Stress

4 Things

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1) This morning I introduced a friend to the glory that is Hark, A Vagrant, which is kind of like XKCD for literature and history nerds instead of math-geeks. I mention this purely because I just assume everyone reads these things, but every now and then I’ll be all “the hippos will always be hungry; they will never be satisfied” and people will be all “WTF Peter? That makes no sense.”

2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website.

3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that.

4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at a somewhat impressive pile of credit card debt that I’m not happy about. This is complicated by the fact that I didn’t actually use my credit card for much at Worldcon – I just have various leaks in my budget that tend to add up over time. After spending yesterday going through a year of statements and bank records, the three biggest leaks are: certain kinds of grocery shopping; fuel; books. The first two are mostly a problem because I’m very bad at saying “no, I can’t afford that” when, in truth, I truly can’t afford to do things. The latter is a problem because, well, books are my comfort zone. And it’s really hard to say “no” when I’m in a bookshop. I have a plan for paying off my credit card. Given that I’m unemployed and live alone, it’s a two year plan. Part of it involves saying “no” a lot more than I currently do.

Sadly, the first thing I’ve taken off of my list of things I’d like to do, despite the fact that I can barely afford them is any form of Con or travel until the credit card debt is defeated.

Cutting back on coffee, redux

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So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media.

The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t blog about ’cause they aren’t much fun. Actually articulating these things was a weird experience for me, since my usual approach is to ignore them as best I can and get on with things, but since that approach has been less and less effective over the last three years I was willing to try something new.

Somewhere along the line we got into the topic of my coffee consumption, and the fact that drinking a cup of coffee is generally my response to stress, boredom, anxiety, being around other people, and those moments in the writing process where you aren’t really sure what happens next. We talked about the various merits and flaws of that much caffeine consumption – some of which I knew (too much coffee in short succession actually makes you tired, but stops you from getting good REM sleep) and some of which I didn’t (it’s entirely possible that the consumption of three cups of coffee before breakfast were having an adverse affect on my concentration). Afterwards I did the math on how much coffee I’m generally drinking a day, and even I was willing to admit it was probably a few cups too many. And since limiting myself to two or three cups a day was only going to give me the space to slowly rationalise my way upwards, I’m sticking with one cup a day and calling it done.

Cthulhu knows how long this will last – I am, after all, a geek and if there’s one thing I know about hanging out with other geeks its that coffee is omnipresent – but the plan is to stay on one coffee a day until the end of October and revisit things.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to stare at the coffee machine and pine for a while. ‘Cause while I seem to be okay with cutting back physically, I really miss the routine of making the next cup…

* basically, for the next ten days, I’ll be running at speeds that make me envy people on dial-up for their swift and decisive internet access. This means that certain things can still be accessed and used (gmail, the back-end of the website, livejournal on days when people don’t post big images), some things are pretty patchy in terms of access (facebook), and some things just outright don’t work (twitter, hotmail).**

** Or I can just do the sensible thing and upgrade my account, get a boat-load more bandwidth, and save $10 a month on the bill.

7 Days ’til Worldcon

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Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points.

Still, among the cool stuff:

– Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was the source of much post-acceptance dancing two weeks back.

– Kicked off a whole new round of snoopy dancing, for it appears that I’ve sold a third story for the year. Once again I err on the side of vagueness until details firm up, but suffice to say that this one is rated pretty damn high on the awesomesauce scale.

– Had the yearly rejection count climb to a tantalising 19 rejections, which has spurred me to get back into the wordmines and get some new stories done.

– Picked up the inimitable Ben Francisco from the airport, whereupon there was nattering about writing and the eating of cassoulet and the planning of literary hi-jinx in the lead-up to the con.

In other news I’m still prodding my brain and saying “yo, you ready to acknowledge that there’s a book with our name on it coming out next week” and the brain continues to respond with a surly growl and a denial. I suspect I’m saving my “ZOMG…BOOK!” type squee until there’s a copy in my hands, whereupon nearby dogs will probably register my joy. I also have to figure out what I’m going to read in my reading slot at the con (logically it should be Bleed, but there’s always something a tad iffy about me reading Aster’s interior monologue); I was tempted to go with the aforementioned L’esprit de L’escalier, but then I realised I had no idea how to pronounce the title without mangling the French and thus it was shelved for another time.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 19/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August )