Warhead On Legs

I've hit the stage of pre-DragonCon where my brain is going around in panicked circles screeching about everything we need to get done before, etc. Not helpful, brain. More helpful though is the fact that I've done this often enough that I have a list I can just pop my current costume details into and go. I might take some time and organize all of that tonight around watching an episode of Black Sails or two. That ought to be useful.

... no, but seriously, I'm trying to think of something to say and it's all coming out DragonCon DragonCon next week you will be traveling to DragonCon aaaaugh you're not ready. I'm not ready! I'm mostly ready. I'm working on getting the last part ready, which is the proof copies of Turing Shrugged. I had some wild lunatic plan last night to get proof copies of Starlight ready and then realized it was only in a second draft form which I feel is going to need a third draft or at least a really solid going over of the second, and proof copies actually cost money, self. Never mind the rush shipping to get it to DragonCon in time, so no. The only reason you want Starlight is so you can present it in hard copy to the muse and no. Next year if you have to. You'll have a first draft ready to PDF up and that's good enough.

I'm going to be punching myself in the brainpan a lot in the coming week, I feel.

Trying to organize my head lasts about fifteen minutes till something else pushes the overstimulation node and I fall over. I mean on the plus side I do have endless to do lists where everything is broken down into small bits? But then I have to pick one to do and finish and that requires energy that's busy elsewhere, usually busy running in circles. Argh.

If I can have this weekend to not do anything but TV watching and house cleaning it will be a fucking miracle I am very, very grateful for because right now it feels like I'm being pulled by five different forces in twenty directions to do fifty eight things and I don't have the brainpower to keep track of all of this. It'll sort of be worth it in the end, the DragonCon and writing part will, but everything else is Monday-Sunday catastrophe fallout and I am so fucking done with that.

I just need one long day of primal scream therapy, seriously.

I did not get half the crap I wanted to done over the weekend. First there was a sinus cold after I woke up from capoeira coma, ended up chasing cats all around the house to try and keep them from fighting and get them into separate corners. The next day wasn't bad, got some laundry done and dishes and some basic tidying started, and then my goddamn phone fell into the goddamn toilet because the goddamn cat jumped up onto the sink while I was picking stuff up. So now I definitely need a new phone. I spent most of Sunday trying to get mine to work, it kind of does? But the home button is massively non-responsive or non-functional and I think the only thing I've seen online that I haven't tried to fix it is rubbing alcohol and. Urk. Plus it's a three year old phone minimum anyway, I've been expecting it to be slowly dying. I just. This is not the time, phone.

Plus my bill for web hosting came due, which is every three years so as far as expenses go it's not an awful one? But the timing, universe. The goddamn timing. Plus the need to get a case for the new p hone and since of all things they're sending the new phone to Mom's place because she's the account holder, it'll take a while till I can get the phone and I can't be entirely sure the case will fit and. And.

Mostly I'm just very ready to go to DragonCon and not fucking worry about this for a while. And if I'm tired and stressed it'll be easily fixed with sitting in place for an hour and having a bananan. Argh.

I was bemoaning that I hadn't brought anything to work to charge up with happy happy eclipse power and then I remembered I had the fucking Badali Jewelry replica of Nenya in my fucking purse. Just walking around with that in my purse, la. We had a relatively cloud-free sky for the first part, then the clouds rolled in, then as if a divine presence commanded it there was a hole in the clouds just big enough at just the right spot for just long enough to see the thing as wholly as we were going to see. So that was very nice, very fun.

I have no comment on the Whedon thing except UGH on him. And UGH also on the people who didn't believe the women involved, or still act as though they don't. But UGH on them all the time anyway, no matter the accuser or the victim.

... we interrupt this post because apparently an elevator motor caught fire when it burnt out, so the fire department came and we had to evacuate the building and everything. So, um, that happened, and what did I just say, Universe, about dramatic stressful shit happening before DragonCon? What did I just say?

Fucksake I'm going to go home, bury myself in fake people problems and Black Sails, and I don't know what. Drink a lot of cranberry cider maybe. I have three novel projects to work on, I have Black Sails to watch, and I think that's everything and I might just put a moratorium on languages except reviewing vocab and pronunciation until after DragonCon. It's about that time of year anyway. I just. What the fuck everything.

ETA: Of course after posting this I got a call from the boy saying the car had been broken into sometime between when I left (I'd walked around the car to throw something in the trash bin) and when he got home. Because that's just what this fucking day needed.

It's been a long damn two days. Between capoeira and then working a normalish day but having come home and done a bunch of household chores after and basically I haven't stopped moving since yesterday morning and didn't get enough sleep and I am so damn tired. I almost fell asleep over my desk. Which would have been bad since I was labeling a bunch of pointy stabby clay tools.

But at this point I'm running on boxes of nerds to stay awake long enough to finish things and get to sleep and do the nightly reminders and ugh. I should buy things off and go to bed early if I can't.

I'm also having one of those moments where I look at Turing Shrugged and think, how arrogant am I that I can decide this novel is ready for publication when a small press publishing house didn't want it? It's a stupid weasel. I had already pushed to get it to the point where I felt comfortable giving it to someone as here-it-is-a-novel whether for submission or publication or whatever. And I have a second run-through in the works just to make sure Editrix and I aren't wrong. And I have vague plans to share it around with a circle of beta readers too? So yes, self, you are not passing off a half-assed product as a finished novel, you have done your duty. So that weasel can just go piss up a rope.

I bet I know where it comes from, is I'm reading over Long Road and cringing at large chunks of it and wondering where the hell all this pretentious writing came from, especially in this book. And if I could misjudge that so hard etc etc. But I already did feel dubious about Long Road, have for every damn draft, and this one is starting off promising so I'm hopeful that it won't end up being another draft for the bin (draft four! heh) so this is not an arrogance problem. This is the luck of Turing Shrugged came out, inexplicably, mostly right. So there.

Besides, Starlight is finishing up with its second draft and I can already tell it's going to need either heavy editing so it might as well be a third draft or an entire third draft. Blergh.

Oh well. I'm still mostly on course with all my writing crap, and I can work on THAT tomorrow. After, I hope, a good night's sleep.

Well. Today was once again mostly good on the personal stuff except one thing, and a complete and utter shitshow politically. I don't have the energy to get into that ridiculous destructive speech. I'm just ugh and swear words by now.

But Turing Shrugged got rejected from the second publication, which in a way I'd been hoping for because I wasn't looking forward to getting used to people not in my existing circle of trust telling me what to do with my novel? But it's still a rejection. It still hurts, it brings up all the old questions of whether or not I know what I'm doing, and I was already having "I'm a crap writer" feelings earlier today before I saw that. And now I want to put it all away and not show it to anyone and so on and so forth, and I have ... well, doubts. All kinds of exhausted doubts that are too tired to even take much hold. I don't know what to do.

My thinking brain has a plan of formatting it up, ordering a proof copy to share around the proof party of authors, maybe give a couple away, and doing the last final tweaks of this sentence here and this sentence there while I work up a marketing campaign? My first ever? I don't know what to do for that other than tweet about it and start working on my blurb copy.

I'm tired all over again, and I didn't sleep well last night, and I was tired and angry and sad before I got the damn rejection letter. And I keep thinking about the fact that I've never had a novel acceptance. Short stories some of them.

Ugh, I don't know. I'm feeling really, really sad and useless and stupid right now.

Somehow I am awake, despite having been woken up by the boyfriend at god knows what hour of the morning (after five, before five forty five, I think a three was involved somewhere) and despite him then going to bed at seven so I had to tiptoe around him and not do my exercises while I got ready and despite all the aggravation this caused.

I also finished Rupert Wong Cannibal Chef, which had surprisingly little human cannibalism in it despite the title, in fact it had very few humans in it at all, a lot of gore, and a hell of a lot of fun. If you're all right with giblets flying everywhere and description thick on the page, this is a good book for you. It's also a short, quick read.

I did the thing! Which is to say I emailed the lawyer for a follow-up appointment to go over the contract and hopefully it will be the last one because not only are lawyers expensive, they are fucking nervewracking. I do seem to have cured at least, eh, a good chunk of my do not want to write? Although I've been doing fiddly shit at work and people keep interrupting me to talk at me, so I haven't gotten as much done as I could have yesterday when it was quiet as hell. But it's a start. And I feel vaguely more balanced on projects. Which is to say I have three things I'm working on, I know where they're going and what I'm doing. It's going to be okay. It could be okay, anyway. The worst it's going to be is banal.

Am having the usual body image stress leading up to DragonCon, although to be honest I'm not significantly worse off? In worse shape? Than I have been the last two years running, so I'm doing mostly all right telling those voices to shut the hell up. And I've now done capoeira both lessons in one week! For the first time in a few weeks. My ability to exercise in the morning is still middling, but I'm getting better about sneaking in 5 minutes of a yoga pose here and there at work so that's not bad.

I also need to be easier on myself in capoeira and out of it, for that matter. I can do about three sets of 8 kicks (left and right) before I'm panting so hard I have to sit down for fifteen minutes and be still. Yes, it sucks, but I need to remember that it's just a fact of my life and. Ugh.

But okay, yes. Things not going badly, things not so much getting better as getting easier? Definitely consistent writing progress is happening, which is very nice.

Okay, that's cosplay for DragonCon organized. Apparently I'm doing Daenerys Stormborn, half-assed closet cosplay Planeswalker (oh god I haven't done Magic The Gathering in so long), Abby Sciuto, America Chavez. I might actually give in and get a curling iron or hair curlers for America Chavez, assuming I could ever figure out how to use either.

I finally sat my ass down while Editrix was there and got White [??sd;fjhgsdf??] figured out, and even got a tentative title of White Noise for it now that White Lightning is taken and possibly defunct anyway. Which means now I have a to-do list and order of operations and so on! And a need for cover art. Meh. Still not sure what that should be now that the title's shifted. Buuut I got all the font bundles extracted and loaded at least onto the work computer so I can work on that if it's slow during the day. And I got kind of a mock-up of cover art for Malachy upon tripping over a font that looked surprisingly nice. Hey. Now all I need is something that can superimpose a golden ratio over my cover so I can see where to put things.

(And with all of this planning and fonts arranging and then some photo editing my brain is refusing to fucking cooperate and settle down. Goddammit brain.)

(.... ahahah I never posted this yesterday okay fine you get the start of a post from yesterday)

Today I'm tired, I did manage to start off the day getting some writing done, I got my face put on and the trash out and everything. I got to sleep in because my exercise is in the evening, yay. But I'm also tired and annoyed at the various leaders who are all I WILL SEE IT DONE IN FIRE AND BLOOD no fuck you go away. And. I don't know. I'm excited about everything in my life, once again, except global politics. Fuck global politics.

A Wednesday Reads type post then, since I've been doing a lot of fiction writing because real life is awful and I don't wanna write. I'm currently reading Cassandra Khaw's Rupert Wong Cannibal Chef and just hearing the Shadowrun game playing in my head. It's awesome fun. It's also brimful of vocabulary and references that are... southeast asian? of some kind? I know it's set in Kuala Lumpur but I don't know how much of it is local and how much is imported from neighboring countries so I feel like there's a few jokes I'm missing out on. But that's around 10% of the overall jokes and references so eh. It's entirely comprehensible and hilarious. And once I finish this one and start googling, educational!

I finished Buried Heart, too, which was an excellent ending to the whole thing and Fucking Gargaron, as I'm now calling him thanks to a Twitterer Kate Elliott RT'd, got his just desserts. And mostly everyone got to be happy, and it was a rollicking good time. I read NK Jemsin's The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate in short/quick order which was not as much a rollicking good time and involved a lot of screaming WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU FUCKERS DO THIS TIME and so on. But I enjoy that too.

Next up will probably be the next Gods and Monsters from CKhaw, and apparently I did the Shattered Earth speed run just in time because the next one's supposed to be out soon? And then I get a choice between Updraft, Borderline/Phantom Pains, and, um. I don't know, I have a lot of shit here. I feel like if I say "A Darker Shade Of Magic" everyone's going to recommend it to me so probably I'll end up reading about apocalypse hippos instead.

Well, that was a day of ups and downs. Deposited all the various checks part one, which is to say Aunt flung some money my way because she's silly and I got paid because it was payday. Bought ALL OF THE DRAGONCON CRAP which was mostly the makeup case and some protein bars and things, as well as some other stuff for Bri and the matte eyeshadows I was going to get after next paycheck but eh, since I have it now might as well not wrack my nerves over shipping in time. And entered my bills in my budget so that it at least looks like I don't have all of the money. It's a three paycheck month so I'm stupid early and can wait until the indulgences clear before paying bills.

BUT right after I deposited my checks the fun of "oh shit my phone isn't getting a signal and there's no GPS it's dead I need a new phone" happened. Which I suspected happened because it's almost four years old and iPhones aren't exactly known for their durability. No, it turned out my phone's fine, it's just almost all of the state was subject to a cell outage. Okay then.

I got a blog post written, finished a chunk of Long Road and imported another chunk to go over, so writing happened. And I even got some books out of the library that may or may not be of use for some of Lifestyles, although some of it will definitely be of use. And now I need to take an inventory of my research books and figure out what I need for Long Road. Which shouldn't be much, I've only been collecting books for that for a few years now.

(Poking at bookshelves it looks like I have assorted on European/British history but only two that likely are the right era in hard copy, I do have one on Gevaudan, and I have one on the Spanish Flu/Flu Pandemic 1918 but not much on life in that era, I might have to dig around for sources there, too. And according to my outline I also need 800s to 1200s Ireland/UK and post-Civil-War Westward Expansion era .... stuff. Life stuff. So that's a bit more specific at least.)

And! And I got my languages and my physics done. For the first time in a few weeks, I had the energy, plus doing some laundry. So. Okay. I might be crawling back on track. And on the plus side I never quite lost track of my writing, just the other stuff. So. Okay. I might be ... something. Approaching stable by the time I have to leave for DragonCon, heh, but still! It's progress.

I've developed a sort of Michael Eklund crush almost overnight. It's all Bobo del Ray's fault. (Wynonna Earp, for those of you who don't watch and are going "who?") And the fact that I went back over his IMDB because I knew he was in the Blood Ties show from a while back and discovered he was in every other Canadian production I've ever damn seen and promptly flipped out a bit. And then I watched a couple of them and flipped out even more. The man is very good at changing both his form and body and posture and attitude and voice to match a character and it's freaking me out. And contributing to the crush because I have a competence kink.

I made my writing schedule for August, I'm hoping it's at all realistic because of DragonCon, and I posted it on my Patreon. I don't know how to feel about this or what I'm doing. Especially regarding Long Road, which I'm at least on my fourth or fifth draft of right now and I have no idea what to do with it and am freaking a little bit out. I guess the first part is to make notes on characters, timeline, and reference books? That'd be a place to start. Also slightly freaking out about Patreon, but I guess since everyone's on the first tier except one they all know what they're getting into and it's fine? I guess?

(Brain: EKLUND EKLUND EKLUND
Me: SHUT UP OH MY GOD.)

I also have no idea what I'm doing for DragonCon as far as panels go, so that's a fun source of not so much stress I guess? as wariness. Most of the shows I signed up for are ones I've already been watching and have many notes on and some aren't aired yet so, heh, can't watch those yet! I think those are the ones most worrying me, except eh, as long as I take notes the first time I watch it. Because it's usually the first few times around that power the AND THIS AND THIS LINE REFERENCE AND SHE SAID THIS SO IT'S TOTALLY A REFERENCE TO THAT and so on and so forth.

And day job dropped a ginormous wholesale order on me yay. So I guess I can think about things but not necessarily work on them. Actually that might be a good time to think about the stupid actor until my brain shuts up. But ugh. But okay, I can finish my salad and work on the outline some more while I pick almonds out of my teeth, then do the thing, then do some reading over. Reading over this ten fifteen something year old story ahhaahhahah oh god.

(Brain: EKLUND EKLUND
Me: SHUT UUUUUUUUUP.

Norman. He was Norman in Blood Ties for those of you who watched it then. And now he's Bobo del Ray. My brain still hasn't recovered.)

Well there might have been a more thoughtful entry here but then the GOP basically rammed their ridiculous bills another notch through and now all I can do is scream.

(This is kind of a lie but at the time I'm doing this entry so I don't forget to do it entirely that's about 75% true.)

Better things. I picked up my copy of Buried Heart which I'm looking forward to, the third in the Court of Fives trilogy by Kate Elliott and my reward for getting my writing done today. I've got about an hour left of work so if I want to get it done before I get home/the allocated writing hour so I can have the writing hour to read in I'd better hustle my butt. But I'm looking forward to it, and that's nice.

I got my writing for yesterday done, mostly got things back on track to the synopsis, not that they'd wandered very far off to begin with. But I got back on track and got writing, wrote the requisite amount of words to get done on time which although higher than it was before my head exploded over things, is still manageable. And hopefully it will continue to be manageable until it's done, or at least until Camp Nano is done by which point I should have written enough in Starlight to let sheer momentum and goddamn you will you be over already finish it off.

I started a Patreon! Um. Go me? I don't know, I hit 'launch' and then all hell broke loose in Congress and on Twitter so I haven't really promoted it yet. I tweeted about it but I doubt anyone was listening. Now I just have to remember to, okay, no, I don't have to remember. Now I just have to feel able to and entitled to tweet about it more often. Heh.

Iiiiii what do I need to do. I need to finish my summaries of my various verses and probably make that my first Patreon post, a link to that PDF, and then ... something. Start dithering. And picking out things for people to vote on for my next month's shorter project.

I did make an appointment with the lawyer! So now that can get finished up and done, and I can start working on cover art or whatever for Malachy. Not that anything was stopping me before so I don't know why I phrased it like that, but that's how it felt. And after that and Starlight are done come Nerd Girls and Long Road, which ahahaha that'll be interesting. I already have ideas for how to fix Long Road sort of, maybe this time it'll stay fixed. Nerd Girls... I have no idea. That'll be a re-read on top of all the other re-reads I have. What fun.

Basically at this point I'm down to hiding in the fiction I write and, slightly less, fiction to consume so I don't have to deal with politics right now. But at least as a coping mechanism it's working.

Well not only did I end up staying up a bit too late last night (for a night of capoeira class) I woke up at least twice in the middle of the night and didn't end up getting out of bed till 7.30. (For those keeping score at home I usually wake up around 6.30 and faff about on the phone doing language crap and silly games and get up at 7, shower and start the day). And then the boy somehow managed to lose Bat Cat TWICE, I got him back the first time and the boy lost him and got him back from the utility room in about five minutes the second time, and figured out that Bat Cat seems to think Scurry Out Of The House Proper Between The Human's Legs is a fun game. He won't actually go anywhere, he just likes to freak us out.

SIGH. Sigh everything, basically.

I got the tier levels for Patreon mostly sorted out, I got some bio stuff up there, I think the next step is to figure out the coding for the polls and Tuckerization and then

(then I forgot to finish and post this because of Chester Bennington's suicide throwing me entirely off my stride and sending me to the couch of despair and ennui for the rest of the night.)

But I did manage to wake up on time and get through the morning stuff, including doing a bunch of exercises which I haven't done in a couple of days. Though to be entirely fair Wednesday's lack of morning exercise is always because I go to capoeira class in the evening.

Having one of those days where apparently I can't say anything on Twitter without it turning into Discourse, usually involving some form of "you're wrong and this made me angry that you're wrong" so instead I ended up staying off Twitter and going through some old writing, and writing a bunch of summaries of my various worlds for Patreon. And then remembering that I'd written this thing and that thing and finding this other thing in my documents folder that I'd forgotten. And getting utterly distracted by everything.

(Note to self: this weekend you are rereading Pen Bryton and the Storms bits and the "what the shit is this?" thing to familiarize yourself, not to edit it and redo it for posting and publishing all at once.)

Blergh. I have a hair appointment, which because I'm a socially anxious idiot I forgot to say "no I can't do this at 10 I have a class" so instead of doing capoeira tomorrow I will be getting my hairs cut and then running several blocks to capoeira, so this is going to be interesting. I would skip but Deutschkind is going to be there and I haven't seen her in ages and if nothing else I can catch the last 30 or so and play games and sing songs and be ridiculous with my capoeira peeps. And then apparently there will be endless errands after.

I'm in a weird headplace such that I feel scattered because I did that stupid scheduling thing, but I have a plan to deal with it, other things are moving forward, and I'm keeping up with my writing and to some extent my languages so I don't feel entirely behind? Or out of control of things. But. I don't know, it's all very weird. I guess I'll take it though. It's not bad, just a bit left of center. Also my Patreon is almost ready and a lot less nerve-wracking to get through if it's going to be monthly, stupid Patreon and your weird inability to get a coherent explanation of how per-creation setup works. You couldn't just have it be like a Kickstarter and then when you've delivered all the tier rewards it wipes it all down and you can start another one? Ugh.