Back from the Brink

Oh, boy, folks, have I had a crazy few weeks. Grab a cuppa coffee/tea/wine/beverage of your choice and let me tell you all about it.

So I needed a mini break of blogging because I hadn't quite figured out how to manage my writing, my "new" job, family, life, and blogging all at the same time. I think I've figured it out now, so we're gonna try a trial of me blogging on Tuesdays and Saturdays for a while, and see how it works. Please bear with me as I reintegrate myself into the blogosphere.

This is your brain on editing.
Any questions?

Then there was the writing. In late October not only was I trying to manage some pretty intense revision on my novel (currently listed on my WIPs page as FIGHTING FATE, though I plan to change the title to IN FLAMES). I wanted to get a full round of revision finished before NaNoWriMo started, while also juggling my NaNo prep. That took a LOT out of me, and I edited until my brains turned into liquid goo. Seriously. It was messy.

My own personal NaNo shield

On November first, having finished that round of editing, I was happy to accept my NaNo fate. I greeted it with a warm, strong handshake. And on the fateful afternoon of November 1st, I had an extra meeting with my boss, wherein he asked me to work overtime in preparation for our display at an upcoming conference (I work for a small, specialty academic publisher). And in my inner ear, I heard my NaNo plans go *squish*. My boss and I negotiated trading the days in early November for days around Thanksgiving, so not all was lost, but it put some stress on my NaNo plans nonetheless.

As of November 12th, one-third of the way through the month, I had only written about 14K over the course of 4 authentic writing days. Ouch.

On the morning on November 13th, as I'm leaving my house to pick up a friend, I grab my phone to let her know I'm coming, and see that I have a missed text message from my boss--who, I might add, never sends me text messages. It said, more or less, that he was in the hospital, post-surgery after having had a heart attack. Everything okay. Call to talk about conference prep. SERIOUSLY. My boss is in the intensive care unit on a Sunday morning and wants to talk about conference prep. Now, granted, the conference started on the 17th. My boss isn't really all that Type-A, but we did still have a lot of work to do, and that essentially took the editorial side of our house from 3 to 2 employees doing the bulk of the work (we have a few work-study students, but regular employees, we are three). So now add more overtime work to my schedule over the next three days, making the first day of the conference (Nov 17th) day 5 for writing. Not a good sign.

See how the Jell-O powder gets all goopy with a little water?

Not to mention that on the 17th and the 18th I was about as worthless a writer as an uncooked box of Jell-O, from working 10hour days three days in a row, and the emotional turmoil of talking to my boss on the phone while he was doped on morphine and falling asleep. Yup, powdery Jell-O.

Somehow, though, I managed to pull a few days writing between 5-6K. Don't ask me how. Perhaps some superhuman feats of strength that even kryptonite couldn't squelch. Who knows? But I have to attribute at least a little of my success to Hart Johnson and her stupendous idea for hour-long sprint-writing sessions. I think those were ultimately my saving grace. Coordinated over Facebook, I would periodically join Hart, among others, on these sprints, and both the time and the community support helped a ton.

And, imagine, through all of that, I actually won!

Granted, according to my word verification, I only have 50,002 words, but I don't care! I'm 2 words over what they need (although, according to my Scrivener file, I have 50,019), and that's what matters.

Anyway, now it's December. A little over two weeks until the holiday break comes, which will entail lots of time with family, friends, and fruitcake. I'm already celebrating by eating too many sweets and listening to Christmas music while I cook and bake. And, dangit all, I am MAKING these cookies if it kills me. I just have to find some sweet rice flour first...

Be seeing you around the blogosphere!

#NaNoWriMo KickOff and Update

You know what today is :) The first of November is a celebrated holiday in my house. Er, well, it is for me.

Especially since the month of October ate me up. Work's a little insane, meaning I've had to bring projects home over the weekend and work on things in the evenings, too. I work for a small, academic publisher, and we're gearing up for a conference that starts in about 2 weeks. So now's the last push to get these projects finished and printed before the conference. Which means overtime. Which means more money, sure, but it also means less writing time.

My hope is to make it through to about the 15th or so, then attempt to reenter the blogging community. I think it's possible.

In the meantime, I'll be NaNo-ing again. Starting at about the time this blog post goes up. If you'd like to add me as your buddy on the NaNo site, my user ID is Rosie-C.

Good luck with NaNo this year, everyone. I'll see you soon :)

Holidays, Moving Trauma, and July

First, if you're a yankee, Happy 4th. If not, I hope your Monday's going well. May we all eat well and enjoy the day. I, poor patriot that I am, don't even know if the city's setting off fireworks tonight or if they did it last night. We have, however, hears all the fireworks they're setting off at the nearby lakes since Wednesday.

*bad segue*

Moving is stressing me out. In fact, anything with a brown cardboard box is stressing me out. It started on Thursday when my boss called me. Now, for the record, I work for a small, niche publisher at my university that puts out books related to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia (former Soviet Block). I work in editorial, preparing manuscripts for print, occasionally dealing directly with the printer in lieu of my boss. So when he called and asked me help do the beginning-of-the-fiscal-year inventory, I can't say I was thrilled. And I sure wasn't ambivalent. But I agreed because the "team" is a little short-staffed right now (long story, but temporary), and my boss was kind enough to hire me through the summer when I'm leaving the university as a student.

Courtesy of Future Perfect Publishing.
Our stacks don't look that neat.

Friday, July 1. Seven hours of doing inventory. This did not include the back room full of boxes of books. This did not include going to the warehouse to calculate our holdings over there. Nope. This involved me standing on a step stool, reading off three digits from the book's ISBN, counting the number of books on the shelf, and reporting the number to my cohort with a clipboard, who then checked off the number on a spreadsheet. Oh, and at four, we moved on to some "donated" boxes of our books (another long story) that then involved finding each ISBN (not as clearly marked as they are on the shelf) and adding +1 to the total. *sigh* I didn't get home until 6:30.

Saturday was moving day for some good friends, so I went to help. I hadn't planned to originally, but I'm glad I did, because when I got there, it was the couple and one other person, trying to load the couple's life into a 10ft Uhaul. A couple more people joined the team over time, but we never had more than six active players. Three Uhaul trips and some "3D Tetris", as my friend coined it.

So we're in July. Soon comes August. My husband and I officially have 4 weeks until our lease ends and 5 weeks until our new lease begins. We have to box up our lives and figure out where to store it all for a week. Can we say, not fun? I'm thinking the easiest thing at this point is to rent a POD, but one-month's rental costs more than one-month's rent for my apartment (the old one, anyway), and I don't think that's reasonable. We're looking into other options, such as short-term storage, keeping various boxes in friends' garages, etc.

Seriously, boxes are stressing me out right now.

I'm trying to keep my head above water in terms of managing blogging, writing, working, and general family duties. I suppose this is nothing different, but I don't have a set schedule for myself, and I can't really create one when we'll be packing and scrounging up a place store everything.

Anyway, happy 4th again. We're grilling in the backyard.

What are you doing this fine Monday, July 4? 
Do you have any create space ideas for me for a week's worth of homelessness?
Any ideas on what I can do to make the boxes less scary? :)

Sabbatical

So much for being back to regular posting...

Ever notice how your mojo slows down? Even when you find the muses again, it feels like you're wading through chocolate pudding (both in the sense of slowing down and in the oh-man-I-just-want-to-eat-chocolate sense)?

How do you deal with these situations?

My plan right now is to recharge by unplugging for a while. That's right. I'm going somewhere untouched by the internet (though it does have satellite TV). Partially, it's a family reunion, but that will be over by the weekend.

My husband and I have decided to stay longer for a self-induced work retreat. He's polishing his dissertation at the moment, and went up to visit this part of the family a few weeks ago--with stellar success. So now, he wants to try and regain that momentum, and I need to get some with my writing and my freelance editing working.

All that being said, I will be on sabbatical from the blogosphere starting today until around the 22nd. Hopefully the time off will help me recharge my blogging batteries, get a jumpstart and/or finish the first part of my BuNo challenge, and get some significant hourly time in to make some summer moola.

See y'all in a couple of weeks.

One Week Down

This week classes started at the university again. I'm trying to get my schedule in order, and the pieces don't seem to want to fit into the neat little slots I've assigned for them. Figures. It's just going to take some time to sort things out, I suppose.

The biggest problem with trying to reorganize is that writing tends to fall to the side. I need some time when I can concentrate and sit in personal-zone silence (meaning, I can be at a coffee shop as long as no one's talking to me), but when my life is a mess, I don't generally make that time for myself.

So my plan for the long weekend (which, since I only have Mon-Wed classes, means I have until Tuesday) is to work out a schedule in which I can:

• get my homework done reasonably and without extra stress
• use extra homework time to write
• get to the gym 3-4x per week
• schedule time dedicated to working on my freelance projects
• read at least one hour per night
• write at least a couple hours every day
• have time to spend with my husband

Pulling off that schedule would be a feat of the invincible. If I can work it out still come out sane on the other side, I do believe I should transcend to superhero status.

How do you keep yourself organized? How do you find time to write if you have a job/school?

Excuses, Excuses

****Warning**** This is not a happy post.  I will not be offended if you stop here.


Before I write anything else, I want to say that today is my friend Jim's birthday.  Jim passed away two years ago from Leukemia just before he turned thirty. If you have a chance, drink a beer for Jim today.


The past few weeks have been particularly difficult for me. 

First, my campus job is the managing editor of a linguistics journal.  I used to love my job when I first got it, and nothing could have been better than the university (read: my boss/adviser) changing it from an hourly position into a GA position so that I didn't have to teach.  Rock!  And I'm still indebted to him for making it possible.  I just don't love the job anymore.

Which meant that, even though I knew the deadline for the journal to go to print would be this coming Friday, I did nothing with it over the summer.  So, September turned into super catch-up month in terms of publication preparation.  That was the first reason for my falling into the bloggy black hole.

Second, the beginning of October is a rough time for me.  Two years ago, my dad died on the first, and then my birthday is shortly afterward.  The year my dad passed away, we actually had to put off the viewing and the funeral so that neither would fall on my birthday.  It made for a rather awkward series of events.  Since then, I haven't really wanted to celebrate my birthday.  It's too clouded by shadowy memories of a false attempt at celebrating that first year, as well as issues with my dad.

I was so wrapped up my work in September that I almost forgot about the anniversary.  Of course, that meant that I had two major things due on that date, one of which I had volunteered for.  Dumb.

It's been a slow recovery for me this year, especially with Facebook and people wishing me a happy birthday when I just want to forget it.  A friend of mine asked why I don't just take my birthday off of there. Honestly, I may have done that last year, but this year I completely forgot.  I should just take it off permanently. The problem is that everyone else can separate the good from the bad—or simply don't know—but I can't.

Anyway, it's been slow, and I've been catching up with one thing at a time.  First I caught up with the journal, then there's the continuous school-work catch-up, then my critique group, and now I'm getting back to blogging.  I'm going to try and be more on top of visiting you all—in cycles, unfortunately—but I think I've dug myself out of wherever I have been for the past few weeks. 

Thanks for your patience, folks.

Return to the Old Life?

My real job started again today.  Well, actually, it never technically stopped.  I just stopped.  That's the beauty of freelance work, right?  If you don't do, it just doesn't get done.  I've promised my boss it will, and it will, just not by the time classes start on, er, Monday.

I suspect, due to a rush job that needs to be completed in the next 6-7 weeks, I won't be here quite as much.  It makes me very sad to admit this because it also means I won't have as much time for my own writing.  And while I'm taking a creative writing class, I don't imagine it will affect my work for NaNoWriMo this year.

I've been saying it all summer, but I need to prioritize.  I have a job with a definite deadline, and another one with a loose deadline.  I'm training a new employee at the publisher today and tomorrow, and I'll be her go-to person when she has questions.  Plus classes.  Plus writing.  Plus husband.  Plus laundry and cleaning and cooking and, oh, I should probably start going to the gym again. 

But not necessarily in that order.

In addition to my entire life that needs order and structure, I think my writing life does, too.  At the moment, I'm trying to follow too many blogs (and I love most of them and don't want to give them up!), have my own blog which I have already let slip over the past couple of days, working on helping out the folks in my new online critique group, putting my work over there, and, oh yeah, keeping up with my editing and planning for NaNoWriMo.  *whew*  Again, not necessarily in that order.  Unfortunately, for the past couple of weeks, other tasks from this list have trumped my own writing, and I'm not thrilled about this.

Oh, and no where in there did I mention reading.  I'm currently reading a memoir—Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bordain—an MG—Princess for Hire by Lindsey Leavitt—and Stephen King's On Writing is calling to me.  Oh, and a novel I won on GoodReads—No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo—and the novel I won from a FB contest—The Handbook for Lightening Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone.  And The Possessed by Elif Batuman, which I've been yearning to read for months and recently got my hands on.  Ack!

So, my attempt to organize and prioritize continues.  I think in addition to setting a minimum number of hours to work each day on the editing side, plus assuming I might do some school work here and there :) I'm going to set myself weekly goals for reading and writing.  Hopefully this will take the daily pressure off if I need to spend more time on my German, or the formatting on my editing job isn't working and takes twice as long as it should.  The writing will happen—it always does—but motivation to edit the text afterward tends to be elusive, and that's what needs to happen most right now.

Okay, ramble over.  We now return you to your regularly scheduling blogging.

How do you prioritize your life?  How do you fit writing into your (presumably) already hectic schedule?

PS—If you're doing NaNoWriMo this year, feel free to add me as your buddy.  I'm Rosie-C over there :)

Don't Give Up Your Day Job

This is advice that I should actually listen to.  For the past month since classes ended, I have: written, rewritten, edited, rewritten, started something new, weeded the jungle that is our back patio, rewritten, played on Facebook, rewritten, and started looking at literary-related blogs.  Where in there do we see anything about writing one of those three papers I had planned for the summer or working on the freelance book-editing jobs that I agreed to?  Hmm...

So today, exactly 4 weeks since I turned in my last project of the semester, I decided to get back to work.  I left my house--always a big help to get away from the scene that sucks me back to Anabelle all the time--and went to the public library.  Bear in mind, I never spend more than 15 minutes in the public library (tsk!), and when I do, it's usually in the CD section (double tsk!).  If I want a book, I usually request it a couple of days in advance so the staff will pluck it off the shelf for me and all I have to do is go to the desk, hand them my card, and leave again.  Lazy much?

Oh, but not today.  First thing I did was actually try to find books on my own.  While it doesn't help that the library seems to be under renovations right now, that wasn't really the issue.  The fact is that I've never had to find the fiction section before, and I thought that the YA section would be in the Children's area.  Wrong!  As I was walking around down there, I thought, "If I were 15 and looking for a YA book, I'd be pretty sprickin' pissed if I had to go to the kiddie area."  So, off on the hunt again.  I finally found the fiction, first stumbling accidentally upon the YA, which led to the adult, SciFi, Mystery, etc.  *whew*  That was rough.  At least now I know for next time.

Okay, so, check out, pick up the CD we had on hold, and then off to the silent reading room (in which I am currently making a lot of noise because both my keyboard and my mouse button are far from silent... triple tsk!).  After once again procrastinating for a good half-hour, I close down my A&M #2 epilogue, I hide my two open Firefox windows, one with Facebook, my email, and a random page on natural mosquito repellents, the other with my Blogger dashboard and a number of other literary blogs (especially this post, which is proving to be invaluable to me right now).  All this done, I open my other email account (yeah, #2) and start looking for the email from my boss with the working files for one of the books I promised to type-style.

.........

Fifteen minutes of hunting through my university email, scavenging through my migrated email on another account on this computer, searching the whole HD with Spotlight (oh, this now works so much better than it did on OS 10.4!!), and I remembered:  G gave it to me on my flashdrive.  So, I reach into my handy bookbag, into the little bitty mesh pocket where that little flashdrive lives and only ever leaves if it's stuck into a computer, and.... it's not there.  Of course.  Then I vaguely remember leaving it on the coffee table last week, then moving it for the Memorial Day party we had over the weekend, and realize that it's sitting on the bookcase next to the couch.  Mother sprickin'....

Okay, yeah, I could blame the flashdrive for my problems, but I know it's my fault.  So, now that I've been at the library for, oh, at least an hour.  I'm ready to pack up my bag and head back home, have lunch with my husband, and then potentially come back here WITH THE FLIPPIN' FLASHDRIVE and work in the afternoon.  Assuming I don't leave it until tomorrow.

Wish me luck!

------------------
UPDATE:
So, I originally posted this at 1:15pm.  It's now 3:30.  In the last 2 hr 15 min, I have played on the blog, tried to add a widget from Goodreads that I made infinitely more complicated than it needed to be, and then played around on Goodreads.  Oh, yeah, I ate lunch with my husband, and I copied the files from my flashdrive to my HD.  So, at least I did one thing that could lead to potential productivity, right? :)