Is that a Migraine Coming On?

I didn’t realize I was as out of sorts as I was until Todd said something today when we were out.

(What were we doing? Why, adding another couple of books to my reference shelf, specifically The Science Book and A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words with my shiny little Chapters gift card.)

I was interrogated about the number of Cokes I’d had (only one) and after shrugging it off, I started babbling and then totally lost my train of thought. He gave me another look, and said, “You’re bouncing off the walls, you’re unfocused. You can’t even finish a sentence.”

But the truth was I wasn’t all corked on caffeine, I was feeling a little punch drunk. Scattered. Random. Tired, even. After I dropped him off I grabbed some food, scarfed it down. Normally that helps, but I’m still feeling, and this is my own technical term here, googly. It may be a headache brewing, I don’t know.

Did not write today, except in my journal. Work has finally dropped the other shoe — our campaign is being closed and we are transitioning to another campaign. I heard about it through the grapevine, as I was off yesterday when it dropped. Heard mostly consistent information but a few tantalizing bits that swung in widely different ways. I expected that when those of us who were off yesterday came in, we’d also be taken into the board room to be officially told but not so much. I know the upper staff were annoyed that it broke on Facebook after someone inside texted someone outside who then put it up on Facebook, but that’s to be expected. They apparently told people they would be calling us, but no such calls came and no meetings have been set up. I can sort of understand if they wait until tomorrow because then everyone who would have missed it will be there. But I would be just as surprised if we aren’t taken aside.

So, maybe that’s why I’m feeling googly. Maybe it’s work. It is comforting to think that two weeks from now I will likely still have my head spinning from my first day at World Con. They’ve released the program guide, and the first two times I sat down with it, I couldn’t get through the first day of panels. There is so much, and so much I will miss. I joked on Twitter that I’d need to invent a fully-functioning cloning machine a la Multiplicity. Part of it will be resisting my natural urge to go to nothing but the writing-related panels. I know that may seem counter-intuitive, but I get just as much a charge from the science and culture panels as I do the writing how-tos and there are lots to be had. And how’s this for cruel? The Opening Ceremonies opposite a panel on Wonder Woman opposite a panel on Doctor Who! Devious! Impossible! Plus there is the opportunity to see one of my favorite podcasters Mur Lafferty who will be on a few panels relating to new media and it looks like there will be a live recording of Writing Excuses, one of the best writing podcasts out there.

And I’ve only made it halfway through the Friday listings! The tentative program book is over a 100 pages, quickly nixing any thoughts of printing out the document. Oh well, better to be spoilt for choice, right?

Calling it a Night

I’m trying to self-medicate with a stiff rum-and-coke after a day that tested the very limits of my patience.

So while I sip the luke-warm beverage, the tinkle-tonk noise of Boom Blox 2 plays on the Wii while Todd and his buddy amuse themselves and the early night’s breeze brings with it the strange but intoxicating blend of lilac and late barbeque, sweet and spicy. I’m trying to picture it as a unisex body spray, not altogether unsuccessfully.

Work was grueling. There was no time to write — we were back to back as soon as the phones started working after a brief, teasing half-hour where we were unable to take any calls at the beginning of the shift. And then the day dragged on, one unrelenting call after another, with the systems freezing, with customers unbearably stupid or difficult. I had one woman spell out the word “snow” to me when, as I am directed to do (and find that I must sometimes because the audio quality is so terrible) paraphrasing back to her the issue. This both infuriated and amused me, as so many Californian’s themselves do not know what I’m talking about when I use the word to describe what the television does when the cable is out. And then Mr. Mumbles who can’t even say the same phone number twice accuses me of needing a hearing aid. I just about lost it.

Not writing made today ten times worse.

So I’m here now, trying, my contacts slowly gluing themselves to my eyeballs, my skin increasingly catching the chill from the breeze. Just a few meager words written on the short story I’m playing with while I work on the manuscript build (you know, so that I’m still producing words). But it’s so vague and far away when I try to write. Like using a net to catch a butterfly that you can only see in your binoculars. Maybe it’s just because I’m tired, or maybe because I didn’t start putting words down as soon as the idea came. I wrote some notes around here somewhere. I need to dig them up.

Anyways, still trying to force my way through. In book news, I’ve finished Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris (after just finishing Scott Sigler’s Infected) and now I’m heading towards a little non-fiction, specifically Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. Making some progress in my mountain of to-read books, even though technically I did cheat by buying the non-fiction book. I tried rationalizing it by saying it was reading for research, but let’s be honest; any fiction I read for pleasure becomes research and any research I read becomes pleasurable, so I’m not fooling anybody.

All right. Shutting down to read about forcefields and robots. Night!

The Moment of Truth (Hurts)

Fifteen minutes to go before I dial the number of doom (i.e., work) to call in for my shift bid.

I hadn’t let myself get too stressed out about it up until this morning. With a shift bid for about 130 – 150 employees it’s hard to get a handle of what might be available when your 80th from the top. The list they give you to look at is huge, and there are only a few numbers you can come up with from a document that you can’t get a copy of – that there are 59 people below me and that there are around 45 or so shifts where the days off are inexplicably split up. These numbers encourage me, albeit slightly. What I do know is that unless something truly weird happens, I will not be working day-shift and I am not likely to have split days off unless I so choose.

They’d had numerous troubles with the shift bid so far. We were supposed to have it a month ago and it was rejected by our site staff either once or twice, wisely knowing that the employees would riot – more than they are doing now at any rate. A lot of full-timers have seen their weekends off either vanish or come with later start times. This does not bode well for those of us who had day-shift purely by accident as of the last shift bid. And there are people already looking for work, either because they are not enjoying the new campaign we are on or because they are sure to lose their current shifts due to low seniority.

Me? I don’t know yet. Only seven minutes left before I find out one way or the other.

Working later would suck, but would give me more time in the morning to write. And sunshine. Oh, how I’ve missed sunshine. It feels that every day I had off, the clouds would roll in and dump another wave of snow on our heads. And I’d have to walk to work, bypassing my lazy inclinations. But that will also screw up eating dinner. Right now, we eat late, but we still eat something hot and freshly made when I come home. Later shifts would see my lunches pushed to around the dinner hour, meaning endless sandwich dinners and late night eating when I did get home.

I need another job but my timing, as usual, is impeccably poor.

Five minutes. Might as well keep writing right up until the call. My stomach knots, the back of my throat tastes sour, my shoulders both ache and tremble. Why do I always find myself in the ass-end of the job search? I’m reasonably intelligent, hard-working, I care about getting things right, I listen, I help. Is there no place for me out there?

Two minutes. I write down the golden questions that saved my ass the last shift bid: What’s your earliest start time? What has a Friday as one of the days off?

One minute. Here we go.

Well … interesting … I still have day shift. Tuesday / Wednesday off, 9:45 am to 6:15 pm. People must have really missed their weekends.  Shows you what I know!

So, no morning writing for me, but I still get dinner. And there is still possibility for me to get to the meetings for the SHS at a reasonable time. Fingers crossed.  

 

PS: That’s twice now, once here and once on Facebook, where I used the word ‘word’ in place of work.  A SHS-member has already teased me about the freudian nature of it.  It’s not even like it’s a mistype - you have to type ‘d’ and ‘k’ with different hands!  Weird.

Skull Scarves

I’m wearing it now, black with cute little pirate skulls.   I can say cute because the graphic is all rounded, inoffensive.  I wear it and I think not only of goths but of little old ladies with delicate scarves flapping in the wind as they peal out of town on a big black Harley.    It’s like I can’t make my mind up about it, so it becomes possible of anything.

Perfect for writing.

I realize this is skipping deeply into the bizarre, but humor me.  I’m alone in the house, I have my podcasts playing but soon it will be blaring, heart-pounding pop that I can mangle with my own voice at the top of my lungs.

I’ve skipped out on the coffee thing – I like my tea.  I’ve been having a cup with Todd in the morning, and found it quite perki-fying, but prefer my flavored brews.  I do have some scented wax melting away, filling my room with scents of mango and starfruit, the dog has been walked and I feel good.  Really good.

I will be no where near my hope of getting my 10,000 words for Friday’s meeting at The Fromagerie, but I’ll have something done.  I will be late for the meeting, as I only get off work at 6:00pm.  Which means I’ll miss the cheese.  And dinner.  I dunno, maybe I’ll ask them to buy me a plate.

Even though I will be no where near my mark, I feel better about Spirit Cat than I did all December.  Failing at NaNoWriMo doesn’t matter so much anymore, especially since it was a soft failure anyways as I still managed a decent output of words, more than I am doing now.

But I also realize that having routine is very important to me.  I like knowing how to plan, what to anticipate.   And work changes, I find myself paralyzed, like a kitten plucked from its mother and stuck on the couch having no real clue what’s just happened or where the hell I am.   December sent me into training and in January the schedule changed again when we got onto the production floor.  It will change again come February with the new shift bid that’s coming in the next few weeks.  How do I plan for this?  Will I be working days or nights?  Should I start a habit now or wait until I know my schedule?  Will I even be able to keep going to the Sudbury Hypergraphic Meetings, or anything else, if I get stuck working later?   It’s not use telling me not to worry about it – it’s just what I do.

The only answer to “When will I write?” is then a) ‘Weekends’ (whenever they may be for me) and b) Mornings.  Those are the only options.    Hmm.  Maybe I just figured out my answers.  Pondering.  Pondering.

(That’s why I like this blog o’mine – even if no one is reading, at least the illusion of me talking to another person helps me figure out what I probably already know already but haven’t articulated.)

Now, to writing.  “Arrrrr!”

PS:  Ad Astra is shaping up quite nicely.  Must go!  Must find buddies to go!  *squee*  http://www.ad-astra.org/

Not Quite As Planned

The goal was to take this, my first day starting at 9:45 am, to try something new with my writing. The plan was to get up at 7:00 am, get ready by 8:00 am, and write from then until 9:00 am. Then it would be strap on the boots and head out the door to walk to work.

Except it’s -24 degrees Celcius, -34 with the windchill.

Todd gave me a lift to the coffee shop across the street. I have an extra large chai tea laite and a bucket of shame.

But it’s warm shame. Going to head into work, claim a seat in the training area of the production floor and do some writing in the cafeteria.

It’s cold out there, kids. Real cold.

Friday Fictional Housekeeping

(Wow, if I’m gonna hit 12-Babbles of Christmas Posts, I’m pretty far behind!  Need to either catch up or chop ‘em up into smaller posts.  Some of them are real long.  Sorry about that.)

Friday.

Normally when I say the word Friday I don’t actually mean the day Friday.  If I was saying ‘Friday’ I was quite likely saying it on a Sunday or Tuesday at the end of a shift.  ‘Friday’ in my personal lexicon means ‘end of my work week’, followed by two days of solitude in the house with only the pets for company.  Until recently, I would madly jabber about ‘Friday!’ on Facebook or Twitter, and then have to explain what the hell I was talking about.  Ah, what shift work will to do you.

But today ‘Friday’ is really Friday.  And tomorrow is really Saturday and following that a real Sunday, a bizarre concept to my mightily abused body clock.  During these last three weeks of training for the campaign switch, they’ve given everybody real, honest to goodness weekends off so I’ve blissfully spent the last two weekends with my S.O. and I’m looking forward to doing the same this weekend.  It’s like a planetary convergence.

Of course, with Christmas and all that jazz, I’ve gotten no writing done on my day’s off.  Bugger.

Tonight, though, I’m on my own.  Todd is boozing it up at the staff Christmas party and I am home alone.  I actually made some notes today for Spirit Cat while at work, figured out where the rest of the scene needs to go, created a few breadcrumb elements as well, and hashed out the relationship between the main character and her mother.  Right now, I’m playing with character dossiers – something I’ve been meaning to do for months and only now gotten to.  It’s been interesting see how the characters have changed already, attitudes that have shifted in the act of writing.  At the same time, I’m coming to new understandings of the traits that were there in the beginning.  For example, I knew that Lily was going to act a certain way but I didn’t really know why.  It’s not that I was having Lily conform to the needs of the plot – it was more like watching a person do something as an observable fact without knowing the choices and motivations behind it.  As I went exploring today, some of those motivations revealed themselves, illuminating logical connections that I didn’t realize existed.

So I’m doing some fiction-upkeep, fleshing out my characters in preparation for this weekend’s run.  I want to hit a pair of 1,000 word writing sessions this weekend, which will bring me to one third of the goal for the next Sudbury Hypergraphic Society meeting.

Demons excised and wireless incarcerated!

‘Cause that’s what it takes, apparently.

I’ve finished Fable 2, again, so that it no longer sings sweet siren songs of doom that lure me away.  I will shortly be turning the wireless off,  so that I can no longer linger on message boards were I do not post or spend the time endlessly refreshing reddit.com.  I am feeling better, having taken Tuesday off when my throat closed shut and strangled my voice.

I have one day left in the month of November that is well and truly my own, and if I don’t write today, I know I will not write another word until after November ends.  It’s like the month has become my anti-NaNo.  I have run from even the thought of writing since that last big push.

And I want to hit 20,000 words before the end of the month.  Four days.  I need about 2,500 words.  About 650 words per day.

Tonight is another write-in.  I didn’t go last week.  Might not make it tonight.  I am still sick, just barely functioning right now and I don’t want to push it.  For tonight, I don’t want to infect everyone and I don’t want to overly tax myself.  I still have three days of being on the phone for the campaign at work before I switch on Monday to the training class.  Hopefully with the American holiday it will be quiet, and my voice won’t be too strained.  After Sunday it won’t matter – in training I take notes, not calls, and I can suffer through that with cough drops and tea.

I do want to make the Wrap-Up Party, though, even though I will not be a NaNoWriMo winner.  I don’t want to lose touch with everyone, and I want to make good on my intention of rejoining the Writer’s Guild.

Anywho, cross your fingers, cross your toes.  I’m turning off the wireless . . .  now!

What Happened To That Week?

Honestly, I’m not even sure what I did from day to day.  We ended up going out a lot after work, which drains me totally.  Friday we shopped, Saturday quiet, then Thanksgiving (my Canada is showing), then helping some friends move furniture they purchased at the auction Monday, and then yesterday was our election.

And now, it is me and the fortress of silence in the house.  The animals are fed with their favorite foods, I threw my laundry into the wash last night so it’s only a matter of putting it away, and I am one family dinner away from having my two days off entirely to myself.

I have made a tiny gain, however.  As we continue to hemorrhage staff at work and with no hope of a fresh infusion of new blood any time soon, cubicles are opening up.  Where once we newbs were forced to move from claimed cube to claimed cube like squatters, we’ve had our own named cubicles for months but now there are so many empty spaces we can move around with impunity.  Out of some sense of whimsy or corporate idea of creative workspaces, all the cubicles are staggered into zig-zags, each unit having either walls covering only the desk, one wall to one side, or two walls on either side.  I prefer the latter, and had one of these cave-cubicles before my switch to dayshift.  After my cube-neighbor left for another job, I eyed her cubicle for a week before deciding to grab it before someone sensible decided to condense our workforce into a smaller, more efficient working area.  

I like the two walls not just so I can play with my iPhone without getting caught, but because I can either hunker down to do some writing or reading or I can participate in the socializing when I want to when we have down time between calls.  Not that we’ve had lots of down time lately post-Hurricane but it’s getting better.  And after I moved, I actually got some writing done!  300 words – not much, but something.  More than I have written at work for months.  

Especially with NaNoWriMo coming up.  I’ve signed up at the boards, made contact with two local participants, found web-based proof of the continued existence of the Sudbury Writers Guild, and plan to make use of my two days off.

I smell cinnamon toast, something I don’t think I’ve eaten for years.  Hungry for it now, but here I am with no bread in the house.  

Time to forage.

PS:  Woot NDP!

Shift in Schedules

Improbable as I thought it to be, I actually managed to get day shift on this shift-bid. I’m going from a 2:00 pm to 10:15 pm shift to a 8:45 pm to 5:30 pm shift. Being 34th of 39 total full-time agents, I worried I’d have only the latest start times to choose from, even later than the last shift bid, and I had no idea how I was going to get home. They offer an small incentive for people who work 11:00 pm or later, but I wasn’t sure how many folks would take it and they were offering fewer day shifts all around than last time. There was talk a lot of day shift regulars would take anything with Sat/Sun off, which made a lot of people nervous in the afternoon/night shift.

But it worked out – at least for me. Seven night a week with Todd beats two any day. The guy said I was the first person happy about the shift bid so far. I don’t doubt that he’s had nothing but attitude from many of the other agents. All I know is that after I hung up I screamed that high-pitched, roller-coaster ride sudden-drop scream for about a minute, then I texted everyone.

What does this mean for my writing? Well, having squandered all my mornings, I am hoping that not having them will make what time I do get more precious. I won’t likely write at night when I’m home – not with Todd and dinner and the animals. But during the oh-so-quiet work day, I do plan on getting a little done. I’ve written a little over 500 words on Spirit Cat while at work over two days last week, which I need to transcribe. (I’m getting a back log!) So my days off will be my official writing days, and who knows, I might try getting up early to write before going to work. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished setting up Firefox as my ‘Writing Browser’, with nothing but writing links, workshops and forums available to me. Took me damn near long enough.

The Work Effect

Again, I was suprisingly productive at work yesterday, until the last two hours where I was inundated with the silliest calls by the silliest people … people deathly afraid that their televisions would shock them … people calling in to say they haven’t had services working for two months but need someone over tonight to look at it … people who have never sent an email before … alright, they weren’t all bad, but holy cats, a few of them right near sent me round the bend. One hour-long, quota-breaking call had me dealing with a woman petrified of everything, sure utter disaster was about to strike at any moment and sure that my clairvoyant powers would be able to get the TV working again, even though I don’t trouble-shoot televisions. Cable, yes, TVs, no. Arg.

Anyway, this whole new angle opened up last night, as well as a bunch of related world-building for Spirit Cats, my official ‘no show’ novel. Yeah, I’m reading all the nifty books, fiction and non-fiction, to learn how to write better, to recognize it when I see it, but Spirit Cats is just for me. Just playing. Just messing around. We’ll see what happens after that.