I never actually thought I’d see a commercial that generated more cognitive dissonance and fear that the end of times are upon us than this one: But this comes pretty damn close:
I have but to rearrange the folder archive of my writing files (to better distinguish between “do now” projects and “percolating for ideas” projects) and tidy up some boxes, then the study is done. Not complete, for there are still projects that remain long-term on the organising front (filing cabinet, wardrobe full of crap), but done enough that I know what needs to happen on all front. I have, however, sorted through seventeen decks of playing cards and tossed those that are no longer complete. I also found a movie ticket for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film that I felt the need to archive once upon a time. No, not the recent one; I’m talking about the first one. Both the ongoing projects list and the very next thing that needs doing lists are getting out of control, but I should be able to burn through the majority of the entries over the weekend. Still, I move onward to the bedroom now, and hope remains that there’s some chance I can get through this process in the appointed amount of time.
It’s day two of the great purge-and-reset, and I’m yet to get out of the office. Twelve straight hours of sorting files and making mental notes on projects yesterday (which proved surprisingly exhausting) and I’m finally down to the last box of lost papers/books and a two-drawer desk-caddy that’s got loose papers in it. I figure I’ll have the study finished tonight, then it’s on to the bedroom. Oh, the things that have been tossed out over the last twenty-four hours. I’ve made seven trips to the bin thus far, each time loaded up with an arm-full of paperwork I no longer need, and what remains is still a pile large enough to animate and give sage advice to fraggles should it so desire. Among the many things tossed out: tax records from 1995; hard-copy of seven chapters from a fantasy novel draft I’m pretty sure I didn’t write – I think it’s Sean’s, from back before I spooked him out of asking about things like that and WoW devoured his life; stacks of notes from sixteen different RPG campaigns I barely remember running (three I remember with fondness were kept for archival purposes); seven different drafts of the Unicorn novella; a metric butt-load of e-book print-outs from my CGW days; 30 or so notebooks full of shorthand recording student presentations from the last seven years. None of these things should have been kept, not really, but I’m a stacker by nature – things get put in piles and shuffled around,
Just got my latest creative project draft from the associate supervisor (aka our gatekeeper, since he’s the one coming at the work fresh and without two years of living with the stories). It looks like I’m correcting formatting and doing some minor line-edits, with a few spots that need a little more clarity. The rest is largely a thumbs up and an “it’s all good and it’ll earn the degree; now finish your exegesis.” Plus the possibility of teaching work is back on the cards after a long absence, so I may be eating something other than two minute noodles come march. Now I’m going back to the to-do list from hell.
So last night I ran down the list: – Feeling like there’s too much to do, yet doing nothing of note? Check. – Spawning new projects I just have to do because “they’re so damn cool” instead of finishing old projects? Check – Not sleeping? Check. – Avoiding blog-posting? Check. – Resurgence of interest in both wrestling and gaming, with a hyper-focus on my favourite wrestling-sim that often supersedes sleep and food*? Yeah, that’s there too; check. Yep, all the signs are there and my customary ambivalence in the face of things that stress me out remains ineffective. It’s time to hit the big old mental reset button and start reworking my to-do list from the ground up. I’ve given myself permission to do nothing but get my life in order for the next four or five days, ransacking the house room-by-room and establishing a workable model for getting done all the stuff I want done. A physical and mental sorting of stuff, if you will. It’s already underway, and it’s starting to frighten me, just a little. Allow me to introduce you too the big ol’ pile of stuff that wasn’t in the right place and now takes up half my office – it mostly consists of unfiled papers, books that have crept off bookshelves, shoes and unusable computer gear. If you need a sense of scale, that gray thing on the top-left of the screen is the plastic bag full of dead ink cartridges that hangs off my doorknob.
At the QWC online promotion seminar, which is very cool but hitting a lull now that folks are learning to set-up wordpress and I already know. After lunch we return to the learning off stuff, but until then: A belated public congratulations to the most awesome Jason Fischer (he of the zombie camels and much other coolness) whose newborn son has arrived in the wide world of late. Do not discover the Middleman series the day before you have to get up at seven am to go to a workshop. It virtually guarantees you’ll get no sleep. That said, I’ve not been this eager to see the next episode of something since, oh, Season Two of the new Doctor Who. Or Buffy. No writing of note lately; it’s too damn hot. But I heard back from the supervisor, who says very complimentary things about the first story in the thesis collection And since it needs to go here somewhere, it appears I now have a Technorati Claim. It doesn’t actually do anything visible, but apparently it’s important.
One of my neighbors is cooking bacon. There is nowhere in my flat I can go to escape it. Any minute now, I’m going to break down and go to the shops.
2013 Update: I Need Your Help If you’re reading this in your RSS feed, please let me know in the comments. It’d also be really helpful if you could let me know which RSS reader you’re using and/or which RSS for the site you’re following – it seems my attempts to spring-clean some old posts have resulted in said posts going out as if they’re new, and I’m trying to rectify the problem. Also, for the record, Laura Goodin’s Peanut Butter Soup Recipe is still awesome five years on, and she posted it on her blog a few years back. I figured that, if anything, was sufficient reason to use an edit this post as a means of doing this test. Thanks in advance, folks, and I now return you to the thoughts of Peter M. Ball from 2008… Yesterday I thought I was meant to be at a QWC workshop, only to discover that I had the dates mixed up and the workshop is sitll a week away. Totally threw me, since I’d more-or-less planned my day around that. Hence yesterday was a terribly non-productive thing, full of out-of-the-house errands and wrestling sims and pizza-ordering sloth. Then, around eleven at night, it wasn’t. The not-writing was getting to me, so I decided to pull out the laptop and do some revision before bed. By the time I went to sleep I’d managed to revise myself about 1200 new words. Today I have to go to the library and make
Not an actual writing post; I’m going to indulge my inner game geek for a moment. Consider yourself warned (unless you have no idea what I’m talking about, in which case check this out and consider yourself informed). Chris Slee has just posted his summary of the last four sessions of my CSI: Arkham campaign over on his site, which serves as a pretty good summary of “what I did with my weekend” really. My inner geek is so damn happy with this campaign, it has to be said. Especially last night’s session. The post-title is stolen from Chris’s write-up; probably a far better summary of the game of anything I can come up with and, since I remain too lazy to do proper write-ups of my sessions these days, I’m just going to point you over there if you have an interest in such things (much as I did for session one).
There is a very peculiar quality to the light outside my study window today. Very white, a little too midday for this early morning hour, and it leaves the view (such as it is) a little bleached out. And although it’s cool and pleasant in my house there’s a very nifty heat-haze rising up off the corrugated iron roof of the neighbor’s place. Soon the cloud cover will shift a little and it’ll all disappear, but right now I’m amusing myself with looking out the window and taking notes. Junked the Black Candy draft last night after long hours of debating its various merits against its various elements of wrongness. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom for new novel writers and will probably come back to haunt me in the near future, but I’m more-or-less convinced it was the right call – I have a novella that shows my love of The Big Sleep already, I don’t actually need an SF novel that shows the same love in the same way, albeit with different window dressing. Especially when the thing on the plan after this is another noir novella that draws influences from Raymond Chandler and talking cat stories. Now I’m off to start over and validate last night’s decision by getting a lot of stuff done.
Word tells me I’ve added about 800 words to the Queen of the Winter Sea today, along with miscellaneous tinkering and cutting, so it should be counted as productive by any reasonable metric. Unfortunately my head still hasn’t got with the program and continues to tell me that I’m making no discernible forward progress – I’m blaming the fact that there seems to be a conflict between my thematic plan and the subtext that’s coming up during the writing process, which largely means that it all feels muddleheaded instead of clicking into place. Solution: call this a draft, let it sit fallow for a few days, and start a new draft over the weekend while working on other stuff. I’ve got enough of a draft down that there’s a shape, so I figure I can give the writer-brain a few days to dwell upon it and trust in its ability to deliver something worthwhile, thematically, that will amuse me as much as the story’s scene-setting and window-dressing. Tomorrow I post something amusing, I promise. Or I post about how damn happy I am that the Dragon Warriors RPG has been re-released. We won’t know for sure until then…
Earlier this week I put together my writing-based to-do list that covers all the stuff I’d like to achieve between now and the end of February. It basically consists of a novel draft, an exegesis draft, a novella draft, and a dozen stories that either need to be written or re-written. It’s the kind of workload that seems reasonable inside my head, but experience says that real life will not let it run as smoothly as I expect. Especially since the work breakdown says I should have a story draft done by this Sunday, as well as a small chunk of novel and a 3500 word outline for the exegesis. My brain is refusing to do any of it and demanding to watch Predator 2 instead (No, I don’t know why Predator 2 has become the topic of fixation, but apparently my subconscious is convinced it’s a reasonable facsimile for work). I’m not panicking about this, which is my usual modus operandi. For starters, I’m not going to give into the Predator fixation, and I can outlast my subconscious in this kind of stuff. I figure sometime, probably in a week or two, it’ll get on board with this list of stuff and get working on it and everything will be hunky-dory until the next complete lapse of writerly discipline and self-doubt hits in March.
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