Whip It Good

I just had a client have to remind me that this is a holiday weekend when I tried to schedule a conference call for Monday. That might be sad, but not as sad as the fact that what's exciting me most about the prospect of an extended weekend is finally having time to clean my house. Not that I'm such a clean freak that putting the emphasis on the "labor" part of this particular holiday fills me with joy; but our house still hasn't recovered from our camping trip last month, and I can't even remember the last time I vacuumed the carpet. This house needs some serious whipping into shape, and it looks like I'll finally have time to do the whipping.

Of course, I shall have to do it all whilst wearing my new t-shirt.

And if I'm really feeling ambitious I might even tackle the mountain in the garage that represents two years' worth of backed up recycling -- the first step in converting the garage from a big space to throw the crap we don't want to deal with into an organized haven for craft supplies and camping gear. Party on!

This month is shaping up to be a pretty good one, work-wise. It never ceases to amaze me the way freelancing is always feast or famine. Never does it happen that one client needs something one week, and another the next, and so on so that I've got a steady stream of work and nobody's ever competing for my time. Instead it always happens that most -- if not all -- of them have major projects that need done all at the same time, or hardly anybody needs anything from me at all. Right now I'm looking at a feast of web design and VA work, so that's going to be keeping me busy for the next few weeks.

Gotta say I'm relieved, because as much as I appreciate that Demand Studios is there to get me through the famine times, it's definitely not my favorite gig, probably because it's the one that requires the most mentally taxing work for the least pay. After a long day of struggling to focus enough to research and write just a few articles, I'm always too mentally fried to do anything else. I'm feeling energized just thinking about having some truly creative work on my plate again. Even so, I'm going to try to keep doing at least a few DS articles a week, just to ensure I'll have a steady, if small, paycheck to buffer against the unsteady nature of freelance pay.

Somewhere in all this working and cleaning, I've got to be sure to get outside and enjoy this perfect fall-like weather we're having. This would, of course, be a lot easier if Matt would let me take the laptop out on the patio, but he's afraid I'll smash it to bits on the concrete and then we'll have to spend a big chunk of money to replace it. And he does have a point -- I do tend to be accident prone, and I wish I could say that I don't have a history of expensive accidents, but... well, let's just say I don't have solid ground on which to argue in favor of ever leaving the house with my laptop. So if I want to go out I guess I'll just have to leave the computer behind and, like, get some exercise or something. How novel!

Chill-away Camp

I'm still nursing my wrist, and still doing a lot of non-blog writing, which is still seriously cutting into my blogging time. It's been cutting into my Twitter/Facebook time, too, so I figured I'd better leave an update so nobody thinks I died.

Our air conditioner is broken. Again. It's done this every summer since we moved into this house, which I think is a good argument in favor of replacing the ancient piece of spottiness. We took out a debt-consolidation loan large enough to cover a replacement, but Matt's still nervous about committing to throwing that much money at the house, even though that thing's so old that any new AC is bound to be way more efficient and lower our cooling bills, no matter whether or not it's rated high-efficiency, which I think is another good argument in favor of a replacement. And also that we'll need to replace it before we sell the house anyway, so we might as well get it done now and reap the benefits for a few years. I think you can see which side of the argument I'm coming down on. But we're both too cranky to discuss it calmly and come to a mutual decision because it's so motherlovin' HOT, you guys!

By the by, this week I learned that a broken AC, short shorts and a leather desk chair are unmixy things.

Anyway, maybe we can figure out the AC business during our long weekend camping at the lake. At least, I think we're going camping this weekend. Matt suggested perhaps putting it off until the weather cools down a bit, but I pointed out that we can be hot here, or we can be hot there, where there is a great big lake to jump in to cool us off. Besides, the whole reason we were scrambling to go this weekend in the first place is because we realized he starts back to school next week and by the time the weather cools off he'll probably be too buried in studying and paper-writing to go. So it's pretty much now or... not this year.

And, you guys. This is my ONLY shot at getting a vacation this year. And you know, if you've been paying attention AT ALL, how desperate I'm getting for a vacation. Even if it's just a hot and sweaty long weekend in a tent at the muddy-bottomed lake out by where I grew up. At least it will be a long weekend without internet access or cell phone reception or anywhere to plug in my laptop, all of which will force me to, y'know, chill the heck out. Which at this point is ALL I NEED.

***

Matilda the turtle is doing well, for those who were wondering. She's the only one of us who doesn't mind the sweltering heat. She just buries herself in the back yard for the worst of it, and at night it's saving me from having to turn on the reptile heater in her indoor tank. I've got a pretty good handle on what she likes to eat, or rather, what she likes to be fed on the days when she hasn't managed to catch some bug the size of her head and remind me that she is perfectly self-sufficient, thank you very much, lady who is holding me prisoner. But for all that she still makes a beeline for freedom every time I let her roam the back yard, she otherwise seems to be enjoying all of the attention and pampering. I'm pretty confident that a bigger habitat will nix her escape attempts.

A loose writing schedule. Because you know how well those always work out for me.

The Hero Factor mark-ups are finished, and here's the breakdown:

60 total scenes

12 of which will be brand new

and of which approximately 1/3 of those remaining will require extensive revisions

but the rest just need some tightening and grammar clean-up.

I wish that I had time to get the actual rewrites done before NaNoWriMo, and for about a minute I almost deluded myself into giving it a try. But realistically there's just no way, so I'm putting it safely away until January (because November is all about NaNo and December is all about recovering from NaNo), when I'll commence the re-writes, which I estimate will take me 4 to 6 weeks, depending on how busy I am in other areas. And even though it's supposed to be a "one pass" method, I'm still planning to show the next draft to a few people and then do another quick pass based on their feedback before I start querying on it. But I plan to have my query package ready to go by March. I'll spend that whole month on submissions, and then start editing the NaNo project in April, and right now I'm feeling ambitious enough to go ahead and say I'll get it revised and ready to query in time for next year's NaNo.

And that's the next year in writing, for me. It might sound like a ridiculous goal, considering that I've been working on Hero Factor since before I met my husband (which would be about 5 years); but I think I'm finally getting the hang of this whole "writing and editing a non-fanfic novel by myself without input and constant hand-holding by other fanfic writers" thing, so I don't think it's totally delusional of me to aim for two novels a year from now on, regardless of whether or not any of them ever get published. If nothing else, I can at least share them online with all five of my semi-loyal readers.

Speaking of which, the more time that goes by without any feedback on This Old Haunt, the more I think it was a mistake to have ever posted it in the first place, and I'm thinking of taking it down. I'm not trolling for compliments, I'm just sayin', and giving anyone who still wants to read it fair warning that it won't be up for much longer. I'll leave it another week or two for anyone who's in the middle of it to finish. But I've given it some thought, and even if it's passably entertaining, the almost complete lack of reader enthusiasm tells me it's definitely not a stellar example of my abilities, and leaving it up could hurt my chances of getting published in the long run. But hey, it was an experiment in the medium, and I'm glad I did it, because now I know that the serialized blog format is not for me. Neither is the podcast novel. I tried recording this one as a podcast and didn't get past two episodes because I kind of hated the whole process as much as I hate my own voice.

On Monday -- scratch that, make it Tuesday; Mondays carry too many work deadlines -- I'll start plotting my NaNo project. I'm going to give Holly Lisle's Notecard Plotting Method a try. Hopefully I can get it plotted out next week, and then give it another week to just simmer and stew in my noggin before it's time to commence the actual writing. Which, I'm thinking, will kick off at midnight on November 1st, since it's so conveniently situated on a weekend this year. I'm also thinking about getting Husband to go see Paranormal Activity with me on Halloween to ensure that there's no way I'll sleep that night, but I don't know yet whether we'll have the funds, and I also don't know yet whether I'm too chicken for that movie. Look, people, I still have nightmares about Samara. I honestly don't know if I can handle PA.

In non-writing news, I made doughnuts this morning, the easy cheater Sandra Lee kind my mom used to make where you take canned biscuit dough, poke a hole in it, deep fry it and then put it in a bag with cinnamon and sugar (or powdered sugar, but we didn't have any on hand) and shake well. And they were every bit as delightful as I remembered, even though I hadn't eaten one in at least 25 years. Man, I's old. And incidentally, that also makes some awesome easy cheater fry bread. Just leave out the bag full of sugar.

Now I'm gonna go get my domestic on and do some cleaning. And possibly some lazy Halloween crafting. Here's hoping the rest of you are having an enjoyable weekend.

My office, let me show you it

I'm quite enjoying the view from my office window. It's a cloudy, gray day, but there's so much green right outside that it's hard to notice. The window is above my desk, and from where I sit I can see the roof of our shed, some power lines and patches of white-gray sky heavily obscured by ever-thickening leafy branches. It's not a view I've gotten to enjoy often, and I'm looking forward to getting used to it.

But here! I don't have to tell you about it--I can show you with my new laptop's handy-dandy built-in web cam!

In the foreground you can see a pair of wee baby evergreen trees I rescued the other day when I was weeding my flower bed. I don't have the greenest thumb, so I hope "rescued" doesn't turn out to be an ironic term. I'm hoping they'll eventually grow big enough to transplant along the busy arterial street edge of our front yard, to provide some privacy and, hopefully, make it harder for passers-by to chuck trash in our yard all the time.

And as long as I'm playing with the web cam, here's a bonus pic of yours truly, all disheveled and too pale in the light of day:

Behind me are my inspiration board and my knitting supplies, including the wall-hanging CD holder I converted to a knitting tool holder (except for the Dancing Lessons 2.0: War! CDs I never managed to unload and can't bring myself to toss. Anybody want a free Buffy fanfic inspired mixed CD?).

Which is all to say that I'm happy as a clam in wet sand to begin my first full workday in my own office. And now I should probably stop basking in the joy of my own space and actually, y'know, get to work.

Our House

Someone on Twitter asked me, "Do you feel like your house is really yours and represents your life? Or is it mostly other people's?" This is an excellent question. The short answer is, it's getting there. Gradually.

The long answer is this. I still can't believe this is my house. We've been here over six months now, and I still have moments, at least once a day, where I look around and think, "Whoa, I'm in a freaking house! And it belongs to me!" But besides the shock of realizing daily that I'm grown up enough to own something as grown-up as a house, there's this weird disconnect. Parts of it feel more like home than others. My office/craft room should feel like home, because it's the one room in the house that is totally mine, that I did not have to make any compromises on decorating, where I don't have to be afraid to hang something pink, and it's filled with all of the adorable things I love and that make me happy. But it doesn't, really, because I'm rarely ever in there, because that's not where the computer is. The computer is in my Husband's spartan and totally utilitarian office, and despite the fact that I'm usually in here at least six hours every day, it doesn't feel like mine at all.

The kitchen is also mainly Husband's domain. We haven't done much--anything, really, other than draping some tea towels over the oven handle and hanging a couple of pictures--by way of decorating in there. He won't let me organize it the way I want to, and it tends toward a constant state of controlled (or so he claims) chaos, and I'm just not very comfortable in there. This is why I don't do any of the baking that I always said I'd do when we got a real kitchen. I'm usually only in there long enough to get what I need. It doesn't feel like home.

The living room and dining area is a weird place, to me. It's filled with the cheap furniture we both had when we were 25, and that doesn't really feel right to either of us, because we're no longer 25, but it's also filled with family photos and memorabilia from our wedding and honeymoon, and that helps it feel homey. We hang out there a lot, but I'm not as at home in there as I am in my bedroom.

The bedroom is the most comfortable room, and not just because that's where we keep the bed. It (along with the adjoining bathroom) is the one room we've bought some new stuff for and put some forethought into decorating. The furniture is still a mishmash of old, cheap stuff from our carefree single days, but everything else--the bedding, curtains, wall decor, books and knick knacks on the book shelves--it all feels like us, now, like quirky marrieds in their thirties live there, and it's cozy and soothing, and it's where I spend most of my time when I'm not working. I like hanging out in there better than in the living room, to knit or read or watch TV or nap or whatever. All the pets pile on the bed with me, and usually Husband ends up in there, too--our bedroom is our family room, apparently. I'm pretty happy with that.

I long for the day when we have the money to decorate. Really decorate, with new furniture and rugs and wall hangings and new paint and all that stuff, to make the rest of the house feel like ours, like the place we put some thought into, where it looks a certain way because that's how we chose it to look, and not like old, disposable furniture scattered around against neutral paint that the previous owner put up to make the house more sellable. Like we're just passing through, and don't want to disturb the walls more than necessary. Like an apartment. A plain, boxy apartment-complex apartment. I can't wait to drag Husband along to shop for furniture, to pick out a couch that we both love and is comfortable and big enough to seat company, and not just us. To pick out things that we love at 35 and will probably still be just fine with at 45. That day will come. I don't know if it will come while we're in this house, but that's okay. Bit by bit, room by room, this house is slowly becoming us.