It's stil 2014 somewhere (belated end of year wrap up)
This year has kind of been interesting for me.
I've spent most of the last year avoiding looking for work, because the very thought would drag me into a mental death and doom spiral. It's probably literally the stupidest thing I've done, ever, and I am really accomplished with the stupid.
And I did finally start getting onto it. And it's sucked. But sucking is something I can figure out how to cope with - I'm not mentally ill, my brain weasels can be negotiated with. Talking to someone else still helps. It's the best help.
Writing has been going in circles, mostly. I've figured out that there's a point at which adding cool new ideas to a story is not actually going to make it a better story, and is mostly a waste of time. I temporarily stopped work on Chained to chase a bright shiny - someone on tumblr was saying that if you did x, y, and z, you could write something that would chart on Amazon, and I thought 'the worst possible thing that would happen is that I'd end up with another novel', and this is the story behind the Dragonshifter novel. And the dozen or so terrible erotica short stories on my USB that are all half-written.
On the up side, this year I started playing ukulele and started learning Irish. I love ukulele, it's got a shallow learning curve and even the more complicated chords on it aren't as hard as what guitar can dish out.
Irish is not easy. It's extremely interesting - the way it approaches prepostitions is extremely cool but sometimes it's hard to get your head around. And spelling-to-pronounciation is not really that easy. Of the three non-English languages I've studied since high school, Irish is the hardest. But it is good to be doing another language again. (And good conlang food, actually.)
I've spent a lot of the year failing at internet - I have a LJ, a DW, a twitter and a tumblr, I haven't posted on the last two much at all, and the first two I've only been blogging sporadically, and checking comments even less frequently. I'd like to get more organised. I'd like to be talking to people online more. But I have been posting. That is a thing.
I've spent most of the last year avoiding looking for work, because the very thought would drag me into a mental death and doom spiral. It's probably literally the stupidest thing I've done, ever, and I am really accomplished with the stupid.
And I did finally start getting onto it. And it's sucked. But sucking is something I can figure out how to cope with - I'm not mentally ill, my brain weasels can be negotiated with. Talking to someone else still helps. It's the best help.
Writing has been going in circles, mostly. I've figured out that there's a point at which adding cool new ideas to a story is not actually going to make it a better story, and is mostly a waste of time. I temporarily stopped work on Chained to chase a bright shiny - someone on tumblr was saying that if you did x, y, and z, you could write something that would chart on Amazon, and I thought 'the worst possible thing that would happen is that I'd end up with another novel', and this is the story behind the Dragonshifter novel. And the dozen or so terrible erotica short stories on my USB that are all half-written.
On the up side, this year I started playing ukulele and started learning Irish. I love ukulele, it's got a shallow learning curve and even the more complicated chords on it aren't as hard as what guitar can dish out.
Irish is not easy. It's extremely interesting - the way it approaches prepostitions is extremely cool but sometimes it's hard to get your head around. And spelling-to-pronounciation is not really that easy. Of the three non-English languages I've studied since high school, Irish is the hardest. But it is good to be doing another language again. (And good conlang food, actually.)
I've spent a lot of the year failing at internet - I have a LJ, a DW, a twitter and a tumblr, I haven't posted on the last two much at all, and the first two I've only been blogging sporadically, and checking comments even less frequently. I'd like to get more organised. I'd like to be talking to people online more. But I have been posting. That is a thing.