Going peacefully into one more day of cleaning things out of the former dwelling. I am oh-so-very tired.
Category Archives: One Hundred Days of Blogging
First Doctor Who at the New House
And last bit of rest before intense packing and prep for tomorrow. Hope you all love this episode as much as I do so far!
Tiny Maker’s Mark awaits my move to reach completion.
Crunch-time
Tomorrow will involve the transfer of DIRECTV to the new dwelling, among other madness. The madness will be slower, scaled down madness thanks to my jacked-up ankle, but it will be there.
Why? This is the point I need to be an unstoppable force, moving forward and not quitting until I’m damn-well satisfied with the results. Even if that means living from boxes for a bit.
Find your own kind of brilliance
Warning: posting this from my Android phone. Who knows what kind of silly shenanigans will follow?
Short summary of my day, better known as The Movening: I got very little done compared to my goals. This is thanks to me finding a groundhog’s dwelling with my foot, falling back on my left leg, and spraining my ankle quite badly. It’s been a symphony of swearing today. The ankle in question is bundled up neatly in an AirCast. It still really hurts.
I also started rereading Stardust for the hundredth time. There’s something in the magic of Neil Gaiman’s writing that fills me with such a yearning to get off my ass and do some of my own writing. The moving mentality I have seems to blot that out a fair bit, sadly.
And then there are the inevitable pangs of envy. Wanting to be able to create something as fantastically brilliant of my own. Lindsey, beta-reader extraordinaire and terrific writer, told me Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King read like a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and the author of Howl’s Moving Castle. That is, without a doubt, some of the highest praise I have ever received, but it also got me thinking.
There’s nothing wrong with never achieving Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett level brilliance. No matter how much I try, I won’t. What I will, I suspect, eventually manage is to create my own kind of brilliance. Even if it’s never on a massive scale, it’ll be me and the creative style that is entirely mine. That’s something I hope all creative folks can embrace.
Find what you do well. Make it brilliant. Make it your own. Love it and pour your soul into it, and then rip it apart and fix it until you reach such a point where you can’t bear to look at your work anymore. Let it rest, and do it again.
Above all else, be happy with creating something. There are so many other, similar artists out there, but none of them are exactly the same.
Make it a great week
The Hell of my last week transitioning from my current dwelling to my new one is upon me. Wednesday and Friday will be nothing but moving things, cleaning up the old place, and probably a fair bit of swearing and frustration. These things happen, I suppose. To be fair, last night gave Brianne and I some powerful motivation to move out of this place in the form of our bathroom door locking. That may sound like a simple problem, except the doorknob for our bathroom is the kind you’d use for an exterior door. And the door trip makes access to the locking mechanism impossible. And the screws holding the wall panel in place next to the door are painted over, thus they are impossible to remove.
Short version of the solution: I had to jam one of those flat metal spatulas used for cake decorating into the door. It took over half an hour, and was pretty damn awful.
I mention this because this week looks horrid, and I will be sure busy, but I know it’s all for a great improvement in my life. It’s going to be a great week.
Before I go on, however, I should mention I’m borrowing these words from my boss. I’m sure he won’t mind. Each Monday morning starts with the promise of an inevitable conference call, and my boss always ends such calls by saying “Go out there and make it a great week”. Normally, I hesitate to admit, those words just signal it’s time for me to hang up and resume whatever task I was focusing on prior to the call. Perhaps it’s the chaos of moving, or the lack of sleep, or even how I’ve been teetering precariously between being sick and being mostly well, but those words resonated with me this morning. I’m about to get a bit soapboxy here, folks, so brace yourselves.
The week, starting with Monday (or Sunday, depending on how your work schedule goes I guess), is only as good as you decide to make it. I’m aware that there are certain things the Universe can throw at a person that will most certainly turn a week to utter shit, but a lot of those things can be reversed or made better. Yeah, it’s a fair bit of effort, but it’s worth it. Right? A bit of work in favor of sanity, success, and so on, or something like that.
I look around me and I see a ton of things that need to be packed and moved. Two couches that need left out for garbage pick-up. What I’m focused on is how my internet and cable set-up dates worked out perfectly. How my customer service experience with Peoples Natural Gas continued to be exceptional even though I won’t have them anymore (my new apartment uses fuel oil instead, which is provided by the landlord; thank god for that). Above all else, how this move will get me the Hell out of my current living situation. Those things and a good few more are all reasons why I’m looking to make this week a great one, even if it is crazy-busy.
Try it yourselves, readers. It may just prove helpful.
Instead of a post of substance, enjoy looking at the board games and awesome fridge set-up in my new place. My post-work day was spent evicting spiders from our basement, and I think I need some sleep.
A necessary break
I moved about ten or so boxes of stuff into the new place, but I still have plenty more to go before this month is over. I’d say that’s a pretty powerful reminder that Brianne and I have a lot of stuff, that moving is quite difficult, and that time goes far more quickly when there’s a limited amount of it to accomplish things. Says the guy who is playing WoW while he writes this.
What I’ve discovered is this: all the good intentions and changes to my schedule can’t actually make balancing this move with writing any easier. I know, I know. That sounds an awful lot like an excuse. It probably isn’t much more than just that, but here are my thoughts on the matter.
My next novel project, which remains unnamed as of now, and any short stories I want to get to writing aren’t going to receive the attention they need, for the lengths of time they need it, while I’m busy finding time to move stuff from current dwelling to new dwelling. The only way I could really give any creative writing the attention it deserves is by using the time I normally set aside for sleeping, eating, and personal grooming. None of those things can actually be cut out of my day-to-day without a risk of serious harm to myself or others. There’s also the not-so-small-matter of me being quite behind on proofreading, so I’d feel quite guilty about doing my own writing before tending to that.
You might say, “But Phil, you found time for video games. Why not time for writing?” This is a fair question, I’ll admit. However, it’s pretty easy to counter with “I moved over half a dozen large, heavy boxes full of miscellaneous personal belongings from my current house, which requires travel up and down stairs and an awkward hill, to my new apartment”. It means I’m made of sleepiness and laziness right now. I know I’ll be like this up until the move’s complete.
Yet here I am, still churning along with the hundred days of blogging. At some point I should check what day I’m on, probably.
For now, however, I’m okay with taking a short break from creative writing. Maybe I’ll return super-charged and ready to go? Related to that super-charged comment: I’m still debating what to use my Warlords of Draenor 90 Boost on.
And dreading how badly my current graphics card will handle the new expansion.
Finding balance in work and play
Today was a suitable counter-balance to yesterday, I think. I cut the grass at my new apartment, moved a good deal of things in (though there are still many box-loads to go, I’m afraid), and decorated a little. It certainly was no day of playing World of Warcraft and relaxing in my current home, but not every day can be like that (I mean, they could but I would end up very unemployed, very fat, and quite unhappy, among other things), and so the work was both a necessary evil and a nice change of pace.
However, as far as daily balances of work and play (or leisure or whatever) go, I am not particularly good at finding such a nice equilibrium. Some days are very work-oriented, with me accomplishing a great deal of productive tasks. By nighttime on those days, I am tired but I feel fulfilled. It’s all very positive, really, ignoring the exhaustion and that there are some such days I still feel like I fell short of where I should have been. There are other, very similar days, when I have shirked responsibility in favor of relaxing and recovering. Days filled with video games, movies, books, and so on. They don’t really serve a practical purpose, but they leave me feeling rejuvenated and prepared for the next day of hard work.
It’s very possible to make those two days into a daily thing. I realize this is all very “hey, that’s obvious” territory, but I excel at the obvious.
What I’m talking about in this case is a total revamp of my schedule as I know it. It’s probably going to be Hell for a while, but I think if I can pull it off that it will provide me with tremendous benefits. That’s what I’m going for here, by the way. A Phil who can find a daily balance of hard work and relaxation time in the face of working eight hours five days a week and trying to become a writer, all while pretending very well at being a responsible adult. A lot of this will revolve around me making a number of relatively large changes over however long it takes, and I imagine it will involve a great deal of swearing along the way. Continue reading
Creative cooking
Or “I owe a fair bit of editing and really want to start on my unnamed novel project, so here’s a cool thing I made on a whim”.
This may have been one of the tastiest crazy ideas I’ve ever had.
I love to cook, which goes hand-in-hand with loving food for me. Coming up with new, potentially delicious dishes is exciting in similar ways to binge-writing tends to be.
My annual health screening at work revealed something I had figured out on my own: I need to shed some weight. Not one to just say meh and give up (yes, I do that sometimes; shut up), I decided I needed to make a healthy dinner tonight. Above is only part of the dinner; a mango-pineapple-pomegranate salsa-thing of my own design. I applied a bit of Pyrat XO Reserve to the sauce pan before adding the diced fruit bits.
The orange aromas from the Pyrat were especially noticeable as this mix heated up, and the kitchen still smells like some new, secret scent from Bath & Body Works. The pineapple broke down somewhat, mixing in with the mango and pomegranate quite nicely. Overall, it went very nicely with chicken and mixed veggies. Definitely something I’d make again.
Phil's Misadventures In Fiction 