Actually, it's not....really. Made you look ;)I wanted to get your attention - what I actually want to talk about is language, but profanities, and our use of them, apparently dictates how
Continue Reading
Featured
E is for “eeek, I overdid it!” #atozchallenge
So, as a few of you have noticed, I’m already behind.
I’m not sure if it’s something to do with some last minute plans that were thrown in my path, taking time out to support a friend, or that I just don’t have a great grasp of time since the UK entered lockdown (what do you mean we’ve already had Easter? no way… wasn’t it just New Years?), or if I just didn’t practice great time management, but I’m a touch behind.
So, today’s titlted EEEEEK!
And I’m going to share a few tips of how I try to manage it, when…I get it right 馃槈
Time management 101 – leave room
And I think that’s where I made the mistake. I didn’t leave room this week – at all. And while you can’t plan for emergencies properly, I always have a rule that for every piece of time I have planned, I leave 15 minutes on either side of it.
Got a therapy appointment? Keep thirty minutes spare.
Date night? Thirty minutes.
The thing is, I’m absolutely going to be pushing this to the limit, as today is the first official day of TM112, at my OU degree, for Cyber security. Which means I’m going to be planning more time, and putting in more space.
The other issue I have with this is it’s advice *I* give. I’m terrible at following it.
I was planning yesterday’s post to be ‘a day in the life’, but reading it back, I realised, I really should rewrite that post as ‘a day in dissaray’ because my ideal day in the life isn’t the one I live.
And when all else fails?
Like now? Apologise, work out how to catch up, and go for it. Seriously. Life is too short to punish yourself.
In my case, I’ll be doing my main blogs, and keeping the 26 prompt story to go back to. So bi-polarbears, here, my book blog, and, as Deirdre has injured herself, I’m probably picking up These our Fandoms too. Once I’m caught up, I’ll try and get ahead.
What do you do when life and plans collide? Got any hints?
As to WHY I got a bit behind? Normally I do my catchup on Sunday, but instead, I was in an Arboretum, taking photos, falling down hills (no, really, I’ve twisted my hip and scraped my leg. The camera is fine tho!) and spending time with my family in the spring air. The UK is coming out of lockdown, so we didn’t get to do everything we might have liked, but we did a lot.
(this is Batsford Arboretum, and these are unedited photos – my daughter, Artenapan will be posting some later on her Instagram, and has already!)
A day in the disordered #atozchallenge
(again, as this is backdated, I’m writing this with the benefit of hindsight).
I did actually have this rather neat post about ‘a day in the life’, but, the last few days led to a bit of an epiphany.
You know there’s an Instagram bubble? I think when we write ‘days in the life’ that we sometimes make ‘blog bubbles’. So, instead of talking about what my ideal day should look like, and what it does when I’ve planned it out, I’m going to write about what my day actually is. And for the first time, I’m even going to include some of the mental health stuff I deal with – so this post could be mildly triggering.
I’ll be possibly alluding to self-harm, definitely talking about psychosis and depression and anxiety and insomnia. And I have a favor to ask at the end of this post.
A day in the disordered
I fell asleep at 11:30pm – a year of training and working with an app called Headspace and other meditation apps (honourable mentions to Digipill and Let’s Mediate (I have them on Android, they may exist on iOs), alongside my partner, which is now 80% of how my sleep works out.
Unfortunately, about 1:30am, I wake up again. I wake up to a voice, that I always hear. She’s my constant companion, and she’s very hurtful. If I’m lucky, I take a sip of water, I go to sleep again, and I might get to stay there for a bit. Most nights lately though, I’ve been waking up and finally falling asleep again at 5am.
The advice is, of course, if you’re not able to sleep in bed, to get up. But if I do that and she starts causing trouble for me. At her worst, she can trap me in the smallest rooms in the house. She’s the reason that I can’t get out of the house alone. She’s the thing I’m fighting back with my favor, but we’ll get there.
If I don’t get to sleep until 5 or 6am, I’ll either stay asleep till 8am, or 11am, or sometimes, I’m asleep till 2pm. And because of that, my day is always harder to plan for. How do I plan to be up at 9am, and exercised and ready to work, if I’m not getting to sleep until 6am? The answer is I don’t.
Insomnia is a difficult and hard to live with disorder – couple it with anxiety and psychosis, and though meditation helps, I’m frequently operating in arrears of sleep.
And that’s why I can’t talk about a day in my life. I have half an hour when I wake up that’s a set routine (get up, unplug and box tech coming downstairs with me, plug in anything, such as my Bluetooth headphones or spare batteries that need charged, wash face, rarely moisturise (I’ll be talking about that in S for skin routine, cause apparently, I’m annoying as all hell about that), meditate for ten minutes after making the bed, then come down. At night, I either go up before Tempus and grab a bath, then make my juice/waterbottle for my bedside, plug everything in, brush my teeth, get my Bluetooth headphones connected so that I can meditate, set up the book we’re listening to on Audible. Depending on how I feel then, I either read for 20 minutes, then meditate, or lately, I’ve just meditated, and used a sleepscape to go to sleep to. And then wake up again at 1:30am.
I can’t talk about this really here, but there is going to be an I for Insomnia over on bi-polarbears (the link won’t work until the post goes live 馃檪 )
And that brings me to a favor…
As many of you may or may not know, I’m an author. My major project this year is to talk about the fact that I live with a pretty severe (though not the worst, by a long shot) psychosis. I think I’m probably at the end of the ‘living in the community level of it,’ though, she’s quite hard to deal with. As an author too, it becomes difficult. I ‘hear’ my characters, and I don’t like that I hear and see things as well as part of my mental health.
On my birthday, I’ll be releasing a collection of mental health books. I’m not putting up the pre-orders yet, but I am asking people to subscribe to my newsletter, so I can start talking about the run-up to releasing them.
There may be a Patreon, there may not.
What I want to do though, is to remove some stigma surrounding both hearing voices and other psychosis, but I also want to acknowledge that authors do hear voices, and that *is not* as far as I’m concerned, is a psychosis. But I guess that’s between you and your healthcare team.
What I do know is that she’s stolen five years of my life. I’ll never get them back, and while I’ve done some things in there, I’ve not gotten everything that I wanted to do, done. There are other things, of course, that got in the way, it’s not just been mental health, but if I can remove from the whole concept of ‘we don’t talk about this, we’ll get into trouble’, then I will.
And I hope you’ll help me.
If you’d like to, ALL I need you to do is to sign up for my newsletter and join my mental health street team. That’s it. If you also want to share this post or the post about the project, I’d be delighted.
I’ll be talking about about this at P for Psychosis, because it’s important to me. Here, and at Bi-polarbears. I’ve avoided telling people I have issues such as psychosis for so many years, that it’s a bit uncomfortable for me, but I also know I’m in a good community, that accepts me for who I am, and knows me as I am, psychosis or otherwise. I hope to help others like me – because I think in the coming years, as we come out of lockdowns and the shadows of what we did to deal with the pandemic, that mental health is going to be a major issue – more major than even now, and I want to help people that need help. So I am.
The radical changes I need to make #Mondayblogs #Wedswriters
So, I was a bit quiet about it, but I went on holiday for two weeks in the middle of August. 聽I spent the last two weeks battering around a pile of theme parks – Disney, Universal, Blizzard Beach (One of Disney’s waterparks), plus Nasa, Gatorland, the Florida Mall, Denny’s, IHOP… we did so much that I’m spending so much time just exploring my experiences and filing them away carefully. 聽My memory being what it is, I’ve also got about a gazillion photos that we all took – me, David, his mom, his sister, the kids.
I’ll talk about that more in another post (because this blog is getting picked up again as my ‘personal’ place to talk stuff, aren’t y’all lucky), but I need to touch on something I realised while I was away. 聽I am doing far too much. 聽FAR too much. 聽There’s no room for me to learn and explore my world, and there’s no room for writing, none at all.
So, you might say ‘but you knew this already Kai, this isn’t a surprise’. 聽And you’re right. 聽But between barely holding it together to grief, and to sleep deprivation (I sleep six hours a night, on my best night. 聽Normal nights are closer to five hours clawed back, with melatonin and other meds), so my little brain needs to be taught the hard way.
And the hard way was basically taking me offline for most of two weeks. 聽My phone doesn’t do roaming and I decided, early on, that I wouldn’t use the wi-fi, so I basically read, spent a lot of time hanging out with my kids (my son and I played pool a lot) and just enjoying *being*.
Now, my being is books and writing, so I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I should do with myself. 聽I don’t read or write nearly enough, and just behind that, I’m not doing a day of learning that I promised myself. 聽So there’s all that. 聽Behind that, and not far behind that either, I have a business to run – hosting and apps as it happens, and a diary I designed to help with all of this stuff. 聽I know it works because I hit the ground running when I came back.
I know it sounds like I’m happy with all of this, but I’m not. 聽It’s one of the most important things in my world- the ability to get to the point where I am comfortable and happy and can work with what I’d like to do, and I’ve lost that.
I’ll get there, but I’m sure it’s going to be bumpy for the next few weeks. 聽I’m happy to get with it, but there are things that are important to me, lost in the shuffle. 聽 And all it took was a two-week holiday to spot it.
My mental health is still deteriorating, but I think I know how to sort that out too – I just need a bit of space to do it. 聽Space isn’t easy to come by though, so while I do, I need to make sure I’m holding up my end of other stuff too.
But there is a ray of hope. 聽Writing and my books. 聽While this is a personal blog, the pro stuff will appear here too. 聽One thing I did learn while I was away was that while my heart is full helping others, my soul sings for words. 聽And I have so many stories to tell. 聽And I want to tell them.
And then she said….follow me :)
I know, I know, I said yesterday I’d post something, but we filmed this, we filmed some other stuff, and then…well, other things got in the way, so we changed the order we did the vids in, and stuff.
I’m writing this from my bed today – I’m not having a great week already, but I’m sure it’ll get better 馃檪
So, today, I’m inviting you over to Authorinterrupted, which you, Constant Reader, may or may not know, is my ‘professional’ writer’s blog, but which, for a very long time last year was just ‘my blog’. 聽I’m going to split off the personal posts and either mirror or redirect those to here.
For those of you asking how best to keep up with this instead of remembering where I left off the day before, if you go to ByKai, you should find that all the posts mirror there, though they may appear slightly out of synced order to when I post on Facebook to say there’s a new post live. 聽But, also as requested, Kai’s Blog Page, or Kai’s Blogging Network as I prefer to call it, has started this week too! 聽Exciting stuff.
So, without further ado, my promised freebie, and see you later, over on Authorinterrupted.com – let me know what you think!
If it’s not behaving here, I’m launching my own Youtube Channel too, so please join me over there, or on my page at Facebook, where I’ll load it direct!
()
Uh….ooops?
Have you ever wondered why people blog?
I have. 聽I think about it every day, to find the reason that I’m blogging. 聽A problem though, and a bit of a hiccup to it all is that if I’m not careful, I start trying to justify why I spend time.
Spend is right actually.
Blogging, and time most specifically, is a sort of currency for me. 聽As is social media, and everything else I do. 聽But I think what I mean by that is TIME is a currency that I struggle to decide how to spend. 聽Blogging seems to be something I didn’t want to ‘spend’ on at all, and I don’t really know why. 聽Or I didn’t until last week.
The thing is, I’ve been given back a lot of time lately.
When last I posted, I was ok. 聽I wasn’t brilliant, but I was ok. 聽My life was on a downward trend though. 聽February 2015 was right smack bang in the middle of the first six months of what I was told was a very short treatment course with the team – anxiety, while hard, was manageable. 聽I wanted to sleep more, 聽but it’s taken until NOW. 聽This week, I can actually say that five days out of seven, I’ve slept more than the goal I have on my fitbit. 聽It’s taken Haloperidol, melatonin and changing my eating patterns to do it.
And you know, I’m talking about this as if it’s a tiny thing. 聽It’s huge. 聽I spent the last year and a half struggling to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and struggling to go to sleep AT ALL some nights. 聽I’d be up all night, and my brain wouldn’t stop. 聽It just wouldn’t stop. 聽It still doesn’t. 聽But it’s easing. 聽The grip on my head is easing, and oh, it’s so nice. 聽I’m still needing to randomly nap in the afternoon, but I’m finding it so much… not quieter but, I don’t know. 聽I’m sleeping. 聽Which seems to make it easier for me.
So, I thought Id talk about this in a way I could understand myself when I look back, but more importantly, in a way that makes sense to everyone else. 聽I need to work out how to spend my time – though I’m not sure how I’m going to measure it right now – and make sure there’s a nice balance for family, exercise, writing, work, and all of the things I want to do. 聽If I can’t do that, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
And last week, it hit me. 聽I stopped blogging because I lost things to say. 聽It wasn’t so much I didn’t even have stuff to *babble* about. 聽I just looked at each single blog I had as one blog, instead of a continuum. 聽It’s going to take a bit of organising, but I think I’ve got an idea that will work.
So, my mission this week is to keep a diary about what I do, and how I’m spending time, and then, from there, I should be able to understand what time I actually have and whether I enjoyed what I was doing, and if there’s anything I can tweak.
My other major projects are sorting out a crowdfunding campaign for a project I’m doing, that I’m hoping will be good for others (it’s not to pay to publish something – it’s a product I need dev money for), and some other things. 聽But I’m starting small this week – tracking.
And, hopefully, I’ll be blogging here semi-regularly again. 聽Let’s make it a date, ok?
The adorable, endless grind
I guess I’m going to get some funny looks for this post, but writing is an adorable, yet endless grind. 聽I’ve been arguing with people today about it today, but we grow, and we learn. 聽And writing is both pleasure and pain, or at least for me. 聽And I’m still stretching my muscles and wearing them in again.
I set myself a goal of 100,000 words this year, and I’m already a fifth of the way there, just blogging, doing 750words.com and a tiny bit of fiction. 聽I want the fiction to be much more of an element in it, but seriously, it’s easy to write 100,000 words, just by blogging and doing 750words.com. 聽I may need a bigger goal!
In the interim though, I thought I’d introduce my new readers to a few things that they might have missed:
My main Facebook page.
My main G+ page.
My twitter
My writing Blog
My PR blog (which I share with Kriss Morton)
I’ll stop there – I’ve got pen names too, but y’know, it’d be great if you’re following the main stuff…it’ll cut down on your clutter too.
We (Kriss and I) are sorting out some other stuff to launch too – a horror blog and a couple of other things besides.
But yeah, that’s where we are right now. 聽I’m back to looking for a job, which is really fun, and really tiring. We’ve temporarily stopped trying for a baby, while I settle into everything. 聽We’re coming up with new and interesting ways to amuse the now not so kitten-sized kittens. 聽Life is as it is.
He had a name…
It was 2001. 聽November 2001, just after they’d decided that I’d damaged my pancreas with a few missed gallstones. 聽I’d spent a month in and out of hospital, unable to eat, unable to deal with most of the pain that had consumed me. 聽I dropped from a svelte mother of two who had been merrily breastfeeding and healthily curvy (12 stones or so) to 8 stones and skeletal. I went from breastfeeding to not and still producing milk, even though I wasn’t feeding. 聽The doctors and nurses looking after me watched me sleep most of the day away, full of morphine and on drips, barely eating. 聽At one point, they spoke of putting in a central line.
I got home and got pregnant again. 聽It was stupid, but still a miracle. 聽It was 2001 – my baby daughter was six months old, my son was just over two years old. 聽By my birthday, after arguing and discussing and going through all of the options, we decided we could manage with a third child, as long as my body would let me. 聽That was a question in and of itself – one that we finally got to the bottom of. 聽I’d be ok, as long as I was careful.
And then, the worst happened. 聽My blood tests showed that actually, I might not be ok. 聽That my liver and my pancreas were struggling – and my relationship was breaking down and things just weren’t working. 聽I’d been making plans by that point to go it alone with the three of my children, as their father was…not whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. 聽Our relationship had gone south long before I’d gotten pregnant again, 聽but I thought I could cope.
I was then faced with the worst decision I could ever make. 聽I could die carrying this child. 聽And it’s something I don’t talk about much – there’s the more immediate ‘trying for this family’ always to deal with, but this was different. 聽I really was on my own in many ways.
So, we went to talk about my options, and discovered the little boy I was carrying was dead.
By then, though, he had a name.
His name was Connor. 聽He’d have been born around August 2002, and would be 11 now.
I have a godson, not much younger than my Connor would have been, and I left the father of my children a year after. 聽We’d grown apart by then. 聽And my life moved on. 聽It always does. 聽I don’t think the things that came after would have happened with three children as young as they were, and I know that losing him was the fork in the path that led me, perhaps, to where I am now. 聽And logic suggests that we’ll never know – you can’t go back and change it. 聽You can’t remove a scar – not easily. 聽And there are some we just don’t want to remove.
But around now, every year, I miss the little boy I didn’t really get to know. 聽We talk about stillbirth and miscarriages in hushed tones, and though I know it’s not the same as losing him at 30 weeks, or earlier or later, he still had a name, and I had hopes for him. 聽He has no grave, but he has a tree in the place I spent some of my teen years. 聽There is no marker, nor other people to remember him, aside from the people that lived it with me, thousands of miles away. 聽And those that got to know me after, while I was still dealing with all of it. 聽But I was the only one that knew him really. 聽I wish, more than anything else, that everything I’d hoped, and all thing things I couldn’t have predicted for him came true, and there was a smiling boy on this post instead of an empty space where his happy face should be.
#Cybercamp – the personal stuff and an overview
Right. 聽First up. 聽 If you’re really not interested in ‘the feels’ of things (sorry, bad internet slangy thing), this post probably isn’t for you and I’m totally ok with you skipping it. 聽This DOES NOT contain much about the actual cybercamp itself – more about the stuff I learned about me. 聽It’s most likely not useful to anyone, other than me, but because people were asking me why I was sad, day two, I thought I better get this written up. 聽I’m totally fine with you skipping this one and hitting Steampunkdragonfly (my new cyber/sec/policy blog – though, right this second it’s parked on another blog, just give it a few hours ;)) later today, when the less personal stuff goes up. 聽That’s going to take a good few posts to cover actually – I’ve got screeds and screeds and screeds of notes to get through.
Before I pick up my blog where I left off, HI. 聽Hi to all my new followers and all of my older followers and sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. 聽I think the last post explains my mindset sufficiently, still, but I still wish I’d picked my blog back up sooner.
Secondly. 聽If you’re based in the UK, go check out these guys:
The Cyber Security Challenge is one of the brilliant initiatives that I’m betting will lead the charge in plugging the gap between the experts we have and the expertise we need in Cyber Security. 聽And I do want to emphasize that it’s not just ‘techies’ that’ll get a lot out of this. 聽I’m a bit techie (though, not as much as the people I encountered at camp) but where I really apparently shone was policy. 聽So if you’re interested, in the slightest in showcasing or upping your cyber security skills, and networking with like-minded people, get your butts over to the site. 聽They’ve earned a permanent link from all of my blogs, and I’ll explain why in a second. 聽And in all seriousness, thank you. 聽I thought my life was quite nice before I went to the camp – and that I was doing the stuff I really wanted to. 聽That PR was just as good as policy, if you removed the tech, and that it was ok to feel like there was a little missing. 聽Thank you for showing me that, and being patient and kind and making sure I was ok, and paying attention to the little things. 聽Thank you for it being perfect, start to finish. 聽Thank you for bringing us all together. 聽Thank you to the sponsors. 聽Thank you to the staff. 聽Thank you, a million times.
And Third
I’ve been looking for a use for one of the new blogs I was going to start – two actually, but the main one I was struggling with was ‘Steampunkdragonfly’. 聽Originally it was going to be my amalgamation site, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really should just be doing that on Dkaiwilsonviola.
And then this Wednesday hit and my world got shoved sidewards off a cliff, flipped upside down and well…from there…I dunno. 聽I’m still trying to process.
Let me explain….
Wednesday, I went to the Cyber Security Challenge at Shrivenham from Wednesday evening until Sunday. And I’ll be honest, I thought I’d be a bit of a spare part there – I’d learn some stuff but that no one would even notice me. 聽Got that one wrong!
I arrived, got my stuff dumped and was pretty much approached straight away by four lads, who wanted to know *everything* about me. 聽I had waited until they’d talked and then told them a tiny bit about myself. 聽I was gobsmacked at how interested everyone was in me. 聽Met two of the girls, confessed to being out of my depth (and in a freaking dress….I mean, that alone is like weddings only) and grabbed a drink. 聽We all went for food and then the ‘getting to know you’ session started.
It was hilarious. 聽I’ll be doing a proper write-up on the bits I can, and the stuff I personally got from it on said new blog, but I have to say something about the personal stuff that went on while I was there.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that I struggle with the ‘social’ aspect of the world outside. 聽I understand *everything* out there in theory, but in practice, I’m about three seconds away from bolting when I do something new. 聽And when you’re planning your escape in the next ten seconds, constantly, there really isn’t much room for anything else. 聽And it makes me very tense, and quite excitable, because that ‘bleeds’ through into my voice and then I say something stupid and everything just….yeah.
I’m not so much an introvert as someone that should live inside the space an introvert takes up when they’re really scared and need time to themselves. 聽you know, that tiny cupboard? 聽That’d be a good place for me. 聽I’m an introvert’s introvert. 聽Mostly because I have severe anxiety.
And it makes me *incredibly* lonely. 聽Which is the weird part. 聽Introverts aren’t meant to get lonely, right? 聽But I do. 聽I’m intensely lonely, to the point of making an idiot of myself cause I’m excited someone other than my other half or my very small circle of friends are talking to me in person/online.
Cybercamp – a bit like the best environment I could have designed….
What happens when you take 20 reasonably young people (*with a few notable exceptions, myself included), mix in a heaping spoonful of a really neat scenario (which was made public, so I can talk about that bit) where some tankers have struck something and they’re not sure of why etc. and it could be security related or coincidence. 聽And that’s where we were chucked in.
FOUR DAYS of intense, hands on fun later and I’m dizzy. 聽I learned about SQL injections, I learned about changing stuff browser side. 聽I learned why hidden HTML fields are going to get you reamed, if you’re not careful.
But I learned that actually, I’m quite level headed and can keep most of my anxiety under control. 聽I learned it’s ok to go off and have a cry, because I’m just not keeping up, but I didn’t need to make a fuss about it. 聽I learned it’s ok to be afraid because a lot of the others there too were too. What’s not ok was letting it win, cause I’d have been the one losing out. 聽And I can get up in front of people and do a presentation without having a panic attack afterwards. 聽I got top three on day three and I learned that I did that way out of my own expectations and I did it because the teams I was on – throughout the whole challenge (and we swapped teams throughout the stay) – were absolutely amazing. 聽I mean, top notch. 聽So it wasn’t really me that did it all – it was all of us.
And I made friends. 聽Lots of em. 聽Heaps of em.
Hi guys 馃槈
One of the things I did say that caused a bit of worry though was how disheartened I was after one of the challenges. 聽I’m going to specifically explain that one in a seperate post – but it was disheartened at how easily I fell into tunnel vision and looked only at tech rather than the hollistic whole. 聽And everything they flagged had been something I’d thought of and we’d missed it because I was so intent on ‘keeping up’ with the boys – not because it was a competition, but because I didn’t want to be their single point of failure. 聽In fact, I should have been the ‘failure’ there, so i could then drop into the bigger picture stuff. 聽That was my own fault for not communicating effectively and not taking the time to do the ‘personal’ bit that I ususally do. 聽I’m USUALLY the loon in most games that explores everything before moviung on – not because I’m indecisive but because RTFM or ‘TTFP’ (talk to fucking people!) is about the rule of thumb I have – I don’t go all on interrogate, but I didn’t pay attention to that and I disappointed myself. 聽But, I learned from that and we did stellarly in day 3.
Oh yeah, and I clearly have NO situational awareness. 聽I wasn’t aware that we were in a tent in the middle of the desert on an island for one challenge, though it was emphasized. 聽I just saw the back wall as a partition and darted around it, not considering what it actually meant. 聽For someone who’s supposed to be hyper aware of her surroundings, that was a bit of a fail – but on the other hand, it really highlighted how safe and how comfortable I was in the environment, and how much I trusted, not just the team members (who at one point had me sandwiched between them while messing with a server box (one on each side, really close quarters)) and though I was a bit aware and kept having to calmly say ‘please don’t touch me’ it was all good. 聽That’s something I need to work on – one lad that went to pull me over so I was closer and up on a chair next to him (tight skirt, very tired, not getting the hang of hopping up onto the barstool) looked genuinely offended when I said ‘don’t touch me’, and I very nearly dashed out of the room because I’d hurt his feelings.
My next blog post, coming in about two hours (A bit of housekeeping) is to answer some of the questions I’ve been asked lately about ‘where do you write, where are your books, how do I follow you). 聽Skip that one too if you want.
Otherwise, Day (x) blow by blow will appear on Steampunkdragonfly in the next 24 hours or so, starting with Day 0.
999 bottles of beer on the wall…999 bottles of beer
I’m about to go hunting for the daily/monthly word count plugin I’ve got on another site, for lo and verily, I want to actually start keeping track of my writing again.聽 But that’s not what the title of this post is about.
I’m writing a new(ish) plugin that lets me track what I’ve done with writing – but I’ve also got something else I want to keep track of, something that’s going onto a new blog, but for now, I just wanted a record of it *somewhere*.聽 I have 137 books to read.聽 137 books I’ve either bought or been given – not including the new ones that are going to be coming in for review.聽 And I want to read the lion’s share of them before the end of December.
Sanity optional – aka, I’m not reading enough
One of the major things I’m discovering right now is I’m just not reading enough.聽 Or, at least, I’m not reading enough that’s not on my laptop, snatched between chores.聽 I’m also not reading enough, as in, for myself.聽 The best I’m doing right now, is listening to audio books while I sleep.聽 Which isn’t good, because the alarm goes off and my brain is ignoring the voice narrating at me, so it also filters out/incorporates the alarm into my dream.聽 And while there’s a lot of overlap (I’m reading my way through Valerie Douglas‘ stuff at present, partially because she’s a friend, but mostly because I like it), it’s getting to the point where I’m genuinely missing just taking time out to read during the day/evening.
This week is going to be a bit busy, but I’m thinking I might be lucky and get some reading in when I’m at the graduation celebrations.聽 I’m going to be there on my own after all, for several hours and though I know *some* people there, I’m not entirely certain I know enough people to have conversations with anyone.聽 On the other hand, but the time I get into my gown and find my seat I might not….
And I guess that’s partly it.聽 It’s been a really long road to here – one which isn’t fully documented *anywhere* any more, and I’m bone weary.聽 Writing isn’t something I can abandon, but at the same time there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything to the point I need it to be, before I’m done.聽 I’m not sure what to do, in the long-term.聽 But I think some of the time I was going to spend on Nano this month, I’m going to have to put towards planning and settling the stuff that I want to keep, and getting rid of the projects that are good ideas, I just don’t have the time for.聽 Priorities are going to have to shift again too, but I’ll look at that later this week.
For now, I’ve got a huge week ahead – graduation, book launch (I hope!), birthday party, Nano!
Momentum
We move through our lives at a constant pace. 聽We can accelerate or decelerate ourselves with a limited amount of success, but the speed we do things at, at our base rate at least, is probably something we’ll never change. 聽Some of us rush headlong into everything and batter through life as fast as we can, hungry for as many new experiences as we can pick up, and tired at the end of each day because we’ve packed in so much.
Others go as slow as possible, savoring every step, and realising, deep down, that they can’t do everything they might want to.
My problem is I want to savor everything, but I want it all. 聽I have too many hobbies, and too little time on my books for new stuff. 聽I book far too much into my life, mostly because I can. 聽My laptop became both my freedom and my curse, because now, there’s a whole world of reading and writing out there, and I get nothing done.
Facebook is a horrible blessing. 聽I can meet and hang out with so many wonderful people, and keep an eye on my聽friends, and there are some really cool games on there, but, lets face it, I’ve got a nasty habit of refreshing my page again and again, and then wondering, at 2pm, where my day went.
Worst of all, I’m a person that moves through life with a momentum that pulls others along behind me. 聽And lately, I kinda feel like I’m out in the middle of a great big ocean, with no chance of finding the new land I was aiming for. 聽But it feels like I’m stranding other people now and I don’t like that feeling.
Momentum is working out where you’re going and I think that’s the biggest thing for me right now. 聽I need to work out which map I’m working from – someone else’s or my own. 聽If I’m working from someone else’s, where can I adapt it so it’s all mine – or if I’m going to dive on in headlong and do it all myself, I need to work out where I want to go – there are *so many* choices right now.
What I do know is tomorrow begins my ninth Nanowrimo. 聽I’m really looking forward to it. 聽It gives me another month to work out and plan the聽roller coaster聽that is about to be my life. 聽One way or another, things will start resolving and working out the way I want to.
Plans are coming soon, though. 聽I’m happy to report there *is* a plan, but it’s difficult to see whether it’s the right choice right now. 聽So I’m going to have a bit of fun with my writing for a bit, and see where that takes me. 聽It’s too easy for me to lose sight of what I wanted to do when I started out online – which was writing. 聽I’ve gone all over the web since, looking for something that’s ‘all me’ but what I am, underneath it all, is a writer.
Free download – project cover sheet
- Image by mattymatt via Flickr
I’ve got these deadlines in my calendar for writing short stories, based on the duotrope theme calendar. 聽But my main problem is I have to do three or four of em in a month, or at least attempt an idea at them – I could postpone submitting till March and roll up to it slowly, but it’s easier, in most cases, for me simply to jump in both feet.
So I designed a deceptively simple cover sheet for my projects – it’s got space to track the idea, or outline, the title, the link, notes, and each draft status. 聽You can print it or simply open it and update it once a month, and is also a handy dandy cover sheet for any contracts you may need to later file.
You can download, modify and mess with the file from deadline planning – let me know if you get any use out of it?
