A touch of glamour

I wish I could say that I was busy doing important things that I forgot about the blog and hardly posted in the past year, but I can't really say that. It was more exhaustion of real life and then not feeling the writing muse beyond writing a couple words a day. Work got hectic and then I was punched in the gut in the summer and then after it was all very 'MEH'.

Hopefully work will get better now that we have a new person to help with the load. Now we have four people doing the work of five instead of three. I lost my horse at the end of July due to a health issue that she had gotten when she had her foal. I've said it before to my roommate that if I ever met someone from that broodmare farm, I would be hard pressed not to punch them in the face. But she was a pasture puff the past few years so at least she was happy the last eight years I had her.

I need to organize all the bits and pieces of writing that I have on different files. Get my thoughts organized and see if I can actually keep up writing with short stories. And find someone who will be a beta when I need one.

2013 wasn't horrible but it wasn't great either. I look forward to not having another year like this past one again. I'm going to start slow and say that I'm going to post to this blog at LEAST once a week. If I get an extra post in, then that's considered bonus, right?

Start small. Isn't that the way to go?

I know that I've dropped off a bit and I have so much reading of blogs and people's stories that I need to catch up on. Work has been...crazy. Already, the meetings on top of meetings are starting up and we have to figure which one has more priority. The past week (and a half) I haven't read anything at all, not even a book. Which sort of pissed me off. Same with writing. I'm managing to squeak out words here and there just to get something down.

Before I said I need to time manage a little better. That's been off and on. I'm trying to make some jewelry to get some extra money on the side. Even started to learn how to make chainmaille jewelry. That's been fun actually.

Of course, maybe it would help with the energy if it actually felt like Spring instead of a late winter. We had winter slop this morning and most of it has already melted away. I'm just glad it didn't do it this weekend.

There is a group on FB, Underground Railroad Rescue Kitties Network (URRKN) that I joined where people volunteer to drive rescue kitties to their new homes. I got to help two bonded boys tabbies to their forever home. I just drove to Allentown which is about an hour and a half. I signed up to do it again with another pair that were rescued from a high kill shelter in Alabama. We're still waiting for some more drivers. If you know of anyone who wants to help with kitties to go to their forever home, I can post a link later. There are all sorts of kitties across the country that are being set up to get driven to their forever homes.

But right now, I think I'm going to go to bed because I'm tired. Ugh. And the year is already a quarter of the way done. Where did it go? I'm going to bed and trying to get some sleep.

A quick post for the night. (I really need to post on here more often)

If there is anyone who is doing the April Camp NaNo and would like to be in the same Cabin as I am (there is a total of 6 people per Cabin), feel free to put my name on your list. I haven't finished with Cabin Assignment yet.

My Camp NaNo name there is Nellie.

I guess I should start writing down what I want to work on, huh?

Day 1 of my World Building Blog Hop entry is here. It should be interesting to see what I can pull out for my steampunk world and redoing history and all that fun stuff.

What the hell did I get myself into with it. XD Either way I do need to get things nailed down if I want to do anything for it. I actually thought of something for the African area but as for a plot, that is alluding me. You know, for saying I was going to take a break from Steampunk to give my mind a rest, it doesn't seem to want to rest now that I'm not concentrating on it.


Of course with the good comes the raging stupidity. There are two links. Second one has a rape trigger so proceed with caution. That one just makes me rage so hard.

( Read more... )

Now I'm going to go look at pictures of kitties to help with my mood.

You never realize all the places you can save a file until you need to have some spare space on the hard drive, jump drive, external drive, etc. and see where you can make the space.

I have had two serious hard drive failures since getting a computer in 1997. One where I got data recovered and one where the guy who was doing the recovery never bothered to return my calls or send the information to me (that still pisses me off). So I've taken to saving a document all over the place.

I'm trying to organize my jump drives (HA!) and see duplicates upon duplicates of the same thing. Or several updated files of the same thing. *cough* So, that's one thing I want to do is clean up the jump drives. Save the SINGLE files on the external hard drive and then upload the important files to Dropbox or create an Gmail account to just use as storage (Gmail is up to 10GB now. that's a lot of word docs.) Plus organizing the stuff that I had printed out and will more than likely have to retype stuff and see if the stories are worth something or just weird drabbles that will just be that.

I'm trying to do this as part of getting my shit together and doing something that I love to do.

In the past week, I have written over five thousand words. Saturday I didn't write at all because I was buying a new car (much as I enjoyed not having a car payment) and I just clocked in under two hundred yesterday. But it definitely has been a good week.

One thing I need to do is sit down and write down my different universes. Because I started writing in another two. So yeah. I'm like the dogs in Up. I'm all SQUIRREL! sometimes when it comes to writing stories because I go by what pops into my head and then the characters start to talk to me and keep poking to be written.

On top of that, I saw that Rebekah posted about a World Building Blog Hop. And I thought to myself "WHY NOT!" because I don't have enough on my plate to work on to get everything straightened out. X-D Anyway. Click on the Earth and learn more about the World Building Exercise.




It will be interesting to see how far I can go.

So over Thanksgiving I went out to see my sister and her family and my parents in Arizona. The flight out was pretty okay. Standard stuff these days and I have seen that whatever gate your plane comes in, expect to walk at least a half mile to get your connecting flight. Seriously. I got my exercise in the airports. I have also discovered my limit in sitting on a plane is 4-5 hours before the butt goes totally numb and it feels like I'm sitting on a boulder.

It was nice out there. The hottest it got was in the mid 80s and then it went down to the 50s at night. It was pretty perfect temperature wise. But you definitely sunglasses. I'm told that you can get ulcers because of the sun shining so much. And things can get very dusty easily.

The downer was that because of the salt in the water, at some point, you will need a filtration system on your shower unless you have tons of lotion because after a while, the salt will dry out the skin and sometimes make it seem like you haven't washed your hair. There were water stations and places to get huge bags of ice fairly cheap. For 5 gallons, it's like 50 cents, and a $1.25 for a bag of ice.

But then what place doesn't have one downside to living in the area.



This is the view from my parents place. They have a cute little single wide trailer that is in a community where half the people drive down from Washington/Canada. So they are only allowed to be there for six months before they have to go back.

I don't have a passport so we couldn't go to the place my sister and BiL go over the Mexican border. A nice bottle of Kalhua there is 6-8 bucks. You are only allowed to take one bottle per person. Next time. I'll have to work on getting a passport when I get my tax return this year. Nice thing is there, they are allowed to sell alcohol in the grocery store so it was still easy to get, though about for twice the cost apparently. And my BiL made some killer White Russians. That's the most I've drank in a long time. Got the stuff to make it when I got back. (16 for the Kahlua, 13 for the Vanilla Vodka. Go State stores).

The flight back wasn't so smooth. For some reason, when I was leaving, we were just sitting on the runway for a good 10-15 minutes. Which made us late getting into LA. So it was then RUN the half mile to the connecting flight (I am so out of shape for that) only to find that they JUST closed the doors. There were four of us and one of the others was going back up to Washington State for college and she was in tears because she had an 8:30 class in the morning and the closest thing they could get her is having her go into Washington after 10. There wasn't anything else so she had to take the flight. Hopefully her professor would understand that it was something that she couldn't control. The flight had been going to San Fran and then I was going to Chicago. They managed to get me a straight flight in Chicago in another 2 hours so I could actually get my connecting flight from O'Hare to home.

Keep in mind, if you ever going to a place the is deserty in nature along the West Coast. The winter months is the best time to go because it's not in triple digits out there for the weather.


In other news, writerverse is celebrating it's 1st birthday. And we've just start Phase 5. It's a very fun community that challenges your writing skill and there are lots of fun challenges to take place in. It's open to fanfic and original writing. Stop in and give it a go. The current Phase will be going to February so it's going to be three months of fun and trying to get your team the points.

22393 / 50000 words. 45% done!

I wanted to be farther along after this weekend, actually. I went to Midtown and they were having a booksale, which was cool. Plus the couple that own the store, the wife was doing NaNo herself and was letting us use space. Next year will probably be the same. And it's a cool old store that had been renovated from something eles and they have a ton of used/old books.

But due to the weather doing a turnabout to 60 degrees, I developed this huge migraine from the barometric pressure. So any concentration to be done was nil. I just did the minimum count and called it a night. It wasn't so bad yesterday but I could still feel it. But it didn't feel like my head was going to explode. I still only did minimum. *sigh* I want to get at least 10k ahead so that when my word count drops while I'm visiting the West Coast for family things, it won't put me so far behind that I'm trying to write 20k within 3 days because I'm coming back the morning of the 28th. I think it's an 11 hour flight out and a 13 one back, but during the night so I might wind up dozing between San Francisco and Chicago.

I need to keep to the word wars and just plug in the earphones to get that far ahead.

Doing a little secret santa thing with some of the MLs and I realized that I spelled recipient (I used receipient.) wrong when I sent out the PMs. *face palm* My internal spell check failed on that one.

Last week I had the fun of seeing Henry Rollins in one of his spoken word engagements. If you’ve never heard of Henry Rollins, check out his website here. He’s been a rocker, an actor, a rights activist, a traveler. He’s only fifty-one and he still tours around like no one’s business. In his earlier spoken word CDs, he drops a lot of F-bombs. He’s apparently mellowed a bit as he’s aged as he hardly swore at all. It was a fun show and my friends and I were amazed that he talked for two and a half hours without taking a drink of water. That and he held the mic like he was ready to belt out a tune. He talks about a lot of things from politics to how he grew up and experienced to what he is planning on doing in the future. If you have a chance to see him, I would suggest that you do so. He is entertaining. He might use a bit of salty language but then there are few people that don’t these days.

So, it’s two hours away but is looming like a monolith. NaNoWriMo starts up tonight at midnight but considering how I’m feeling sleepy, I don’t think I’ll stay up very long even to write 100 words. They’ll get done, when they get done and we’ll see if this story has staying power. BAH! I’m a pantser so it’s always a ‘will I get it done this year’ moment. I do have to say that if you are having problems getting words down, find a sprint partner or a chat that has word sprints. You would be surprised how fast those 100-200 word sprints add up by the time you are done for the night. That’s how I passed 50k last year. I wouldn’t say finished as there is a LOT if fixing that I need to do.

And what is taking NaNo by the horns than signing up for something else, such as #writemotivation. One of my fellow MLs, Rebekah speaks of #writemotivation and how it has helped her a lot so I’ll give it a go and see how I do with it. I had seemed to have kept up with it at the beginning of the year with writing daily and then I don’t know what happened. I just seemed to have ‘died’. I was very meh about writing and I need to at least do something every day, even if I later throw it out because it is more utter crap than my other utter crap.

I need to do a goal list so:
1: Keep up with NaNo and use the blog to keep track, maybe even give a six sentence snippet with each post.
2: Work more on expanding the world that I’m basing my story on. (Most people would do this as prep, you know before NaNo. Not me, OH No!).
3: On top of NaNo, keep up with the flash fiction contests all week.
4. Actually pulling out my older NaNos and work on editing them, even if it is a page at a time.

So, on top of NaNo going on this month, I’ll be flying out West to visit my family for Thanksgiving so I’ll be taking my Livescribe pen and notebook to get writing done because I’m not sure that I’ll have a lot of computer access except at night. I’m not sure if I’ll be staying at my sister’s or my mom’s yet. Plus the things that we’ll be doing.

Come December, yeah, I’ll be ready for a long nap.

Yesterday I was up at Dark O'clock because the radio station that I listen to was hosting a People's Flea to help raise money for the Susquehanna Service Dogs.

It went from 6am to noon but we went there at 5am to set up. There was some less than impressive organization. The woman told me to pull aside and she'd find a spot and then I sat there for fifteen-twenty minutes. Same with the roomie. She was told to drive around but then the woman never met up with her. We finally found a spot that we just gave ourselves. The woman didn't even come over to talk with us. So other than that kerfluffle, it went pretty okay.

I had several boxes of books (bodice rippers) that I had in storage and I just wanted to get out from there so I could clean things out. Some people looked and one woman came buy to buy ten (the thicker novels I had 5 for a dollar, the slender Harlequin type were 10 for a dollar) and I thought I would have to drag them all back and just stick them up on Freecycle and give them away when a guy came over and looked around. He had asked how much and I gave him the price or for the bigger boxes, five bucks. Pretty good deal either way.

He offered 15 for all of them and since I wasn't eager to take them back, sold! Apparently both his fiancee and mother are very rapid readers so that would give them something to work on. Good for them. I'm glad that they would go to someone who would enjoy them.

I went over and bought some cute doggie pens (will have to post pictures tomorrow) and a scratch pad for a dollar and they had one of the dogs there, a black lab that was so cute.

There were a bunch of people who had their dogs with. A pair of lovely looking German Shephards, a very pretty 'mutt' who was a mix of spaniel and something else. A pair of red corgis that the roomie took hers over to talk with, a fun size puppy that I wanted to steal, a pretty Weimer and Bulldog that were VERY well behaved and the guy who had them said he had five dogs total all the same size. Those two of the ones who were better behaved and he liked to get them out to socialize. There was someone else who had a bulldog that was very cute. What wasn't so cute was one of the other people who were selling things who had small terriers or whatever. They had their tables by the road and was letting one of the dogs run around without a leash. That was stupid. Freaking people need to keep their dogs on a leash, especially with other dogs around. One of them was sniffing at the mutt before snapping and the poor dog jumped a mile in the sky before trying to get away from the little ankle biter. And the woman was just like 'No, bad.' Uh, whatever lady. If your little dogs can't behave in public/around other dogs, then they shouldn't be out.

Overall, it was a good day and $1100 was raised, at least that's what we heard around 11:30.