Spoiled!

Christmas has come and gone, and with one wonderful family get-together around one succulent turkey feast. Presents unwrapped, wine sipped, rolled home stuffed like the birds of yore and tumbling into deep, comfy sleep.

Today is Boxing Day, the day after. In communities across Canada, people are lining the malls and spending whatever money they either have left or received as a gift. But not in my home town. No, Boxing Day keeps its malls all boxed up. No shopping for this northern Ontario town!

Which suits me fine.

It’s a day of lounge pants and chai tea, a Top Chef marathon running on the TV while I spread out on my bed surrounded by the animals of the house. And while I lounge and goof around, I’m playing through my new toys: Notebook by Circus Ponies and a shiny black Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch tablet!

*dances* Nerd life! *dances*

Notebook I’d tried (and loved) before NaNoWriMo. I know I mentioned it near the end of October. What I didn’t mention is that, after a week of messing around with it and with NaNoWriMo LOOMING I knew that if I didn’t remove it from my hard drive, I would end up messing around with it all month and not actually write anything.

So I wiped it from the hard drive and put it on my Christmas list.

The tablet was a surprise addition to that list, once I realized the Notebook offered that sort of functionality and when I realized how affordable tablet add-ons are these days. Tablet basics have been covered, so now I’m knee-deep in Notebook tutorials. It will still be a massive undertaking to move the mountains of data I have into Notebook, but I have a week to do so. Starting January 1st, I’m back on the writing wagon, as well as the pack-up-all-my-stuff wagon.

Which, in turn, will lead to the unpack-all-my-stuff wagon, which will then become my make-my-place-a-creativity-den wagon. Booyah!

Back to nerding out! Hope your holidays were all they could be!

Full Immersion

I’m at the end of Day Two of World Con, trying (and failing) to come up with any coherent thoughts that would express, even minimally, how productive these two days have been. Productive and exhausting, both mentally and physically.

My right hand, for instance, has one hell of a cramp. I haven’t taken so many notes since I was in high school. I’ve put in a solid dent into the Moleskine notebook I have dedicated just to World Con and I’ve already killed the first of my pens, ruining the nerd-esque color-coding I had planned. I have blisters blossoming on my feet. My back has only just begun recovery from the twisting depravity that was the 10-hour bus ride here. After surviving on only two hours of actual sleep on my red-eye trip, I managed to make it through the first day of panels until the evening, where I had to crash with the comfort of two liquid gel painkillers. But that was the worst of it, so it’s not too bad.

Our quiet, non-party hotel isn’t; there is a massive, multi-night French rock festival happening literally outside on the corner. Strangely, perhaps because it isn’t in english, it’s not keeping either myself or my roommate up. And the beds are sinfully comfortable. That never hurts. Tonight may be different. We’re clearly on a hard rock, Fracophone Metallique style. May require headphones.

But the Con itself. My god. Everything I could have hoped for. In some cases, too much. I pour over the convention panel schedule, highlighter in hand, and my thoughts run from “When am I going to eat?” to “Those evil fuckers!” In some time slots there are, no word of a lie, five panels that if they were back to back instead of simultaneous I would happily dedicate the entire day to attending each one and leave feeling completely satisfied. Instead, I must pick one and only one, and then do it all over again each and every hour that follows. I could go to this same Con five times and get an entirely different experience out of it each time.

And as for the writers themselves, so far I’ve managed to attend panels with Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and Nancy Kress — all of whom make my inner fangirl squeal. (Okay, my outer fangirl, too.) I also got to listen in to a live taping of Writing Excuses, one of my favorite podcasts. I’m not doing the signing thing, though, for practical reasons. I did not have the ability to lug significant quantities of books to the convention to get signed nor do I have the money to purchase new books to be signed and then brought home. I have already bought too many new books and must resist the urge to purchase books 2, 3 and 4 (of 6!!!) of the new Roger Zelazny collection. In fact, the logistics of how I’m going to bring them home have already hit me and I pray to whatever gods there are that the bus ride heading back is not packed body-to-body as the one coming here was for the selfish reason that I will need the extra seat.

Tired, but in the happiest sort of way. And there are still two days left!

More commentary to come when I am lucid. Which may not be until Monday afternoon.

Making Real Progress

Taking a small break to crow a bit, as all the preparatory work that I’d written long hand is finally, fantastically entered into Scrivener and with the help of Pages has also been printed into a to-go file for when I’m writing away from home. Even got all nerdy for way too long and made a title page for the documents and put them in a shiny, newish folder.

Not that I’m done yet. Not by a long shot. Now I have the scene-by-scene breakdowns. I’ve actually created a separate Scrivener file to do all this work in and if the two end up getting merged … well, we’ll see.

In the meantime, nibbling on teeny Goldfish crackers (not the three cheese kind, unfortunately), lactose-free milk (you get used to it) and I’m singing along with the Dr. Horrible Sing-A-Long Blog soundtrack (don’t worry, the drapes and windows are closed).

But now, back to the build. Working up a mental sweat, but enjoying the hell out of myself.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The blog roll. It’s coming. I swear.

Excuses Like Dandilions

I haven’t had any coffee or tea yet, which may explain why I’m so incredibly short-tempered with things today. I’ve had niggling little technical difficulties for a week or so now, and today I seem to have both sorted them and found a host of others. At one point, having reset Safari entirely (which has solved my web-page redirects) I lost all my passwords. Being a clever monkey, I have a file for them in my MacJournal so I can’t lose them. Of course today is also the day where MacJournal has a new update out and the redirect to the webpage was giving me different errors. And when I wasn’t able to log into here, I stopped, walked away from the computer and came back.

It seems sorted now, though I am still suspicious. I think I’ll be uninstalling some Safari add-ons and maybe stripping down a few extra programs off the hard drive. As fast as she is, my Mac hasn’t had the breathless zip-zip-zaroo that it came with when I got it out of the box.

But computer issues aren’t my only challenge today. I have laundry and cooking, more food for my low-iodine diet. I have to get out with the dog at some point. I was supposed to make bread from scratch that I could actually eat but I don’t see it happening. Writing? I have to get some work done! And I haven’t even eaten yet.

I’ve gotten very, very bad at getting to work on my writing on my day’s off. I’m not typing words in, I’m not writing new ones. Most of the day is spent in an aimless and unproductive surf with a bit of book-reading thrown in for good measure. It all seems to start with running errands on my first day off. After that, I don’t really want to do much. Maybe I should do my errands on the second day? Maybe at night? I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m not managing my time well, even with the help of Things,

And I’m trying around a cat in the throws of pleasure, curled into a ball between me and the mac, front paws flexing and curving, back paws stretching out, toes extended over the keyboard, the sound of purring competing with the sound of my typing. Cute, distracting little bastard. I’ll have welts up and down my arms before long.

Today I have to get my Spirit Cat words in. That’s my good news – I’m writing Spirit Cat again! After the three (unedited) short stories, I’m back to writing the novel. It’s still shit and I’m still not sure about things, but I’m moving forward which, right now, is a tick in the win column for me.

59 Inches Or So

I’ve been obsessed with ergonomically improving my workspace at home. Not that I’m normally not fiddling with things, but after the last Hypergraphics meeting, where we changed venues and I sat at this desk, this table, this wonderful, perfectly-suited workspace, my obsession has manifested in me carting around a measuring tape between work and home. It’s not pretty, but it’s true.

The Table, which shall forthwith be acknowledged by a capitalized first letter, was an IKEA standard, flat and about 59 inches long. The legs were the cheap non-adjustable variety. And the chair? Ha. Plastic. Unadjustable. And yet the whole thing felt so tailored to my body, my moods, my needs. It said, quietly, stately, that this is a table for work, beautiful, creative work, and that I should sit at it and become one with the work.

Not to get too romantic here, but maybe the table carries some of the resonance of the crafters that use it – the venue ended up being the storefront of one of the members and she offers craft supplies and workshops set around this table.

I’ve long found the desks at work to be exceptionally productive. They’re a good height for me to lean over them and chairs that are low and firm without too many unnecessary adjustment wheels or flaps. It seems so much lower than my desk at home. So did the desk at the meeting. But when I measured them all out, my desk at home is only about an inch taller. Can I really justify swapping everything out for an inch?

We also thought it may just be the chair I’m using. I’m sitting in Todd’s now and I like it, though it leans too far back. And it’s cushy, which is something I always thought I wanted in a chair but the slim little number at work has proved that to be wrong. And what’s really maddening is that I mostly have the go ahead to have an IKEA run for an office update yet I won’t be the one able to go myself. If it happens I’ll be sending Todd out with a list of color coded numbers into the wilds of IKEA alone.

Besides my fussing, the Novelist Blood Pact has been born! I’ve paired up with one of my fellow Hypergraphics for one-on-one encouragement. Time for me to get to work.

PS: A low-iodine diet sucks. That’s all I’m gonna say besides, “Thank god it’s only for three weeks!”

Mac-ish Messing Around

Somedays I swear I’m in love with this computer. I just can’t stop playing with it! Remember back when I first got the Macbook (if you’ve been reading this for a while, and there are perhaps two of you who do), I said something to the effect of, “This computer feels more like a tool to work on rather than a toy to play with.”

Yeah. I take it all back.

I’ve spend the last half hour dinking around with it, learning how to change the icons on the folders, squeeing as I found a place that has not only Futurama icon sets, but set for Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, too, and now have to scrape up $40 or so to get a copy of Candy Bar from the folks at Icon Factory so my graphical whims can be satisfied more quickly.

Last night was more of the same, finding a wonderful page describing the 100 best (and free) applications for your Mac and I sat there for an hour mining the list and adding a whole host of new programs to the system.

I am weak, feeble. Naught but a hapless kitten when it comes to the charms of the Mac.

In that vein, however, I’ve stumbled across a very interesting application called Slife, for both Macs and PCs, that tracks your computer usage. It breaks it down by day, by hour, by application. You can also set up groups of applications to belong to certain projects so you can see not only what programs you’re using but also towards what purpose. Heck, it will even break down how much activity is spent at specific websites! So far the biggest bar in Slife for me this morning is Safari. For all my talk of ‘keeping honest’ for this blog, Slife will be the one who’s really telling me like it is.

On today’s agenda – out, out and out! It will be a criminal shame to stay home today. The weather’s been brilliant, warm and bright and melty, and I need to get out of the house. I had thought of bringing the Mac, but part of my plans today involve hiking up to the movie theatre to catch a Digital 3D viewing of Coraline. For the rest, I’ll just truck along my notebooks and do more writing by hand. Tomorrow, though, the plan is to input all the new words on the new story, finish it, and then go back and start editing. Once this story is done I’ll have one fair-sized story in the 4,500 range, and two in the 1,000-2,000 range. I’m ahead of the monthly word count goals by a little, and this is including the occasional day when I write either few or no words.

I don’t know what it is with me lately. Suddenly, all my brain wants to think about are short pieces. It may be out of a desire to see something finished. I don’t know. Still need my novel-date. That will be … I don’t know when that will be. Tonight it’s green beers and pizza to celebrate mine and Todd’s nine year anniversary. You know, I could take the paper copies of the novel with me. I could sit down at Chapters before or after the film and begin my review. That might be for the best.

Things has been a great addition. I love the syncing between the Mac and the iPhone and last night, during my fiddling, I started setting up my recurring activities and some long range plans. Still more to be done there, but progressing.

Hmm. Slife thinks that my blog writing is online research, which is technically what I’ve told it is because I house an incredible amount of data in it. I may need to put MacJournal in it’s own category, because it does many separate tasks: I use it as the primary place where I write my blog entries, I use it as a binder to collect weird things I find on the web, I use it as a directory of writing advice I glean from various author blogs, I use it to digitally record my story ideas if they are too big for my little moleskine, and I’ve started using it for general life stuff, things like recipes and good advice from sites like LifeHacker.

Time to start the day!

I <3 My Mac

Are Mac-centered magazines the purview of the British alone? They seem to be – twice now I’ve picked up magazines whose price was stamped in pounds instead of dollars and, in much the same way that British cooking magazines are on the whole superior to their American cousins, these Mac magazines are great. Solid articles, reviews, extensive how-to articles and programs, both trail and freebies, two shiny CDs worth. I’m playing with them now while I wait for dinner. One is a disc from iCreate and the other from Mac Format.

They remind me of my youth. I never had a Mac when I was a kid, though I had one for a while on loan that ran Hypercard which was oh-so-awesomely cool. But before the IBM Personal Computer and its army of clones took over the nation, there was the Amiga, a computing power house compared to its predecessors, and the Atari. No, not the arcade. The Atari computers were the sleeker, cheaper versions of the Amiga and my parents made sure we had one, an Atari ST, somewhere around 1985.

Our whole family used that computer for just about everything. I would type up projects in a word processor, I would make character sheets with a desktop publishing program called Calamus, and we played games. Not just me and my younger brother, either, but my folks, too. In fact, it got to the point where my brother and I would play our game on the computer until bedtime, and then after our parents would play to the wee hours of the morning. It was as central to us as our television. More so, probably.

Where I’m going with all of this is that our family, huge Atari geeks that we were, were devoted readers of the Atari ST and ST Format magazines, also from the UK. We had boxes and boxes of back issues, and all of us read them. We used the Atari ST computer right up to the end, and I still remember my Dad’s disappointment (and ours, too, really) when he found out they were discontinuing his favorite magazines. I recall even after we no longer actively used the ST computer anymore that it took some convincing to finally get rid of the magazines.

Hmm … just digging around the inter-webs. Looks like there are more US based Mac-centered magazines. All I seem to find are the UK ones, at least locally. Or maybe they are the only ones that caught my eye. Still, it makes me happy, in a weird way, of the threads that go backwards and forwards in our lives.

Off to play some more with the disks.

PS: In case you think I’m avoiding the issue, I did get my words. A couple more days and I’ll have another short story draft. I just have to get at least one of them edited. I’m also moving closer to setting up some sort of writer’s pact with another member of the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society. More on that later.

What To Do? What To Do?

Very productive day this morning at work. I managed some 450 words on the latest short-short, getting about half-way through. I got into a good groove, easily making my words and leaving me peppy all day. I’ve just killed one of the characters and I’m about to make the bridge between the two strong images that are driving the short-short.

I’m just not sure how I connect the two. Tomorrow will be some exploratory writing so I can figure out where the heck I’m going.

In the meantime, I’ve come into a teeny sum of birthday money. It, combined with my regular spend-a-pa-looza freebie cash, makes me think I should do something special and/or fun with it. I’ve got so many fiction books to read (Mom even sprang for two more books as part of my birthday present) and enough non-fiction to keep me busy. I don’t want to spend it on clothes. Already going on a trip. (Woo-hoo Ad Astra!)

Leaves two options:

a) Spending the dosh at Ad Astra, which will likely be books, which I shouldn’t spend it on, but may involve coolness like art prints or neat-o jewelry.
b) Spending the dosh after Ad Astra, specifically at IKEA, where I could get a bunch of items to pimp out my office.

I think I’ll do both. The trip will straddle two months, meaning I can dip into the April toy money, and if nothing strikes my fancy at the Con, I can invest part of it on office goodies.

This will be posted late, as my wireless and my broadband are both down, so I am isolated from the informational networks of the digital ether.

I guess that means time for bed, eh?

Doing Foolish Things

I’m doing something I may regret. 

I’ve taken precautions.  I took a Snapshot in Scrivener earlier today and now I’m ripping my chapter separators right out.  Most the first chapters are staying together, but a lot of the later ones are getting sliced up.  It’s been something I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of weeks now, as I’m looking to take advantage of the index card features a little more.  Right now I have the text files in the manuscript section and then I have my story cards in a second area.  I think it will help me keep on track of the story and where I am going if they are one in the same.  

Why it’s foolish is that I’m a third to half way through my story, and I’ve printed it out to date in the old format, which may make editing, um, interesting.  

But another reason I want to do it is because as I was writing this last chapter I realized that it followed too quickly on the heels of the chapter that set up.  I’ll have to either push the set up chapter back or push this one farther along.   Once my chapters map with my story idea cards, I’ll be better able to figure out how to fix it.

Nerd Alert: Remember that calendar?  Yeah, I’m taking it to the next level of nerd.  It’s nice seeing the words listed every day.  Encouraging.  But now I’m stepping in to Numbers from iWork (‘08!!!) to start tracking my progress.  I have a page that shows my month to month daily output, I have a page (so far) for January tracking words, location written, time written and mood.  Not sure if this will generate any real info for me, but even just keeping track of output will be a benefit.