Windblown

You know it's really windy when you're in your car, stopped at a light, and swaying enough for motion sickness. That is my city today. More than one cardboard box has found its way from the dumpster across the alley up onto my second floor balcony. Good thing we don't have a professional NFL team trying to play outside today.

My first deadline is creeping closer. This is the first writing contest I've entered since I was a high school student. If you know me you know how long that's been. If you don't, well let's just say it's has been a really long time. My story is chosen out of the massive pile and been through a couple of edits. I'm going to fire it off to a couple of readers for any last minute comments before I submit next week. Distractions have been enough lately to keep back the nerves. Besides, it's not as if I'm submitting anything under my 'real' name so no one can tear me apart to my face. Right?

Speaking of my alter egos, under another I've signed up for a challenge. NaNoWriMo. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a novel in 30 days... November 1 to November 30. For purposes of the challenge a novel is defined as 50,000 words. This is all pre-editing and all that jazz. Just serious amounts of creativity. I've been preparing for this excursion... stocked up on tea and chocolate, reading and watching tv/movies a lot to get the 'what if' mentality going, getting vet appointments out of the way. Dozer got hurt bunny-chasing a few weeks ago so here's hoping that's out of his system for a while. He's now snoozing on a dog bed beside me while Moof has managed to fold himself under my desk. Evidently he thinks he's Fuzzybutt who lived with us for a few months but is half his size so fits at my feet easier.

That's all the updates on me. Work is still in reorg transition limbo so I don't have anything to report there. When it stresses me, I'm trying to focus that into my writing. Job insecurity turned motivation to change my career. Here's hoping it works.

SK

Mental Comfort

I thought I had it all in gear for getting back into this writing thing. I even had multiple blogs ready to go up here. Then my evil day job did a reorg. I can say that I have survived the cuts… at least for now. But my department is no more. Half got cut and the rest of us are being split up. Thus I have been in limbo for two weeks with the promise of another two to three weeks before things settle. Spiffy.

With the mental and emotional turmoil it’s been tough to concentrate on my stories. Thankfully Samhain is the end of this month so I’ll at least get a long weekend there. In the meantime I’ve been trying different ways of getting my creativity back up and running. Various reference books that have helped in the past just didn’t do enough. A couple of new ones I’ve purchased or received as gifts this year have started a couple things percolating in the back of my brain but nothing’s even close to done cooking yet. I moved my ‘office’ from my bedroom to my living room for a change in view. I managed a little editing on the computer files there. I’ve also been trying to read more of other’s stuff. The novel collection has expanded significantly in the past month and I’ve found a few new authors I’m intrigued by.

Today it’s all about comfort. Hot green tea, cinnamon jelly beans, two computers (one running an rpg I’ve played through dozens of times). And my ultimate in comforts when trying to write… notebook and pen. Events drive a lot in my stories but so do characters. Today has been about creating characters. Using an online random name generator I’ve been creating new friends. Lycurgus, Seosamh, Luben, Caleigh, Margarid, and Evgenia so far. Nope, I don’t do Tom/Dick/Harry type names very often. There’s far too many options in this global world we live in. With somewhere in the vicinity of 7000 living languages… plus the so-called dead languages our current ones evolved from… there’s a lot of choices out there. In exercises like today’s I go through a lot of names until one sparks in my imagination. Then the pen hits the paper and I start fleshing out what I see with that one name. I’ve discussed creating a character before the name before and I find this works much better.

SK