I’ll be afk next week while we take a long overdue and well-earned vacation to visit the oceanside up north, so there will be no Welcome to Bridgetown posts next week. See you on the 9th!
Fly-by: brb, heading on vacation
Month: August 2024
That time of year again…
Y’all know how I feel about autumn, heh.
The teens have returned to the neighborhood schools, which of course means twice a day, five days a week, for about fifteen to twenty minutes, twenty to thirty of them come into our store all at once and cause chaos. Some of them are just fine, some of them are troublesome, and many of them are blissfully unaware of their surroundings or how flipping loud they can get. I don’t mind them myself, but those two short stretches of time can suddenly make an otherwise calm day extremely stressful.
But I digress.
The weather here in San Francisco has definitely started its yearly changes. Our weather patterns are a bit weird compared to other places, even locations a short distance away in the East Bay. It might be humid and hot, or it might be chilly and dry, or it might be overcast, or it might be a rare moment of sunny warmth. Sometimes all of that within the span of twenty-four hours. We don’t get the glorious foliage that New England gets, but we do get the lovely colors of late-blooming flowers and the stunning oranges and reds of sunsets. [We do get the lovely blooming of cherry blossoms in the spring, so I’ll definitely take that as a plus.]
I think I’ve finally adjusted to this sort of thing, to be honest. I love a weekend walk through Golden Gate Park or Crissy Field, or even a trip down the other end of Clement Street to the local farmer’s market. And now that we have our garden plot, I even enjoy getting dirty with the weeding and deadheading and watering.
Autumn Sundays, as always, feel like the winding up of a relaxing weekend, and needing to prepare for the coming Monday. Even now, even when I have the occasional day off (like today), I spend Sundays prepping my blog posts and making vague plans for the week. What should I work on? When should I do the laundry? Do I need to do any local errands? It’s certainly not the frantic last-minute of doing homework I should have done Friday afternoon (I was notorious for that), but some days it comes close.
Still, it’s always been my favorite time of year, and I embrace it each and every time.
Going deep again…?
Whenever I think about the Bridgetown Trilogy and the Mendaihu Universe, I almost always wonder if I’ll ever get around to writing something with that level of worldbuilding. Theadia certainly comes close, but that project’s a different beast altogether. While it certainly has an ensemble cast and multiple worlds, it doesn’t have its own conlang or its own highly detailed mythos. It’s a big story, but it’s not a part of a bigger universe like the MU is.
The MU is still alive and kicking somewhere in the back of my thoughts, and I still want to write more stories in that universe, but I’ve come to the realization that if I’m going to do it right, I’m going to have to go in deep once more. And I’m perfectly willing to do that once I allow myself to take that dive again. [And I will not complain one bit if that includes the music side of things, mixtapes and all. That was one of the best parts of the project!]
As you may remember, I deliberately chose to bounce away from that kind of thing because, up to 2015, that’s pretty much all I knew in terms of novel writing projects. Everything had to be a full-immersion, years-long intensity, and I needed not to do that for a while. I needed to know how to write something standalone and concise. Partly to prove to myself that I could do it, and partly because I knew that not all of my newer story ideas would translate well into that long of a format.
I knew I’d come back to the longer form sooner or later. I’ve often said it’s a format I truly enjoy writing. But in the several attempts in writing the temporarily-titled-MU4 novel, each time felt like I wasn’t doing it justice. The deep immersion wasn’t there, only a reflection of the past style. I wasn’t allowing myself that level of focus and, let’s face it, obsession. So it kept getting pushed to the back burner.
This will all eventually change, I hope. I’m not sure when, and I’m not sure how. Perhaps it’ll be a change in my writing schedule, better and more creative use of my break times at work, or perhaps it’ll be something else altogether. Who knows? I may even start a new extended universe instead…?
Not lazy, just languid
I’ve gotten so used to my slightly unconventional two-days-on/one-day-off/three-days-on variations of my work schedule that working five days in a row at the Day Job over the last couple of weeks has thrown me for a loop a bit. [There’s also the fact that last Sunday we did some major gardening, after which I did three loads of laundry, which didn’t give me much of a day off.] I’m trying not to overdo it, so I’m allowing myself the occasional day where I do nothing much of importance.
It’s also that the weather’s been its usual weird westside SF self lately: overcast, foggy, extremely humid, and stuck somewhere in the mid-50s…plus it’s allergy season, occasionally leaving me sniffly and migrainey. On those days I’ve learned it’s best to just slow down a little bit and let nature take its course.
I am working on Theadia, just not on a daily basis and not at intense levels, so at least that’s still moving forward!
Hopefully things will be a bit less languid in the coming days….thanks for your patience!
Thank you!!!
I’ll be honest, I spent the entirety of July thinking that no one had downloaded any of my books during the Smashwords/Draft2Digital summer sale, and now I realize that it was because I’d been expecting a notification with every download, something I’d had set up at Smashwords.
SO! Imagine my surprise and my joy when I receive my D2D sales report on the afternoon of this past Monday, and find that I’d actually gotten sixty-two downloads!! Wow! A huge thank you to everyone who downloaded the books, and I hope you enjoy them!
So yeah, now that I know that I’m not getting all those notifications, I’ll be sure to check out the sales reports more often, heh.
Walking
I’m doing a little bit better with the walking to and from work instead of taking the car, but I could probably stand to be less lazy about it. There are days where I’ll take the bus in (after all, my commute might be only eight blocks but it’s literally all uphill) and walk back, even when I’ve had a ridiculously busy day at work, and I think I need to do that more.
It’s not as if my Day Job is sedentary…I can do up to four or five miles a shift with all the walking and moving around I do within the span of eight hours. Perhaps that’s partly why I don’t always have the moments to step aside and write out story ideas or work through something. It really depends on the day.
Still, I’m glad that I’m moving around a lot more than I was during the Previous Day Job, which had me sitting on my behind and snacking more often than I really should. All this moving around keeps me healthy and my blood pressure at normal levels. And when I’m walking home after a shift, it’s a stretch of time where I don’t have to think about anything else. I don’t use earbuds, so I only listen to the world around me. Some of those walks have been spent thinking about what needs to be done with my WIP, or working out how I want a certain scene to go. And most importantly, I get to unwind for a little bit before I start the writing work again!
fly-by: brb, going to enjoy the weekend
Hey there! It’s been a sort of busy week at the Day Job and next week’s schedule is going to be pretty much the same, so I’m going to enjoy the two days off I have coming to me by doing some stuff outside. Take care of our plot at the community garden, go for a walk, catch up on errands, things like that.
Hope you have a nice weekend! See ya on Monday!
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