Stinking Cold...

I'm not throwing in the towel yet, even though this cold is making it impossible to start writing for NaNo. I know; rather than wasting my limited time before getting dizzy while blogging it could be writing.

No, it couldn't. Trust me. If I was writing a book about LSD trips, I'd be good, but I literally thought I saw a pair of boots running a few feet ahead of the girl wearing them today. I'm not taking any meds that would do that, just good old fashioned sick hallucinating.

On that note, I felt okay to make a flower chain for my doll's head, so again, total hippie LSD shit I wouldn't trust in my book.

I guess that's a pretty important point-- know thy book. I'm sure people can gush about how surreality is exactly what fuels their creativity, but it's just not going to be for every writer. Even though I write fantasy, the book I'm working on has some pretty tight logic systems that I REALLY don't want to confuse with... whatever my head is doing these days. One pretentious thing that some writers do that makes me want to punch a nun is that thing where they act like being altered is the source of their creativity. I've spend a good part of my life struggling with an undiagnosed mental condition that did more to hinder than help. It's not because I lacked the ability to harness it. I've worked through depression, anxiety and hyperfixation, but there's not always a pretty solution around it. Sometimes it rides you. Sometimes you beat it into submission, but there's never been a formula--no matter how pretentious I might have claimed there is in the past. I was lucky sometimes, unlucky at others. Now I'm simply satisfied when I try.

So, no panicking just yet. I knew this cold would be a kicker on my ability to enjoy a word count. But drawing, doll customization projects, the ability to feel fulfilled--all of those things are on the back burner while I do that gutter-fucking slut-genitalia ass-blasting boredom circuit that is being sick. I haven't enjoyed balloony headedness as I have in the past with colds. Nope, this one just sucks and leaves me with this incessant need to do things my body is just not letting me do.

Except for sleep. Lots of that planned until I can heal up and kick some ass again.

Mwah. Love, peace and chicken grease!

Slow Start

As it turns out, I haven't *yet* gotten going on NaNoWriMo and it's Day 7. On previous years, I was pretty much halfway done or more by this point, but life got in the way. November 1st, work. November 2nd, a wonderful wine tasting trip with dear friends Erika and Phil. November 3rd until now? Bad cold. I'm taking antibiotics and steroids but I'm still not quite human. I worked today and I work tomorrow, so it's looking like Saturday is where I stumble to the starting line in Heelies and dangling from the bumper of a drag-racing jalopy.

But I'll get there, armed with a Slender Blush wine from Country Heritage Winery in LaOtto, Indiana. Going to have to order some more of it too, since they do ship to Ohio now, but my humble bottle will get me toasty and raring to go for an awesome word sprint.

I do this while juggling time with my nephews, school, work, life, so it's a challenge but I'm not panicking. The 50K words is a chip in the full demand of this story anyway so even if the goal is made, there's much more to do. I may be throwing out a short story anthology, continuations of both of my series, come my mother's birthday, just so I can put out something then. Neither rushing UnHeard too much nor unable to put out something worthwhile.

I only plan on working at Sports Page until the Christmas break before I crack down on my projects full time again. Money is nice, but passion isn't something I find worthwhile to ignore. I don't mind being less affluent in order to delve into my projects fully again.

Ah, as for doll projects, those are being chipped away at, if not in actual work then in acquiring more pieces to make the work possible. I've been, er, collecting more dolls at that. I have three tinies, one medium girl, three large girls and a large boy now, some with plans, some just keeping me salivating with possibilities. I also have a cinnamon toned Nendoroid that I plan on modding to become Dinsch, my rabbit hybrid (Bryfolk) character. I have most of the parts. Just waiting on some gouache paints to start some of these faceups. I was going to do acrylic but I've seen a lot of advice that gouache is a lot easier to work with for a beginner and I am, unquestionably, a beginner in the doll world.

Rienna, the first of them, currently has her garters, dyed bathing suit/leotard and wig done. I have yet to sculpt her armor, make her boots and carve her sword, but I'm being rather fiddly with these parts since I keep looking for advice before diving in, making sure I'm investing in the best pieces before diving in. I have several clays, fabrics, and woods to work with, so if one isn't going well, I'll be able to minimize frustration by hopping to another option.

In any case, I'm off to start an adventure with Linux for a friend, so do wish me luck, if you have it in you. I'm a very busy woman and wouldn't have it any other way!

Winter Wonder What Now?

Positive posts on FB are why I still bother with social media. Rainbows, clouds that look like dragons and middle fingers, hilarious animal videos and the wit of my many friends. I don't even hate that when weather hits people clamor to show pictures of the destruction and look for each other and scramble to make sure their animals are comfortable. Like books, the less the posts are attempting to influence or call for sympathy, the more likely I am to allow myself to find those depths for myself.

But this post is about weather. Shit's ridiculous here and in many other places besides. These aren't old gripes but rather new for the Cincinnati I've spent a good chunk of my life in. The trees around here have no idea when to cycle, the bugs multiple in huge numbers and take over when the cold would have taken care of it-- it's unnatural chaos in nature. 

This spring, there were several damning false starts. Flower bulbs shot up almost immediately at the first sign of melt then stopped again. The trees didn't even try. Until they did, suddenly, and we had some of the worst cases of asthma, respiratory distress, the pollen and mold counts were insane. Just tree sperm everywhere and well beyond the usual spring cycle, into summer. It was actually a milder summer than usual and one without the drought of the year before that turned everything shriveled and brown. There was plenty of rain and yet, the tomatoes just didn't grow in abundance. I still pine for the summer like the one where there more tomatoes than we and the thieving squirrels could handle.

Fall? What's fall? We had about two weeks that felt like it. Leaves finally started turning colors and the nights were good for bonfires. Yet there were and are still a lot of green on the trees.

Then winter happened.

Kind of. Not really. We got snain, what the boys and I call the combo of fat snow flakes and rain. We woke up yesterday, at first admiring the fingers of ice dangling everywhere, not really paying much attention to the big downed branch in the front yard that came down while we slept.

We heard a loud crack, what sounded like someone loudly and poorly opening a bag of potato chips and saw another rather large branch come down. I went outside to look and immediately noticed that every tree still burgeoning with still green leaves looked at least ten feet short, drooping with the sheer weight of ice that coated every branch, stem and leaf. I told the boys we'd get a better look when we went outside to go to school and nearly every fifteen minutes another branch went down.

Reports all over the area reported down branches and even huge trunks, split under the weight of weather that trees here just hadn't evolved to handle. Power lines as well. People started to post about not having power, some getting it back after hours, some going on a day or more. We worried about it too. A couple of branches rest right over our power lines and if the rain had kept coating everything where it froze, we'd be among them.

I was already devising a way to keep my tropical fish alive if it came to it. Luckily, our house still gets hot water and the stove still works when the power is out.

Until the tree gets taken down, I can't say I'm not thinking about the what-ifs. All the same, nature used to be an adaptive cycle that wavered but always managed to balance out. These years have been anything but.

It doesn't matter if people believe climate change is real or that we affect it greatly. There are actual studies that can tell you that not believing we are part of the problem is willful ignorance. If you're only going to make an argument for human comfort, then you can't deny that even what is out of our hands is still something we have to clean up then work to solve. When you suspect that something is killing you, are you really that surprised that rather than being cautious at the first sign, it got worse because you waited for all the evidence to came in?

There's enough. We're fucking up a world we have the run of, even though we also have the means to fix it. We're sniping away at insignificant petty shit and the greed, even brought to spotlight, is never really tackled. We all bitch about it. I do too. And maybe we can't win people over, certainly not by being 'passionate' know-it-all assholes at that.

We're attacking each other over the big unknowns, writing off what nature is telling us clear as day. Even though they don't directly correlate to all arguments of climate change. I'm not going to hoard lists here of every natural and unnatural occurrence as a way to make everyone bow to the whims        of the planet. I don't disagree that the earth does go through drastic natural shifts. Yet don't use those as blankets for a shitty carbon footprint. I won't make a case for being efficient. Just don't be the dick trashing your neighborhood and choosing luxury over harmony every time.

Life would suck if we always let moral judgements be public domain. I get that. Yet denial over the evident, the whole ant and the grasshopper dilemma of not doing shit until it's too late? Don't be that guy. I'm sure even if you are, people still love or tolerate you. It's just disgusting to me that someone like that pretends to give a shit about the seed they spread. People who pretend to guard the sanctity of human life and willfully give their progeny a future full of their table scraps.

Whether you plan on putting these things to thought or not, give your children some desire to figure out how to help ecosystems heal at least. Human intervention in nature CAN leave an impact on human progress. No, you don't have to go vegan or live a joyless life of strict discipline to be mindful of your impact. Encourage and reward those who are doing it. Look at the efforts of permaculture farmers, scientists, doctors. You don't have to be the big change to support it.

I know I'm jumping between two topics that could be muddied as far as how much they actually intersect, but when people start diving down the rabbit hole of climate change, they sometimes brush it off as natural, disregarding that human intervention is just as natural. Our methods of self-preservation and progress are a necessary balance. We can build a better life, but not on the garbage of the broken things left half-working. We tidy the space and learn from the mistakes.

Maybe I give my own species too much credit, for what we can do and what we will do. I live a good life, but we all think that too. I know it's useless to get frustrated when the mess you try to avoid is the mess someone else makes. What keeps me happy is doing what I believe is right for me. I don't police those I love and I don't police the planet. I just sincerely hope we will continue to discuss it.

Because these goddamn trees need some boot camp style weather training at the very least. 

Writing High... Do Eeeeet...

I don't mean 'under the influence', although I'm not against the cannabis lovers of the world (I myself don't enjoy smoking it, but I'm wildly curious about CBD as an option for pain and anxiety).

No, I mean writing on the ass-end of a cold type of high. I might have even mentioned this before since it's simply the bee's knees.

Well, when you put it this way, 'the bee's knees' are actually pretty gross. Which also describes my cold.

I KNOW I've had to mention balloony-head, that little window where you don't actually remember much, but what you do tends to be fantastic. Like you think blacking out drunk will be based on the people who lie about their adventures while doing it. Only legitimately and completely fun. Not embarrassing, waking up in vomit and urine kind of... fun?

Either way, somehow I went from about 35.5K on my NaNo goal to breaking 40K. I not only have no idea what I actually wrote, but I'm absolutely going to pick it up from there tomorrow. It is usually miraculously comprehensible but more sarcastic, I guess. It's definitely something else.

10K more to go. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow, I make that goal tomorrow. Why? Because I'll have no sense of time and it'll just happen if it does. I've done maybe 6-8K in a day on occasion and it's not impossible that between blogging and short stories that I've topped 10K in a day, but hell, why not unintentionally set a new record?

Don't worry-- I'm still babying this cold. I can ill afford for it to get worse, but as long as I'm not dizzy or feeling wretched, writing is much preferred to binge-watching whatever crap Hulu thinks I should watch. Anyone else yell at the Still There? (Or the 'are you still watching name-of-show-because-you-might-be-unaware of' of Netflix) for doubting your abilities to want it to keep going even if you're not watching or there? We all know I'm not all there!

More on whatever comes next in a later post...

I'm Back... Sorta

Despite the balloony-headedness of this stage of my cold, I decided to do some minimal writing today, just to break the annoying tedium of Netflix, tissues and the layers of Vaseline it takes to salvage the results from rubbing these tree-shreddings against my face all day.

So why not get to Justina Ireland's Pep Talk from our NaNo mail today?

lol Writing sucks... Already my kind of pep talk! Like many people, after I get over the butthurt of a harsh reality, what motivates me is often the begrudging acceptance that despite how much certain processes can suck, I'm going to do it anyway. And for the sheer fact that I can't stand wondering what something would be like when I could be trying to find out if it can be done.

The message is pretty simple here. You're probably not going to magically feel better at writing, nor will it become a task that gets easier, but you're going to come back as long as the drive remains.

People might tell you that writer's block is just laziness, fear, an excuse to seek attention, lack of ideas (or the confidence to realize them)... Whatever. I've tried to explore what 'writer's block' is and it's mostly a purely mental place and not one that people can easily suss out for you. In most cases, writing sucks because it's not a magic formula you're always eager to chase, that the words sometimes just aren't there when you have the time for them, or in abundance at the worst possible places (afk, yo!).

No one can tell you that you'll finish every story or book or even want to. Everyone is either writing a book, has a book inside them, or lost their way to doing either. Some people will treat it like it's some luxury that will fill in the tedium of retirement (where they imagine it's not work and more along the lines of sipping mai-tais on some beach while typing away on their tablets-- poof! masterpiece!).

Speak to anyone who's actually doing it. What it takes to reach 5K. 10K. 25K. Every few thousand words, it can even be more difficult not less. Shouldn't it be easier the more you establish? Well, no. Some people imagine that they can first draft their way to a great book then throw it into their spell-checker, but the reality is, we often find our best ideas after some retrospect. The cutting room floor isn't just for film-- we also end up throwing around chunks of text with some really amazing insights that we either have to find the perfect place for or come to terms with the fact that we'll have to save a gem for the next story because this just isn't where it goes.

I did plenty of 2-5K essays for college. The structure that instructors look for may seem strict and at times very boring. I was equally guilty of being wordy as hell just to stretch those word counts as far as they would go. I dealt with jaded instructors that took out their literary pet peeves on me (Gods forbid because I used a John Lennon quote one instructor had seen used many times before and always inappropriately-- made for a good debate though on how artists don't expect their lyrics to mean the same thing to everyone and they can still be used 'appropriately' if the words fit the sentiment.) One absolutely flipped their shit if you used the word 'thing', no matter how much it fit the abstract (again, I defended that you don't always want to take away from the more important subjects by using more powerful words for the insignificant).

Let's just say I was not let down by what these challenges did for my writing. I ended up finding a middle ground with all of my teachers, and namely because I got the message early on that as much as an artist must learn to be adaptable, they should also speak up when they want to stand by a choice. I just as often relented where my argument wasn't strong enough-- I reduced color choices or simplified sentences, all in the name of seeing their point of view as well. There wasn't really a 'better' choice, just the attempt to see if I could make it work well for me. 

One teacher asked me why I used the same font on all of my storyboards for a brand design. Even though I varied the color and mood choices of my mood boards, I used the same font repeatedly rather than playing with different ones. I explained that I created the challenge that the client might have insisted on the font in their logo (since we did lock in our brand logos in a previous lesson anyway) and would want to see how well it played into the different images their brand might want to represent. It would give them the confidence to use it more diversely if I could display its versatility. I did however take his suggestion to only use a border I had made on the title pages since I did agree that they seemed to limit the visual of the brand content.

Realizing that balloony-head is making blogging more distracting than usual, I will loop back around and say this absolutely applies to writing as well. Writing IS a lot of mental gymnastics. Even if writing is all you do (or want to do) creatively, you are still wrapping your head around influences (some people are visual or rely on moods from music and so on), trying to carve out an effective story from the cinematic explosion or burgeoning knowledge of a more complex series of ideas. Even simple stories often need more than a light hand. I certainly know writers that whip through typing, yet these are also usually linear and simplistic, what you might call quick and easy reads. Even then, it's still a deceptive title. I'm a fast typist, yet at my fastest pace, 1K/hr is about the best you can expect from me. If I'm typing my absolute fastest creatively, then a standard novel is at LEAST 90 hours of work. In most scenarios, when you throw in planning, editing and finalizing, it's easily 4 times that. With the 200K+ tomes I've committed to these days, it's no wonder that I'm going on nine months of working on my latest book and it's still in drafting/editing stages. Even though I work very efficiently, these aren't stories I want to put out there without being confident in what they are. It takes every bit of time I give to it, no more, no less.

Soooooo, if writing sucks, you're doing it right. Nothing is won without it glaring you in the face. Repeatedly. Until it borders on harassment. I mean, you REALLY have to hate it to the point where you're coming back like a kicked dog. It's not always going to be work. It doesn't reach a point where the nostalgia of being fun is ever a distant thing, a high you will never reach again. You'll always have those revisit, the whimsy of your first time even. And yes, even the awkwardness of it. You'll sit down and forget what words are, wonder if you've lost your mojo, question your sanity. 

And once you get over the highs and lows, you'll remember it doesn't matter all that much. That neither is really all that necessary. You're not going to be the same person every time you sit down, in the same moods with the same confidence. That's the scary and wonderful thing about those introspective spaces. You intimately get to know every uncomfortable and glorious part of yourself. And, if you're lucky, even lose yourself and simply expand into the possibilities that await.

Boo, Sick...

Still a bit too dizzy to stick around to write very much, but I caught the nasty cold that's been going around my area. This is precisely the reason I was writing so much for NaNo to begin with-- I knew I might need the leeway for just such an obstacle. I might be another day or two off with frequent posting and I do want to discuss the latest Pep Talk in the NaNo mail when I get the chance. There should be the usual two-a-week scheduled posts coming up though (I wrote enough to fill November anyway). 

Can't wait to get back to writing though. It never fails that the brain is always most active when you can't really do much about it. On the upside, I'll have total balloon-head, which is the end part of a cold where I'm really giddy and oddly focused, so I'm looking forward to bringing that to drafting.