Tag: blathering about writing

Scorpions and such

I had Plans for today but then I got called in to work. (Story of my life) That kind of cast a pall over the day, which did not exactly dawn bright and cheery in the first place. Then as I was getting dressed, I found a scorpion in my pants, so that was fun. Fortunately for me, it was already dead (probably got washed and dried with the jeans), so I did not get stung, but you better believe I won’t be throwing my dirty clothes on the bathroom floor for a while.

Anyway, instead of spending a couple hours at the library, I spent it sorting and stocking and organizing stuff in the big cooler at work, and now I’m tired. Also it very rudely started raining while I was in the grocery store, and now I am slightly damp and the humidity is at 110%. I’m going to eat shitty frozen pizza and lie down, and then maybe I’ll have the energy to do writing things. I got in 1800 words yesterday so I guess I could give myself a break, but I’d really like to get the next chapter started while the words are still in my head…

Catching up

Been a while. I always mean to blog more, but I’m an ADHD gremlin to my core, so the inconvenience of attempting it on my phone or tablet tends to discourage my already barely-existent executive dysfunction.

My reading slump continues. I thought it was getting better, but all the impetus to get through the long list of books has dwindled, and my attention span has become so bad since I stopped taking my ADHD meds that even listening to audiobooks a bit at a time has become a chore. I was in the middle of Gideon the Ninth, and it was really good, and I just…can’t pay attention enough to listen without having to stop and rewind every time my brain decides to go off on a tangent.

It was severely impacting my writing too, since I finally finished the draft of my last project. Editing is much harder than writing, especially when your progress is carried more by momentum than intent. There’s a sort of letdown once the euphoria of actually finishing a really long manuscript is over, and it took me a while to get back into the swing with the new one. (I’m not even technically done with the previous project, there’s still a bracketed note that says ‘insert flirting scene here’ that I’m not looking forward to writing.)

But now that I have a laptop again, it makes it much easier to switch around between my various other projects. I’ve started volume three of my steampunk fic, and I’ve made headway on the side story that sort of bridges all three volumes. I’ve been poking at Golden Wolf again, and the Unicorn and Incubus thing. I’ve picked up another research project, for after I’m done with my folklore and fairytales research for that one urban fantasy thing that’s been percolating. It’s about magic systems, how the growth of fantasy as a genre and the advances of science and technology has influenced the way we develop them. Obviously I’ll need the grounding of the fairytales and folklore first, but I have begun to collect early examples of fantasy, like Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (I managed to find a translation online, since I am the last person who would understand Middle English.) I have a spreadsheet that I’m still filling up with books. It’s not as long as the folklore and fantasy spreadsheet yet, but give me time.

Crawling out from under my rock

A dewberry flower, five petals, white with pale pink accents
Dewberry flower

The dewberry vines are flowering in the ditch, so it must be spring. A little early, it’s still February (because it’s leap year) but I’m not going to complain. My peach tree is also starting to bloom, pictures to come. Hopefully this stupid cold front doesn’t blow off all the flowers.

So the bupropion/buspirone combo is not working as needed, and I have made the decision to discontinue the bupropion for now. This leaves my ADHD untreated, but I’m going to have to prioritize my mental health for the time being and stay on the anti-anxiety medication until I have the spoons to make an appointment with the new brain doc at my doctor’s office. My physical health appears to be good, all my labs came back with decent numbers for once, which is a load off my mind. I’m still attempting to crawl out from under my current…episode, seasonal affective disorder, whatever it was. Feeling better, enough to have dived right into my usual spring fever, been seed prepping since last Friday. Logging my farm progress over at the spacecat.studio site. As I tanked my progress pretty hard on that front, I’ve decided to go a bit slower at it, not intending to renew my nursery license until next year at the earliest, just gonna focus on getting plants going, setting up the beds and trellises and things, repairing the greenhouses (the wind today blew out another panel, which I found in the ditch while walking Ben Ben), soil enrichment, trying to germinate seeds that are a bit past their prime. Slowly rebuilding my succulent collection. (Very slowly, sigh. I still can’t think about all the plants I lost without getting discouraged; cleaning out the small greenhouse is going to be tough.)

Things are still creeping along on the creative front. Tor 2 is still not done, still can’t read anything, not even the slightest pretension to art stuff. It’s frustrating.

Those annoying updates…

So I have been writing on my phone for years. It started when my laptop began to succumb to old age, which meant I started using my iPad to write, and then Pages became standard on iOS, which made it very easy to switch between iPad and iPhone via iCloud, and now at least half my writing is done on my phone. I had finally got every setting at optimum for my extremely bad typing, the system was working, and though I had a few issues that bothered me, I was more or less content with the experience.

Then there was a fucking update. At first it seemed like a good update. Some of the more bonkers autocorrect quirks got ironed out, which was one of my main gripes. Like. I write mostly fantasy, and it would take entirely too long for the autocorrect to realize that yes, I am in fact typing sorcerix, and aera, and all those other weird, made-up words deliberately, and yes, I do want to use the British spelling for colour, thanks, and why are you correcting this word, a real actual word, the one I meant, even, for another similarly spelled word that is completely nonsensical in context? Like, I know track record is bad because my typing is Bad, because there is an intersection of ADHD and dyspraxia and I got stuck at a red light there twenty years ago and I’M STILL THERE GODDAMMIT but please give me tiny soupçon of credit please because I do have a decent vocabulary and pretty good spelling most of the time. So that was a fairly useful improvement, as updates go.

But ye gods. The way they handle autocorrecting now. Used to, if you backspaced after an autocorrect, it would just bring up a little pop-up with the original thing you’d typed, which you could just ignore and type in the comma, plural, quotation marks, etc etc. But now, backspacing into the autocorrected word HIGHLIGHTS the fucking word and you have to tap the screen in the text to unselect it, and if you don’t, because you are used to just ignoring the pop-up with the misspelled word, it will just fucking delete the autocorrected word/s and I fucking hate it. Fortunately for my sanity, it only does this on iPhone, but since I still do a ton of writing on my phone, it’s become a huge damned annoyance. I scoured the settings, trying to find a way to turn this off, but it doesn’t seem possible and I’m just really irritated about it.

Vacay

Took a couple days to go visit my oldest friend with my sister. We don’t get to see each other much on account of the distance, but we always have a nice, relaxing time and a lot of good food. I was worried my appetite would be too bad to enjoy that part, but I ate without any problems, so I’m starin to think my stomach issue might be partially environmental. I’ve been having issues with my fridge so that’s currently my main suspect. I’ll have to wait and see how the next couple days go.

On the writing front, I’m so close to being done with the the current project. Building up to the climax, so just another chapter or so, then the epilogue so it doesn’t end on a total cliffhanger. Despite some of the shit I put these characters through, I’m not *quite* that evil. XD