Unresolved

Oof, there’s more dust in here than I figured there would be. I fell short on a lot of my resolutions for the last year. Okay, I fell short on all my resolutions from last year, though a lot of it is my own fault for setting the bar so high.

In all honesty, I had some really rough patches this year that made it exceedingly hard for me to do anything more than wake up, trudge through some day-to-day responsibilities and go back to bed. I’m hoping for a much better year, and so I’m back here, as part of the process of seeing what’s out there.

I’m amazed at the traffic on this blog. I’d have figured that it would have flatlined after over 5 months without a new post, but people still keep coming here. I won’t repeat last year’s resolution to post once a day because it hurt more than it helped, but I will try and come in here more often, and to try to find interesting things to put here.

I do have writing goals for the year, but they certainly aren’t going to look like the 1 million words challenge I threw at myself last year. In short, I’d like to write a new short story every month, and I’d like to finish the first drafts of two novel ideas. These should be pretty attainable goals, and it’ll be good to get back to writing again.

Also, reading. This is something that I’d neglected for a while, but I want to set myself a solid reading goal for the year. Books, graphic novels, short story collections… all that good stuff. I think one a week would be very easy, which is why I’m tempted to set a goal of 100, but I think that might be too high. Maybe I’ll split the difference and say 75 books for the year. I certainly have the pile of reading material to fill most of the year, and it’s about damn time I made a dent in it.

Happy new year to you all.

Death by Patio

I discovered a new type of yard torture today, which is clearing out the grass and weeds which had been growing through the uni-stone patio I have in the back yard. It’s something that’s been needing to be done for a while, but got left off the chores list for too long and now it’s at the point of no return. It was either do it now or soon have to start mowing my patio, and I’m not ready for that just yet.

I should be able to finish the clearing portion tomorrow, after which I’m going to take a pressure washer to the thing and get as much dirt as I can out from between the stones before filling the whole thing up with the special sand polymer that goes in. I was hoping with an extra week off that I’d be able to do the driveway as well, but now that I see what’s involved that’s a pretty laughable goal. Not gonna happen.

But seriously, torture. I can barely flex my fingers right now, and I’m typing my keeping my fingers crooked and moving my whole forearm to each individual key, not the most practical writing method. Perhaps it’s time for bed, or I won’t be able to get anything done tomorrow.

Back!

We’re back home after a week in Orlando, Florida, and I’m so glad I decided to take an extra week off work. I knew it would be a packed week away with the theme parks and whatnot, but I wasn’t prepared for how tired I’d be when I finally got home. I feel like I could sleep for a week, which may not sound like the hallmark of a relaxing vacation, but the whole family had a great time.

As expected, Internet access was hard to find. Well, reasonably-priced Internet access was hard to find. Expensive-as-hell access was available if I’d been willing to turn my phone’s data back on, but at something silly like $10 per megabyte, I wasn’t interested. I freaking hate the roaming rates. There’s no excuse for data to be that expensive and so I do without. I’d rather go without access for a week than encourage any company to price-gouge for no good reason other than price-gouging. I managed to snag free wifi twice, but it was only enough to check a couple of emails and poke my head into assorted social media before disappearing again.

We flew to Orlando on the Saturday, but we were so wrecked from the early wake-up to get to the airport that after we landed we had lunch and crashed for a couple of hours. Then we spent a bit of time at the resort’s pool, before crashing again for the night, somewhere around 8:00pm.

After that first day, we spent four out of five days at Universal Studios, and one day at an affiliated water park. The one and only time I went to Disney World was when I was about five years old, and aside from a trip to Canada’s Wonderland a few years ago my only experience with big amusement parks is La Ronde, which is our local Six Flags. La Ronde was in pretty bad shape for a few years, and even now it doesn’t compare to the scale of a massive park like Universal. Even at the ripe old age of 35, I found myself impressed by much of what I saw down there.

Ride after ride, park after park, the production value just blew me away. True, Universal Studios has the benefit of charging admission all year round, where La Ronde can only stay open for the summer (alas, snow!), so they have a LOT more money to play around with, and they’re a much bigger park so they can fit more paying customers on any given day, but the scale of things at US is amazing. From Harry Potter to Jurassic Park to everything else, the details are very impressive, and the scope is astounding. In a lot of ways, if you’re familiar with the franchise, it’s just like being there. This may seem obvious to anyone who’s been there before, and often, but I didn’t really know what to expect from a “Theme Park” as opposed to our local “Amusement Park” and I was every bit as amazed as my sons. It’s nice to be made to feel like a kid again.

And so, summer continues. Vacation also continues for another week, and I’m going to try to get caught up on the writing and reading I was too exhausted to to while in Orlando (seriously, I felt like I walked a marathon’s worth of steps most days). And, because my birthday is coming up, I get to start planning for yet another big BBQ-party at my place. No complaints, though, this is a good kind of tired to be.

Vacation!

I got my packing done, but only after the day-jobbery was done. Then I mowed the lawn so that it wouldn’t be knee-high to a T-Rex when I got back, and double-checked that I wasn’t missing anything. nothing sucks more than being far from home and realizing that you forgot something major. True, we’re going to Florida; I hear they have something resembling civilization there so if I forget my deodorant I’m sure I can find a replacement, but still.

Now if only I didn’t have to get up at about 3am tomorrow to catch my flight, I’d be golden. I’m heading to bed now so that I can hopefully get four hours of sleep or thereabouts.

Two More Sleeps

Tomorrow’s my last day of work before vacation, and Saturday morning we fly down to Orlando and Universal Studios. My kids are really excited to get going, and they’ve packed up all their stuff already. They’ve even been walking around all day with their carry-on backpacks, as though the plane ride wasn’t still forty-something hours away. I’ll be packing tomorrow, hopefully during the day because I don’t like packing last minute. That’s the best way to forget things.

I will have my netbook with me while I’m down there, but I don’t know if there’s wi-fi where we’ll be staying, and I’m certainly not going to tether this thing to my phone, given the ridiculously stupid international roaming rates. That means that I may miss out on blogging for the week I’m away, but some things can’t be helped.

At the very least, even if there is wi-fi where we’re staying and it’s even slightly reliable, the odds are good that I’m just not going to have much time or energy to spend online. I’m hoping for a couple of quiet evenings where I can sit and get a little bit of writing done, but I don’t expect many of those nights.

For tonight, I’m going to jump offline now and try to nail down that last scene so I can get some editing in tomorrow.

New Writing Group

I hung out with a trio of other local writers tonight, as we took some tentative steps toward creating a new writing/critiquing group. It’s something I’ve been lacking for a while.  I have one person I’ve been working with consistently who’s amazing, but she’s only one person. Having a group of people look over your stuff is better, even if they all say the same things (though they almost never will), because it gives you a better sense of how your story is working, and if you’ve well and truly written something that just doesn’t work no matter who the reader is.

Since we’re people with assorted combinations of jobs and children and families and responsibilities, we’ve settled on once a month for now, and we’ll see where that takes us. The first get-together next month will give us a better sense of how we work as a team, and whether or not we want to grow in number.

Since I’ve been slowing down considerably with my writing of late, it will also be a good kick in the pants to get more stuff written. Sometimes the best muse is a deadline.

The Home Stretch

The current (long) short story keeps chugging along. I only have one scene to replace and then it’s on to checking for continuity errors and seeing if the writing I’ve added isn’t completely terrible, since almost half the story is basically a first draft now. This is definitely the most effort I’ve ever put into a short story, and it’s not even done. It will need another draft or two but mostly that will be to fix little things, once this scene is done there won’t be any big fixes hopefully.

Tonight’s also been a bad wrist night so I’ve put aside the chainmail for now. There’s nothing like twisting stiff bits of metal around repeatedly to make you wish for less painful hobbies. Like sleeping.

Speaking of which. I’ve done all the writing I’m going to do on this story tonight, so I’m turning in.