HEY I'M NOT DEAD
Jesus, how long have I not blogged in?
How long have I not blogged in. This is what is left of my brain, y'all. All my grammar is belong to novel.
I've been struggling. I mean, not sad, but in terms of physical health. For about a week there, I successfully fought off my sister's combination sinus/ear infection, but I felt pretty wiped the whole time regardless. I've also managed to twist my knee somehow--my mother keeps fretting that I've torn something, but it just really feels like I've overstrained some muscle or tendon in the back of my knee. The problem is that I keep re-twisting it--just stepping wrong, just twisting it a little bit the wrong way--and I can't quite get it to get over itself. But this is why I think nothing's seriously wrong with it: it's a little stiff in the mornings, but after a night of sleep off my feet, there's no pain. The pain comes back after I've whisked Sam outside ten or twelve times during the day (he's mostly blind now, as you may remember, and fairly incontinent). I don't have dog duty on the weekends (mostly), so I am trying to take advantage of this to sit or lie down as much as possible and try to fix it. I've got an ice pack under my knee as I type; I've dug out Mom's old knee brace to use, if I have to, to keep myself from those stupid little step-twists.
As for the book itself... it's going so slowly. Like, I think the scenes I'm locking down are pretty good, but... I might not finish this century, at the rate I'm going. I did have another bit of location research serendipity that made me deeply happy yesterday. But still. I spent all yesterday hacking away at one paragraph--not because I was picking at word choice, but because it required a lot of geographical tweaking--and BY GOD, I felt accomplished when I was done. But sometimes... yeah, I'm picking at word choice and self-editing as I go. Even though sometimes I just leave "the [proud, bold, not exactly haughty] façade" in, I get to a point where I feel like I haven't truly written it if I didn't figure out what I really meant. Buried in this movie trailer is a snapshot of my life, essentially. Starts at 1:58: "The night was... clouuuuudyyyyyyy."
It has to go faster than this. It has to.
My point is, I've been incredibly tired. And Halloween's one of my favorite times of the year, y'all. I try to spend the whole month in a Halloween mood, and here I've just been so... tired.
(I wish I could have my traditional ghost background, but I don't think it works on this layout. I would go back to the old one for the occasion, but the point of this layout was to make it easier for readers with visual impairment. Sometimes you just can't make everything work.)
I'm still on Twitter every day, which sounds like a huge cop-out (oh, so you're not too tired to play on Twitter, huh?), but it's just really so much less effort. You hit RT a few times, you answer people with 140-character one-liners if you can think of something to say, you go back to your work. (Actually, it's helped a lot with eye strain. I haven't developed my usual eyelid twitch at all, because I'll get to the end of a sentence or paragraph or thought, look over at Tweetdeck, and then look back. You have to be careful not to slip into procrastination, but apparently this kind of look away/look back thing is advisable for your eyes.)
But I need to post here more often, because this is home.
WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE
Seriously, my Tumblr has devolved into movie trailers and animalstalkinginallcaps reblogs. I got nothin'. The best thing I can think of at this point--well, let me rewind a little. I'm still reading your spooky and/or gothic 19th/early 20th-century short stories, with a number of novellas and the occasional novel thrown in. (One of the major reasons I do this, besides watching how the masters handle suspense, is just to read anything set in that period to keep a sense of how people talked in my mind. It's easier to think in 19th-century character voices if you're surrounded by them constantly.) This being the week leading up to Halloween, maybe we can discuss something every day or other day or I don't know, something. I'll save the first discussion for the next post. For this one, recommend anything spookative you like, preferably something available online where everyone can read it (I practically live on litgothic.com and, for nonfiction research, victorianlondon.org).
So. Uh. Stuff. How are you?
How long have I not blogged in. This is what is left of my brain, y'all. All my grammar is belong to novel.
I've been struggling. I mean, not sad, but in terms of physical health. For about a week there, I successfully fought off my sister's combination sinus/ear infection, but I felt pretty wiped the whole time regardless. I've also managed to twist my knee somehow--my mother keeps fretting that I've torn something, but it just really feels like I've overstrained some muscle or tendon in the back of my knee. The problem is that I keep re-twisting it--just stepping wrong, just twisting it a little bit the wrong way--and I can't quite get it to get over itself. But this is why I think nothing's seriously wrong with it: it's a little stiff in the mornings, but after a night of sleep off my feet, there's no pain. The pain comes back after I've whisked Sam outside ten or twelve times during the day (he's mostly blind now, as you may remember, and fairly incontinent). I don't have dog duty on the weekends (mostly), so I am trying to take advantage of this to sit or lie down as much as possible and try to fix it. I've got an ice pack under my knee as I type; I've dug out Mom's old knee brace to use, if I have to, to keep myself from those stupid little step-twists.
As for the book itself... it's going so slowly. Like, I think the scenes I'm locking down are pretty good, but... I might not finish this century, at the rate I'm going. I did have another bit of location research serendipity that made me deeply happy yesterday. But still. I spent all yesterday hacking away at one paragraph--not because I was picking at word choice, but because it required a lot of geographical tweaking--and BY GOD, I felt accomplished when I was done. But sometimes... yeah, I'm picking at word choice and self-editing as I go. Even though sometimes I just leave "the [proud, bold, not exactly haughty] façade" in, I get to a point where I feel like I haven't truly written it if I didn't figure out what I really meant. Buried in this movie trailer is a snapshot of my life, essentially. Starts at 1:58: "The night was... clouuuuudyyyyyyy."
Click to viewIt has to go faster than this. It has to.
My point is, I've been incredibly tired. And Halloween's one of my favorite times of the year, y'all. I try to spend the whole month in a Halloween mood, and here I've just been so... tired.
(I wish I could have my traditional ghost background, but I don't think it works on this layout. I would go back to the old one for the occasion, but the point of this layout was to make it easier for readers with visual impairment. Sometimes you just can't make everything work.)
I'm still on Twitter every day, which sounds like a huge cop-out (oh, so you're not too tired to play on Twitter, huh?), but it's just really so much less effort. You hit RT a few times, you answer people with 140-character one-liners if you can think of something to say, you go back to your work. (Actually, it's helped a lot with eye strain. I haven't developed my usual eyelid twitch at all, because I'll get to the end of a sentence or paragraph or thought, look over at Tweetdeck, and then look back. You have to be careful not to slip into procrastination, but apparently this kind of look away/look back thing is advisable for your eyes.)
But I need to post here more often, because this is home.
WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE
Seriously, my Tumblr has devolved into movie trailers and animalstalkinginallcaps reblogs. I got nothin'. The best thing I can think of at this point--well, let me rewind a little. I'm still reading your spooky and/or gothic 19th/early 20th-century short stories, with a number of novellas and the occasional novel thrown in. (One of the major reasons I do this, besides watching how the masters handle suspense, is just to read anything set in that period to keep a sense of how people talked in my mind. It's easier to think in 19th-century character voices if you're surrounded by them constantly.) This being the week leading up to Halloween, maybe we can discuss something every day or other day or I don't know, something. I'll save the first discussion for the next post. For this one, recommend anything spookative you like, preferably something available online where everyone can read it (I practically live on litgothic.com and, for nonfiction research, victorianlondon.org).
So. Uh. Stuff. How are you?