Tag Archives: bad days

Hello, Old Friend

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts

It’s that time again. Time to dust off Misadventures In Fiction, evicting spiders and so forth, and return to giving it the attention it intermittently deserves. While I certainly can’t claim to have forgotten this site–quite the contrary, in fact, as I think about what I could be writing almost daily–I must admit I haven’t done the best job of keeping it alive. Or the most mediocre job, really.

However, I am moved back to Carnegie as of a couple months ago (living partially out of boxes and bags is moved back in, right?). Life has gone on, and in ways I couldn’t have necessarily predicted but I’m entirely okay with (and no, I am not suggesting I won the lottery, so don’t start asking for yachts or anything). Tonight, when I have an overnight shift to work tomorrow and relatively unlimited time to stay up, I find myself frustrated. I am, as often is the case, in the throes of a creative funk. Continue reading →

Banishing the troubles of the universe

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging 2.0

And some other things. I’ll focus on the bigger topic first before I throw the real surprise out into the world, as it’s not really as substantial as I’d like just yet.

The good outweighed the bad yesterday. I would say it was an entirely terrible day, but there were enough redeeming qualities that I can’t damn all twenty-four hours for the transgressions of only a few. It was, however, enough to leave me feeling flustered and frustrated, stuck in a state devoid of creative thoughts. Such occasions are usually rectified with a healthy dose of my usual stubbornness, but not so much last night.

Before heading to bed, I posted this status:

I have resolved to make tomorrow a significantly better day than today. No over-the-top threats of violence, nor sarcasm to that statement. Just the conscious decision to not be affected by whatever stupid-assery the universe throws my way.

Reminder: I work in retail, and so this was a rather lofty goal. I’m also not always the most positive person in the world (a statement so obvious it’s painful). Keeping that in mind, I went to bed with every intention of making today superior to yesterday by will of not letting the universe ruin my perfectly good mood. Continue reading →

Creative vexations

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging 2.0

February is almost over. As far as I can tell, it has been a month of those days for quite a few people, and so I can’t think of anyone who will be particularly sad to see March begin. Except Julius Caesar’s ghost, of course, who will have to endure constant reminders of that one time he ignored advice and got stabbed to death by a roomful of his best pals. The point is that February, chocolates and candy hearts and overpriced dinners aside (or maybe as a contributing factor), performed poorly. I suggest removal from the schedule, effective immediately, replacing it with a month that has its shit together. Honestly, what kind of proper month only has twenty-eight days most of the time?

Tonight’s post was off to about five false-starts. Unlike yesterday’s, the idea didn’t just magic into existence; it’s still putting up one Hell of a fight. Suffice it to say, I am already celebrating scheduling my first week of vacation time, as I think I’ve reached a point where my sanity is questionable on good days and prone to scattering itself via a strong breeze on the bad days. Whatever, right? Moving on.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that many of the walls we creative types seem to encounter are ones of our own building. This is by no means a revolutionary line of thinking so much as a clumsy personal revelation, so please be patient in entertaining me here.  Continue reading →

Something about better days ahead

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging 2.0

Today was characterized by several moments that, without a doubt, could be considered seeing the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel (although I must say the intermittent uncooperative nature of my laptop keyboard is not one of those moments). Typically, especially during weeks such as this, I am very suspicious of such days. Call it paranoia, pessimism, or whatever, but after a week like this one, I can’t help but assume that light is followed by a freight train.

Perhaps, I say in a show of cautious optimism, that may not be the case this time. I have the entire weekend off. That’s forty-eight hours of potential progress (or failures), and I’m about to carpe those diems so hard they’ll turn to diamonds.

I’m so sorry for that joke. Future generations will probably use that as the official definition of “awful”.

As part of my attempt at forcing positivity from the stinking shit-lump that I called this past week, I’m keeping my goals, plans, and so on for this weekend relatively fluid and open to change. This will hypothetically allow for less fear of, and feelings of, failure. Hooray for thinking ahead. A few new big ideas are also present in my brain-meats, but I’m saving those for later. I need to get through the remainder of this hundred days somehow, after all.

Goodnight, WordPress.

This weekend will feature less lazy posts. I (half-heartedly) promise.

Another chapter of my life concluded

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

Today was dreadful. Awful. Horrendously bad. Let’s not even speak of it. Instead of complaining about things I can’t change I’ve decided to share a picture of my cat, Meowiarty, being an asshole.

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Those are our new shelves, complete with a mischievous cat using them as a cat palace. Little bundle of bastard.

Tomorrow should mark my return to regular writing, hopefully. I’m Surface-bound until I remember where the Hell my laptop charger is. Woe is me for I am forgetful and easily distracted.

An off-day day off

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Today was a monster, and so I’m recovering by doing some cleaning (yes, recovering by doing some cleaning; that’s a bit sad). I know I should do some creative writing, but my brain is a stagnant pool of disappointment. There is some good news, however, in the form of having a super-huge, super-secret project…that I can’t talk about because it’s a secret. It is, however, related to tomorrow’s planned post about making gifts out of creative stuff (writing, drawings, whatever). Serious business. Tonight, however, can be a small failure, no thanks to my mood and my laptop being an uncooperative assclown. Alternatively, I budgeted for days like this in my Hundred Days of Blogging madness.

Instead of enjoying my writing (hey, I can hope), here’s some music that helps me along as I write (and through life in general). Naturally, I claim no ownership of any of this music. It just helps keep me sane on days like today (when the internet apparently only works on devices I DON’T NEED THE INTERNET TO WORK ON; I’m looking at you, Wheatley, you lazy piece of circuitry). Anyway, onto the good stuff.

Coldplay – Viva la Vida

St. Vincent – Psychopath

Metric – Speed the Collapse

MSMR – Fantasy

(This one’s a bit trippy, but I love the song all the same.)

Delerium – Stargazing

 

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging
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Honorary coworker and window-lurker at my place of employment.

I had planned a post on another topic, but today turned into a series of misadventures all centered around my debit card info getting snagged when I was in Chicago.

On the plus side, this awesome praying mantis hung out at work with me all day. If you stare at the image long enough it’ll probably feel like you, too, were visited by this super-cool mantis. My phone keeps wanting to say praying mangos, by the way, so there’s also that.

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Twenty-Four

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

There has to be some universal threshold for too much bad news in a day, and today crossed it. I acknowledge that it’s pretty easy to argue that I don’t handle bad news very well. I’m willing to accept that. It was a lot of work woes, none of which will be mentioned here.

One of my stories I sent out yesterday was already rejected. It’s a little disheartening, especially on top of bad news, but these things happen. On top of the rest of my day, it was more of a blow to my mood than I care to admit.

After work, I could have written stories or worked on other projects, or a number of other things. I didn’t. Today’s post is about why I’m okay with Continue reading →

Monday Mayhem

Posted on by under Posts of a Rant-like Nature, Short Stories

There is a small, albeit moderately insane, portion of my mind that is convinced today was a test, for me from the Universe, to see just how many times I could string together expletives in the course of one sentence. If we take into consideration that I am a man whose verbosity and capacity for complex sentences is, at its best times, unrivaled, I would dare estimate that the total curse words I managed to cram into one sentence would max out around sixty. If I were actually keeping track of that sort of thing, anyway.

I’ve ranted plenty on Twitter already. I vented to my girlfriend. I even considered researching possible ways to bring about Armageddon (which, to the relief of many, is beyond my capabilities at present). Out of some weird, misplaced mercy, I will spare the additional ranting for other outlets. Let me just leave this portion of the post off with this open-ended question: why is it the universe is most prone to go to shit on Mondays? Ignoring the business of it being after a weekend, because some of us work on weekends.

My brain is a touch soft today. Whether it’s because I burned myself out writing three short stories and a blog post last night, or how the forces of stupid really stepped up their game today, I don’t know. I do know I don’t like this lack of motivation very much, as it puts a real damper on my ability to focus on anything at all (there’s a shock).

However, as a sudden plot-twist to this post, and thanks to some Twitter-chatter with @MortuaryReport, this story happened. I realize this is a rather abrupt transition into a short story that could have never happened, but that’s sort of how I do things on days like today. This is how I managed to be creative and destructive, all at once. It, like any story that happens out of nowhere, may have gotten a bit (and by a bit I mean extremely) ridiculous. I’m not sorry.

Continue reading →