take it out to make the "bay" area that four inches wider. Okay, I can cope with that. But what the hell they were thinking with supporting the beam in three or four different segments, and notching it, and.... Yeah. It's weird. The whole layout is weird, and the structure underlying it is freakin' bizarre.

But! With that one bay wall gone, the room is already vastly more open and spacious feeling. I hadn't realized that I instinctively scrunched up every time I left the kitchen that way, until now suddenly I don't have to. I can walk out of the room like a normal human being! And someone in the entryway can actually hear the person in the kitchen talking! It's only about a foot of actual floor space that's newly exposed, but the effect is downright magical.

I can't wait to see what it's like when the other bay wall is gone. Which will be trickier, because we're keeping the cabinets on the other side of it, and I won't know what's attached where until I get into it. (And what weird and unnecessary interlinkings with the structure may be in there.) And it'll be a few days, because while I can still work just as hard and long on a project as I ever could, I'm not so good about getting up and doing it all over again the next day. (And this is coming on the heels of discovering our sump pump wasn't working, in the way one usually discovers that, and all the icy-cold-water-in-crawlspace fun that involved.) But it's going to be awesome.

Tuesday was supposed to be a writing day, and this is what I did instead. Not sorry.

It's a shame I didn't find Library Comic while I was still working there, but even after the fact, I'm finding it strangely cathartic.

This one sums up a large percentage of my ex-job in a mere four panels:
https://librarycomic.com/comic/210/



In other news, I did not need a water heater problem, especially not one that involved draining the thing multiple times in sub-freezing weather. But it's fixed now (knock quite a lot of tree products), and I've had my first hot shower in two days.

Yesterday I hit 75% of the 50K goal, which is pretty damned good for just over halfway through the month. (I started at about 53%, this being wuss-mode NaNo, but I'm still quite pleased with it.)

I just reached 39,041 words, or 78%. (That's 78% of NaNo, not 78% of the book. Probably just over a third of the eventual book.) I took a productivity hit on Saturday because I went to a local maker group's open house, and got thoroughly distracted by the potential of OMG the toys! But apparently raw Mustelidae* and theology discussion was what I needed to get back in the groove.

I have poked a bit at the convention, and been thwarted by internet problems and people not cashing their reimbursement checks. I have done my best to ignore the estate for a while, and been thwarted by relatives wanting status reports. Real life remains a work in progress.

Now there's a cat sitting on my arm. :-)


* As the sticker says, pay no attention to my browsing history; I'm a writer, not a serial killer.

We have an accepted offer on the condo, just waiting for a closing date. All the furniture's out that's going, and almost everything else (new owners lost everything in the FL hurricane, so they'll take whatever we want to leave). Just need to get the last few decorations, do a final clean, and keep the mums on the porch from dying.

I'm taking the next few days to collapse. I slept in today (eleven glorious hours, with only two cat interruptions!), I anticipate more of the same tomorrow, and if anybody tries to schedule me for anything other than the one convention meeting I've got coming up, they are going to be made to change their minds, fast.

NaNo starts in four days. Am I doing it?

The arguments against are obvious: I'm exhausted, beyond any previous definition of exhausted I've ever known. I haven't written more than a handful of words since last November. I'd have to boot the current book back up in my brain, and I'm not sure my brain can even retain that much data right now.

The arguments in favor are more subtle, but compelling: I very much want to get back to normal, and writing is, or should be, a big part of my normal. NaNo would certainly jump-start it. Writing is one of my top priorities, and it's the one I've most abandoned for the past year. NaNo gives me a built-in framework for saying no, sorry, I can't do that thing you want, I have to write. And in various ways, my entire past year has been about doing for others. I really want to do something just for me for a while.

If I decide yes, there's also the question of what I'll actually do. It'd be the same book I dropped in the middle of last NaNo, Apocollapse. Do I start on November 1st and try to add 50,000 new words? Do I start on November 11, the day Mom went down, and aim for 50,000 total? Or some other convolution of mathing?

I should at least re-read what I've got and see if the brain cells sit up and take notice. Maybe in a couple of days, after some more zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

In Memoriam: Janet Reid

I was never active on her blog, but I learned a lot from her, and she was kind enough to answer my question about how to handle my then-upcoming first publication in query letters. Her generosity with her time and knowlege was a tremendous resource to aspiring authors.


This comes a couple days after my trusty auto mechanic passed away, and while I'm deep in dealing with Mom's estate and all that entails. People need to quit with this dying thing, dammit.

There will be more words later, but for now:

https://www.vickersfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/Patricia-Lou-Vogel?obId=31027504