today, i am waiting.

 journal  6 Responses »
Oct 282007
 

I am none too good at waiting. Patience, thy name is not Deb.

I have ordered a new bed and mattress, but does the phone ring to tell me the new bed and mattress (and the good night's sleep I need) is ready? No. The phone is stubbornly silent. The phone, in fact, is taunting me. It allows through text messages which have nothing to do with beds and mattresses, but nothing else.

I have always suspected that phones are (not so) secretly evil.

In the meantime, I have been distracting myself with random and useless trivia.

On Friday, I learnt how to spell proctosedyl. I'm sure that'll come in handy. Sometime. Probably not in the immediate future. Actually, by the time it comes in handy, I'll probably have forgotten, and all I'll be able to remember is the price of an IVF cycle in 2007. (I quote that number a lot. A lot lot.) I also visited an old drinking haunt from my uni days, but that only served to make me feel excessively old.

Yesterday, I entertained myself (for (very loose) values of "entertained" equalling bored) writing website code for the dayjob. I passed the evening drinking a bottle of bourbon I had been given no less than 10 (10!) years ago. What was I thinking, leaving it so long? It was awfully good, however. Today I miss it.

none too bright

 journal, writing life  1 Response »
Oct 272007
 

Richard Steinberg at StoryTellersUnplugged has a great article on why writers write:

The thirty-seven writers in my address book (along with me) are a pretty diverse bunch. We live in five countries spread across two hemispheres, to say nothing of a bunch of us scattered throughout AmeriCanada. The youngest is nineteen, the oldest ninety-three. Male and female, rich and poor, gifted and self-taught; frighteningly wealthy, piteously poor, and all stages in between.

And we’re all not too bright.

today was a good day

 journal, novels, shadow bound  12 Responses »
Oct 242007
 

Today I purchased (or ordered, and paid a deposit for) a new bed and a new mattress. (Which, given that purchasing mattresses involves lying down in public and is therefore on the whole an awkward and slightly ridiculous affair, is quite an achievement. The salesman in the mattress store did not share my sense of humour.) Given my current mattress is probably pushing 15 years, my back and neck will thank me when the brand new mattress arrives.

Buzzing slightly from the experience of spending money,1 I thought about parting with yet more of the hard-earned on some CDs or DVDs. I held off on that one, though, because my family would quite likely kill me if I happened to buy something they'd already earmarked as a gift.

Also today, I managed to get 23 words on the novel, thereby officially breaking the drought. I know this does not seem like much to celebrate, but drought-breaking is always to the good. There would have been more, but a phone call derailed me on that front. Incidentally, the phone call was also good news, so on the whole I couldn't get angry about losing my writing time, just this once. Besides, there will be more words tonight, when I find another pocket of spare time and can get un-derailed.

In the meantime, it's time to pretend I'm domesticated enough to know how to operate an iron, and avoid burning myself while ironing shirts for work.2

  1. Clearly I don't do this spending thing often enough. [↩]
  2. Seriously, I do not jest. Although I've never topped the achievement of a friend of mine, who really should not have been ironing while naked. Lesson learned, I should think. [↩]

the land of stuck

 journal, novels, shadow bound, writing life  7 Responses »
Oct 232007
 

The novel is (hopefully: has been) well and truly stuck.

I've tried all the usual tricks, such as sneaking up on the plot by exercising, and writing other stories, watching tv so dull and boring I'd honestly rather watch the carpet in front of the tv than what's on the screen, watching stories I love and which inspire me…

I've even tried — prepare yourselves — combing through the plot of both this novel and the previous one, and writing every beat down, and compiling a list of what I have, what I wanted but have forgotten, and what I still need.

That was so wearying I had to take a day to rest. There's only so much plot my brain can handle before it starts dreaming of eating macaroni and cheese and intellectual tasks no more stimulating than wondering what's on the other channel.

Of course, the latter may have had something to do with the dayjob as well. It's always possible. For some reason, probably related to the fact that it's everybody else's first day of the week and my last day of the week, I find Mondays the hardest.

I'm not actually sure which tactic proved the most successful, but let it be said: it was while I was watching the carpet that the first plot snippet crept up on me.1

At any rate, I now have the teeniest inkling of the events which should, hopefully, if all is well and my wrangling is successful, tie together into an ending. Not all of the events I need, nor all of the answers I need, but perhaps that's for the best. I've always found outlines drain the joy from writing the first draft, for me. Which is a shame, because I'm also feeling an increasing urge to outline my stories. :?

  1. Yes, yes, okay, it was only after I'd done the outlining. [↩]

when market forces go bad good

 journal  7 Responses »
Oct 172007
 

I just purchased an airline ticket to Melbourne — which Google tells me is something over 1,000km distant by road — for $51.

$51!

According to the airline's website, that's a $2 credit card fee, a $9 fare, and $40 in taxes.

If I was going to make the 11+ hour drive to Melbourne, I'd pay at least $100 in fuel alone. And yet I'm essentially flying for $9.

It's a strange world, is all I'm saying. Now that we have more than the one airline in Australia, it's a better world, at least as far as airline fares are concerned.

 Posted by at 1:53 pm

somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even…

 administrivia, journal  5 Responses »
Oct 162007
 

8O
In an attempt to avoid the multiple procrastination born of multi-tasking, I followed Leigh's advice and focussed on one task to the exclusion of all others.

A touch over 18 hours of coding later, 1 I have a new theme for the website.

I'd forgotten how much work goes into making a new theme. This is probably why I was putting it off. Still, it's pretty and much happy-making to have that task knocked on the head. Now all I have to do is look into importing the old posts and fixing up the splash page, and it will be done, done, done.

(Until I decide to do it all over again.)

In the meantime, if you find any bugs or pages not loading, please do let me know. Themes are tricky beasts, and I'm sure I've forgotten something.

  1. 6 hours last night, 12 hours straight today. I know. I'm insane. [↩]
 Posted by at 6:17 pm

i wish you would…

 journal, novels, shadow bound, writing life  5 Responses »
Oct 142007
 

Is it the ever-growing stack of work I have to do which has produced my funk? Or has the funk created the looming pile of tasks? I am not sure which started first, but I know I don't particularly like it. My energy levels can return from wherever it was they ran and hid anytime now, kthxbai.

Lately, I've been waking up at 5:00 every morning. This is because my bedroom faces due east (and even if it didn't, I have two cats who would come tell me as soon as the sun was up), and we're in that tricky month before daylight savings kicks in. Probably this has had some negative effect on the energy levels. This morning, by dint of general weariness and the kind of serious effort you can only put in when you've had decades of practicing at sleeping when it's not required, I managed to sleep in … all the way to 6:45.

There is something wrong with life when 6:45 is a sleep-in.

The novel is still misbehaving, and I'm not sure whether it's the funk or the novel, or some combination of both. I'm actually toying with the idea of putting it aside for a while, working on some short stories or a different novel, while my brain unsticks. If I had any confidence in my brain actually getting down to work on the unsticking of things, that is.

into the woods and outta the woods…

 journal  5 Responses »
Oct 112007
 

Lookit. The only plant which has to date survived my "I don't actually kill plants so much as forever draw out their waning lives on the narrow edge of death… a kind of torture born of inattentiveness and panicked applications of water by way of sudden rescue…" tactics.

Although astute observers will notice the plant is not, strictly speaking, thriving:

That, my friends, is what cat breath (and fangs) will do to a plant. Why yes, this would be the lucky bamboo which survived its six foot plummet to the floor. Astuter observers will notice the water spray bottle in the background, always ready to protect the lucky bamboo from the attacks of playful cats. The moose is courtesy of Suzanne, my roomie at Clarion. Cute, innit he? He has a Canadian flag badge pinned to his antler.

and darling, we go a-drowning…

 journal, novels, shadow bound  2 Responses »
Oct 092007
 

Astute observers will notice I disappeared for a day or two there. Sorry 'bout that. Sick. Better now (at last!), or at least better enough to function.

This of course leaves me decades behind in writing, and facing a rather grim day in terms of getting back into the flow of the novel. I find it hard enough to get back into the novel when I've had a couple of days off. When those couple of days off are because I ran out of plot and the novel started baulking at any new plot I threw at it… well. We shall see. Complicating matters is the presence of a house-guest and her two cats who, not surprisingly, are causing havoc and dissension in the feline residents of this house.1

Despite this, I am cheerful enough — because this morning I purchased tickets to see Rufus in concert early next year. Rufus!

Rufus is one of my favourite singer songwriters. Doesn't matter whether his songs are melancholy, upbeat, passionate or whatever, there's a single, underlying thread of zen in them for me. His songs always suit my mood. And now, if you'll excuse me, I may go and mainline said songs in an attempt to get the novel to behave.

  1. This means I am living with four cats at the moment. My two cats, a girl and a boy, have not been made closer by the presence of enemies in teh house — in fact, the girl cat appears to confuse the boy cat with the enemies, since he's the same colour, and she hates all and sundry. The boy cat cannot stand the other boys and wants only to cuddle in close to the girl cat for added comfort. Meanwhile, the two interlopers (who should at least be reliably sanguine with each other) periodically spat with each other over the pretty girl cat. Oh, and they've discovered the rabbit. It's like a comedy with fangs. Without the comedy. [↩]
 Older Entries