lizvogel

A month since the end of Narrativity is approaching, and I am almost done with the post-con work! The coffeemakers are air-drying, preparatory to being packed and stored for a year, and I have some notes & ideas left to type up. But everything else, from doing the consuite's dishes to cleaning/counting/packing/storing the inventory and making notes on what we'll need to buy for next year to the no-show mailing and the free membership drawing and the consuite shopping list and and and and and... is done! (Doubtless I will now find something else that isn't, having typed that.)

And then... I get to start on next year's stuff! Or rather, dive into it, since next year's work has already started even while I'm still finishing this year's.

Two things that really helped this year: On Sunday night, pile everything into spare boxes (big thanks to my ConSuite Coordinator for saving those!) and haul it all to my room, and sort & pack on Monday when I can take my time. And for the shelves, toasters, and anything else that works, clean them at the hotel and final-pack them there, so I don't have to unpack them when I get home. Miles better!

Current Mood: accomplished

Narrativity is in one week. OMFGaaieeeeeeeeee! I am, as is only to be expected, Not Ready. Although given the number of new things, old things that are newly mine to deal with, and just generally Things, I suspect I'm a lot closer to ready than I might be.

The cookies are done, photographed, and packed up. Three batches of dough plus an emergency back-up batch, which I ended up cutting and baking because the baked cookies last just short of forever, whereas the raw dough has a limited fridge life. I made some fairly ruthless choices about what got decorated and what didn't; the following, which I really think is about three batches of dough worth, are going to the con:

( again, cut to spare everyone who doesn't care, which is nearly everyone )

Really, honestly, three batches of dough was plenty.

I measured the time in episodes of Cabin Pressure and, later, Hitchhikers Guide (because even I can only listen to St. Petersburg so many times), roughly half an hour per episode:

making dough = 7 eps (3.5 hours)
cutting and baking = 13 eps main, plus 4 eps for backup dough (8.5 hours)
decorating = 4+3+5+9+7+7+6+7+2+5+6+8+1 = 70 eps (35 hours)
pics and packing = 2+2+1+5 = 10 eps (5 hours)

for a grand total of 52 hours. Yes, the cookies are a full-time job.

Also, for the record, HHGttG gets really weird toward the end.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Professionals theme, 'cause multi-tasking

The program book's at the printers, and I got four hours of sleep last night. That's actually excellent! Historically, it's been an all-nighter. But the head of programming got me the info a little early, and I've been working on the layout for some time now so that I could have all the inevitable battles with recalcitrant graphics and inadequate computer memory before the last minute.

There's no way that the final print-prep isn't going to mean a late night, because too much of it really is keyed to the midnight-Central-time final price change. But doing in advance what can be done in advance is definitely the way to go!

And now, I think I'm going back to bed.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Metric, "Now or Never Now"

I am bad at journal-posting.

About a month ago, I went to Minicon, where I hosted a room party 2 nights running for Narrativity. This was the first ever room party I'd run, so of course it was a learning experience; among the things I learned is that a room party should *not* be a one-person undertaking!

Mainly I'm posting this, a month after the fact, to document the cookies for myself, because I am about to start making cookies for Narrativity, and data is useful.

( cut because no one cares but me )

Current Mood: tired

Two days ago, we were watching the water pour through the tunnel the muskrats have cut through the berm, and that we haven't gotten around to fixing like we should have. Yesterday it ceased to matter, because the flood waters topped the berm. Today at least was sunny and nice, so I could look out at the lake we now live on the shore of.

The house is on a small rise, so we're okay as long as it doesn't get any worse, but another couple inches and we'll have to seriously consider sandbagging the AC compressor. The sump pump's been running basically non-stop.

The most annoying thing is that the grass really needs to be mowed, and even the few parts that aren't underwater are far too soggy to do anything with.

Current Mood: there is no "wet" mood icon
Current Music: many, many, many crickets

So there's this anthology call for which I thought I might write a story. I came up with a plot idea to fit the theme, and then I came up with a better plot idea. And then I wrote about half the story, then paused for research, which is when I discovered the science didn't work at all the way I needed it to. So there was a lot of flailing and more research and wondering if I should just let the story die. Finally I got my idea and reality to play nice with each other, or at least nice enough to be going on with.

Research issues aside, I didn't get quite as into the story as I would've liked, because the anthology has a hard upper limit of 2000 words, so I was trying to write short. So of course it came in at 2362. *facepalm*

Cut nearly 400 words? Not bloody likely, but I figured I'd give it a try, just for the experiment.

The current fashion for "efficient" writing is entirely wrong-headed, IMNSHO. But it's been an interesting exercise trying to edit for shorter ways to say things without entirely losing the rather sprawly, drawly voice of the story. Surprisingly, I was still fairly pleased with it after the first pass (2114 words) and even the second pass (2030 words).

The third pass, however, was a different matter. Apparently there is a point at which the character stops sounding like himself, and trying to cut those last thirty words passed it. It's down to 2003 now, and losing those 27 words hurt. And three more, while it should not be that big an obstacle, is a big obstacle. I'm about to give it another go, and then I'm going to have to think about whether this is still something I'm comfortable submitting.

ETA: Okay, done it! And amazingly, it's not bad. The longer version is better, but I wouldn't be sorry to see this one in print. (And if it doesn't sell, I can mine the various passes for useful phrases and go back to the +400 words version for regular submissions.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: the housemate's laptop's error plinking

Feeling overwhelmed by the to-do list as usual, so I decided to just write everything else off for this week, and set the days aside for taking the cat to the vet, taking the car to the mechanic, and especially doing my taxes. Yep, just that; gonna focus on that and get it taken care of and not melt myself down trying to do seventeen things at once. Good plan.

And then I checked my email. What was that, like 20 seconds?

There's a thing I wasn't expecting to have to deal with until late May, and now I have to fit it in this week. And it's just a phone call, but it's a pretty big deal and I'm going to have to do a lot of prep for it, both practical and mental/emotional. And gawd, I just want to curl up with my tax forms and not deal with anything else, and instead I'm gonna have to fucking adult and I just don't wanna.

This always happens when I set aside a chunk of time to Just Do This. It's like blocking out the time creates a magnetic field that attracts other obligations. I wanna hide in a Faraday cage for time management.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Music: Orbital, "Halcyon + On + On"

I recently set up a Bluesky account for posting pictures of my little travel buddy: https://bsky.app/profile/touristbear.bsky.social

And after I'd played with it a bit, I set up an author account, too: https://bsky.app/profile/lizavogel.bsky.social. I'm mostly name-squatting there, but Bluesky seems to be the least-bad of the major socials, so I figured I'd stake my turf while I could.

Today I went to post another Tourist Bear picture, and discovered that none of my previous posts were visible, and my avatar picture had disappeared. I made a new post; couldn't see it either, logged in or not.

Support email sent.

At least my author account still had avatar and banner pic, and the one post I've made still showing.

Five minutes later, as I'm typing this, I go to copy the URL and discover that Tourist Bear's posts are back, although the avatar is still gone. And grabbing the author account URL, yes, both the avatar and banner pic are now missing, although the one (pinned) post is still there.

This is not encouraging me to spread my social media wings. Maybe I'll just stay here on Dreamwidth, where things, y'know, (knock wood) work.

ETA: Prompt response from support, that this is a known bug and they're working on it. Um... prompt response is nice, but this is literally what your site is for and it's not working? This is not a thing that should happen to a site that's more than about a week old, guys.

Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Matchbook Romance, "You Can Run, But We'll Find You"

The book I'm currently working on packing up for an old-school paper submission includes the bad guy being captured in part because he trips over a cat. Anyone who thinks that's unrealistic should see how much "help" my cats are currently giving me.

Current Mood: frustrated, but I love them
Current Music: prrrrr?

I've been waffling like a waffling thing about going to Minicon. Narrativity should have a presence there, ideally a room party, plus I keep saying I want to go to more conventions and it sound like my kind of con. I have bursts of "yes, let's go, rah!" but overall I've been weirdly reluctant to commit to actually going.

Part of it's the money; Minicon itself is reasonably priced, but I'll have to fly, and I don't have a roomie. Part of it's simply that committing to any firm plan these days is stressful for me; scheduling, having to be somewhere at a fixed time, etc. hits me right in the condo-estate-hospitals-toxic-job overload point that still hasn't recovered after a year-plus off. And organizing a room party, especially when I won't have my own transportation, is a whole 'nother level of scheduling and commitment and aaaargh! But part of it, I realize, is simply the idea of having to be "up" and interactive and out there for four straight days. I'd have to go somewhere! And do things! With people! Aieeee!

Perhaps my housemate is right that I need to get a job outside the house, just for the getting out of the house, if this is my reaction to, well, getting out of the house. It's just going to a con, with extra groceries, for goodness sake. Worst case scenario, the party won't be as awesome as I want it to be, I'll have some good conversations but make no real connections. Best case scenario, I'll inveigle some new members and maybe get to smof with the MNSTF crew, who seem to have similar ideas to mine about how to run a con. (Okay, worst case scenario is I'll miss a flight, but I've survived that before.) If I'm this anxious about the jump, maybe it's time to push myself out of the airplane.

I guess I'd better go to Minicon.

I haven't written since I finished Apocollapse (edits on Kitchen Sink don't count, that's just tweaking and fiddling), and I don't want to lose the oomph that I built up in November. So today I decided I'd sit down for a couple hours and work on a nice little story about a dragon -- for which I've had half a line in my head for a while now, and I figured that plus a few hits on Oblique Strategies would get me going for a decent chunk of words.

Three times as many hits on Oblique Strategies and a lot of flailing later, I still didn't have a story idea; I didn't even have the rest of that line. Then a search for more prompts netted me this: What Happened When I Posted 731 Writing Prompts Online (part 1) and its follow-up here.

And five and a half hours later, I'd written 1800 words of pseudo-magical realism about a garden.

Writing is weird.

Current Mood: surprised

In looking back over the past decade or so, I don't have a good sense of what went on when, not just this past year, but for quite a few years running. I mean, I remember events if the subject comes up, but I've been too busy scrambling from thing to thing to form any kind of coherent overall timeline-impression. This realization comes out of a conversation with the housemate recently, in which we started stacking up major events and came to the conclusion that fuck, it's no wonder we're exhausted. So, for my reference/enlightenment/reassurance/future planning (i.e., don't do this!), here's a timeline of the last something-or-so years, in bullet-point form. (Subject to updates/correction as I remember stuff.)
( cut because, good grief! )

Current Mood: thinky

As of this afternoon, Apocollapse is, finally, finished!

Of course, this is the version of "done" that still includes some find-a-better-word brackets, and a couple small chunks that I keep waffling about whether I need or not. One of which depends on whether I split the inordinately large last chapter into two, which might change the title of the epilogue-chapter, which might or might not carry that load.... But it is a coherent hunk of text with a beginning and an end and no gaps in between. Hooray!

It clocks in at an overwhelming 134,665 words. Woof! It is by far the longest thing I've ever written.

It has taken me two years and one-and-a-half months, which despite feeling like it was taking forever is actually pretty fast for me, for a novel. Faster by half than books that were 25%-40% shorter! And that time includes the better part of a year when I was dealing with Mom's medical care and then her estate, and doing very little writing at all.

I shall hand it over to the alpha-reader tonight, and give it a full proper read-through myself fairly soon. For now, though, it is Done. And Done is a very good thing for a book to be.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"

I was going to shovel the driveway, but there's a deer in it.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: be vewy vewy quiet....

I dumped one of my jade plants yesterday. It had gotten badly infected with powdery mildew; at first I thought multiple cleanings with 70% alcohol were doing the trick, but no, it was just slowing it down. It was the second-oldest of my jades and probably my favorite, and so I feel a little bad, but it was also the one that leapt to its death a couple years ago, so I kinda figure it'd had its chances. Rather than keep battling and probably lose, and risk the crud spreading to the rest of the house, I decided to pull the plug. It's not like I don't have plenty of other jade plants.

I probably feel worse about the little sprout that I'd stuck in the pot with it as a temporary measure, and that was coming along nicely. But there's no way it wasn't infected also, and if I'd tried to save it, I'd never have trusted it around the other plants. Best just to make a clean slate.

Far as I can tell, the plants that were near it are okay. (I isolated it as soon as I knew.) There was one that had one mildewy spot, but that does seem to have responded to cleaning. I've also been misting with 70% alcohol; the next most likely to be exposed is the original plant, which is huge and tangled and there's no way I'm wiping all those leaves individually, I can't even get at half of them. Fingers crossed.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Counting Crows, "Recovering the Satellites"

Wrote half of quota the day before Thanksgiving; good stuff, I'm happy with it, but it was one of those sessions where I hit an obvious stopping point and pushing past it would have resulted in words-for-words's-sake that I probably would've had to cut later. And then Turkey-day was good but tiring (an expected no-writing day). All of which ate into my lead and left me a lot closer to the target line than I expected to be at this point.

Today... started out crap, writing-wise: too many other things in my head, and my mood tanked. But the housemate brought home cheap Chinese for dinner, and we watched a couple eps of Murder In Suburbia, which despite the lack of gunfights and explosions had just the snark and cynicism I needed. And then I sat down to write.

Slowly.

Really slowly.

Okay, a little less slowly.

And then....

30,082 words!

Yes, I have met the thirty30K challenge, and kicked its ass!

ETA: Did a bit more after posting this; final total for the month is 30,861.

The book is still not done (argh), but it is getting close. Three and a half post-it notes left to cover. Will I make it before the end of November? I doubt it. But I will get it done soon, dammit. And I did my 30K.

Woohoo!!!

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "Learning To Fly"

I ended up taking three days off to fix the front privacy fence. (Two broken posts to dig out, including what looked like two separate pours of concrete, then new posts to set, holes to fill, and pickets to reattach/replace, plus miscellaneous other repairs.) That was a lot longer than anticipated; I'd originally written off Saturday, but was hoping to have a little bit of Sunday left, never mind Monday. Very glad to have the job done; the posts broke in a bad windstorm a year or two ago, and I don't think the fence would've survived another winter propped up with sticks.

But three days, it turns out, is a day too long to take off without losing momentum, and I had a lot of rereading to do to get back into the book today. Got there, though; plugged out over a thousand words this afternoon. And then I sat down and did another thousand this evening!

I wish I could attribute it to virtue, but frankly it's the impending doom of the calendar. I'll hit 30K no problem, unless something very weird happens. But my other goal this month was to finish the book, and that one's in peril. I didn't have those three days to spare for that; I'm looking at the five now remaining, one of which I'll probably lose to Thanksgiving, and the five post-it notes of events that still need to happen, and I just don't see it getting done. Even if I ( outline spoiler ) I honestly can't tell if that's appealing because it would be more dramatic/better pacing, or if it's just that it would get the thing done sooner. Contemplating it did shift me from oh-god-is-this-scene-still-not-done to being excited about the end of the book, so I'll probably give it a go; we'll see what the words do when I get there.

Whatever happens, I did 2129 words today, and that ain't bad at all.

28,076 new words and counting.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Haley Heynderickx, "Untitled God Song"

956 words today. I was working on dragging out the last 50 or so when a rep from our sucky ex-phone company came to the door to try to get us to come back; now the only words in my head are increasingly eloquent explanations of how if you treat somebody like an inconvenience you want to go away for 15 years, you're not going to convince them you value them as a customer after they leave. Any further writing I force out would be words for words' sake, and probably need to be deleted tomorrow. Better to just stop now.

I'm still way ahead of quota. Also, wondering if I really do need one of the last few things I have planned (adding a few more characters), or if I could cut it and be done that much sooner. Certainly don't need it for the word count; do I need it for the plot? I honestly can't tell.

25,947 words and counting.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Tears For Fears, "Rivers of Mercy"

Started the day with writing today and just kept doing it. 2296 words!

The Big Thing was a lot easier & more fun today, and is most of the way done now. Some reactions/follow-up to do, and then I can get on to the Next Thing.

There aren't many more Next Things left. End of the book is in sight, though I can't get complacent about it.

The month is two-thirds done, and I'm more than four-fifths (81%!) toward my word-count goal. It's going to be interesting to see if I hit it before I hit the end of the book. (Still aiming to do both this month.)

24,382 new words and counting.

ETA: Make that 2905 words today. 83%. 24,991 and counting.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Simple Minds, "The Signal and the Noise"

Had a kick-ass writing session yesterday (2045 words!), and still finished in time to ice the cookies I'm taking to family turkey-day. That was after a morning where I absolutely could not get started; it helped a lot when I finally realized I'd forgotten my morning Red Bull. *facepalm* That, and throwing myself at the page. (But maybe mostly the Red Bull.)

That was the lead-in to the Big Thing I've been looking forward to writing. So today was the Big Thing, and... four hours to barely drag out 1092 words? C'mon, brain! This is supposed to be the fun part!

Probably didn't help that I'd prewritten a bit that turned out not to fit ( spoiler ), so I had to rework that and try to save as much of my clever wording as possible. And then figure out how to get everybody where I needed them when they wouldn't naturally be there. And it didn't help that I had a bunch of tasks to do this morning that put me in a non-writing headspace. And that LittleGirl really wanted to sit on my lap and purr. (That "help", I'll take.)

Still, it's another thousand words. That ain't crap. Maybe tomorrow I can manage to have fun with the rest of the fun part?

22,086 new words and counting.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Haley Heynderickx, "Untitled God Song"

It ain't over til the con chair sleeps.

Time is an illusion. Con time doubly so.

It's not impossible that Narrativity is soon.

There were cookies at Minicon

Anybody got a spare ark?

An Interesting Exercise

Yes, but not now.

Sky's not so blue

Reality imitating fiction

Get over there

Back in the saddle, or at least by the pony ride

Years In Review

Book. Is. Done.

Hi there, neighbors

Jaded

Thirty Days, 30K: Day Twenty-Eight

Thirty Days, 30K: Day Twenty-five

Thirty Days, 30K: Day Twenty-one

Thirty Days, 30K: Day Twenty

Thirty Days, 30K: Day Nineteen

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