Thinking about my life
Can be such a massive pain
But sometimes
It’s less painful
Than life

So some of you might know that Topper Grey’s mild-mannered alter ego was laid off in January due to an unfortunate conjunction of insufficient work for the department and being the least-liked person in said department, as least as far as the person who handles hiring and firing was concerned.  I can’t say I really made it easy on him, as, while I was perhaps as skilled with the software as anyone else there, I certainly wasn’t the best at dealing with client bullshit and project-based uncertainty.

I started to write much more about the situation, but I realized that almost all of it was either an excuse or a justification, and it seems a little late for that.  Fuck it.  I was a bit of a screw-up, and when it came time to trim the payroll down, I was that little dangly bit that no-one ever misses.

Strangely enough, things haven’t been that bad around the ol’ homestead.  My side jobs have kept us afloat, I managed to convince the government that it would be in their best interests to send me a weekly stipend, and some careful budgeting is allowing us to more or less carry on as before, at least financially.  In fact, I’m saving close to $200 a month on gas, and with me not being in town all the time we’re spending less on groceries, coffee and just eating out in general.

Better even than that, I get to take the Greyspawn to school all the time, or stay home with the smaller ones and read.  I get to sit at the dining room table in my underwear and work, or sometimes even write if I can convince myself that I need a little mental health break.  I can get up in the middle of drawing a custom kitchen and just… make cookies, if I feel like it.  And I have.  And they were the most delicious cookies of all, because I made them in my underwear.

No, not like that.

I have applied for many jobs and gotten some good feedback… which is the polite way of saying that there’s no jobs for me in this area.  The jobs improve dramatically the farther I get from here, which is a little depressing because we love this area.  We love the house, we love the town, we love the yard, we love the school.

When all of this started, I was trying not to vomit out of my eyeballs.  I was panicking, I wasn’t sleeping, I was depressed and trying not to act like any of it.  It took almost a week for the initial shock to wear off, because this is the first time I haven’t been gainfully employed or in college in more than a decade.  I am the wage-earner, I am the ‘man of the house’ as they say, and pretty much my sole duty in life and on this planet is to provide for my family.  And I wasn’t doing that anymore. I wasn’t even sure I could get EI. My reason to exist, from a certain point of view, had been removed.  I was only good at one thing in this world, and it didn’t look like I was going to get a chance to do it again for a good long while. In the words of my father, from way back when he was trying to motivate me the only way he knew how, I was a failure.

I’d get the kids sent off to school and then spend ten minutes just staring at a wall trying not to cry (no worries there, though, I haven’t cried since 1996).

Eventually the shock started to wear off.  The situation still sucked, and continues to suck, but now I have been somehow freed by all of this.  I’ve been occupied with side jobs, completing one and sending off another for partial completion billing today, and I did manage to get a substantial employment insurance claim. It will be tight, but we can get by, and I’ve spent so much more time with my family lately than I have since… ever. After that first week I even started writing again, and it’s been coming faster and flowing easier than it has for a good long time.  During a normal work day I get the bug to write around… 2pm.  I don’t know why.  I also feel the urge while driving, which is usually impossible as well as dangerous.  Now I can alt-tab, bash out a few paragraphs, make a batch of cookies, then go back to work.  I’ve racked up almost 30,000 words since I got fired, and I’ve got such an enormous variety of stories on the go I can always find one to dump my creativity into.

This has definitely been an experience for me, and one that I now feel lucky to have.  I may never escape the day job lifestyle, but I am cherishing the brief reprieve and the freedom it grants me. The last time I was even a fraction this unencumbered by like I let it all go to waste, and it continues to haunt me with shameful regret.

All I want to to is make them proud.

…

Well, that was deep.  Fun time!

I may be going to hell for this, but it was so worth it.

Got your attention, didn’t I?

A certain friend who shall remain nameless (HEY JAMES!!!!!!!!!!) reminded me that I used to have fun with my blogs, back in the day. All my old blogs are still up on Blogspot, though the vox one got taken down (I really liked that one, too, but Vox kerploded). I was reading through some of them, and… man, I could bash out a thousand words on ANYTHING at the drop of a hat. That was a good outlet for my desire to write, even if it wasn’t a ’story’, exactly. It helped be practice soliloquies, though, so I guess that’s a good thing.

Starting in the New Year, or perhaps sooner if i get bored, this blog will focus less on my writing (which is really just embarrassing and I have very little progress to actually write about without giving away PLOT SPOILERS) and more on just that dog has a puffy tail!

I meant, more on just… random things.

I think about a lot of wierd shit during the day. To people who know me, this will come as no surprise. To people who DON’T know me… it will also likely be very little surprise. This is the internet, after all. This is the place that made David Caruso a star.

I dunno what to talk about yet, though. I can’t just turn this on and off like some sort of… of… thing that stuff comes out of when you fiddle with knobs. I have to wait for inspiration! Usually in the form of my morning BBC headline feed, but sometimes just when two neurons think the unthinkable, crash into eachother, and detonate in a mushroom cloud of thinkability.

MAN, I haven’t had enough coffee to make sense yet this morning.

And we’re off! NaNoWriMo!

WHOOSH!

This is going to be pretty sweet… I hope.  I’ve still got a lot of work I have to do this month, both around the house and for my various side-jobs, but I’m hoping I can cripple most of those problems next week when I have a nine-day vacation.  Taking into account I’ll be spending several days traveling, I might still be able to make a dent in my story by the end of it.

Now, I’m thinking that I might have to work on two stories in parallel, because I know all too well how hard it is for me to focus on ONE story at a time.  I’m spazzy.  I like to bounce around.  So I’m going to be working mostly on:

And on the side, I will be plotting and noting for:

I may be the worst person ever, but dammit, I have fun.

I’m surprisingly proud of how well this one outline is coming along.  I’ve rarely had something develop with so much breadth to the storyline, and with so many great characters to draw upon, and even though I’m pooching from a global megagiant of existing media, I still think my Pokemon story is going to be something pretty special.

And wierd.

The problem, however, is I hate telling people about my stories before I write them, because then I feel stuck to the plot points I covered, or I feel like they’re already pre-judging me for the crappiness, or I decide that what I’m saying sucks as I’m saying it and then I get bummed out.

Conversely, I do my BEST world-building when I can sit down with someone and explain everything to them, because then new things appear to me almost as fast as I can talk or type. They’ll ask a simple question, and I’ll think of something that adds three whole chapters and two new characters.  I ask them for advice on a sticky spot, and they give me an answer, and I usually reject it by countering with something that never occurred to me until THEY gave me THEIR opinion, and… it’s usually very constructive.

But I also don’t want to give away the best bits before I’m done.

But I also want to brag about how awesome it is.

But I don’t want people to see what I write.

But I want praise.

…

AUGH!

…

This will be the song I’m writing to this year.

Do do do do!

Do do do do do!

…

Never mind.

Seeing my wife periodically check this page out over the last couple weeks reminded me that I actually have a website.  Strangely, this has been a really good period of writing for me, very creative and prolific, but it never occurred to me to really update this.  Nano is coming up soon, and a friend of mine is trying to psych me up for it, so here I go.

I don’t know which story I should go with this year.  I don’t really feel comfortable with Big Sky Theory yet, as it’s still just a very, very detailed world in my mind but whenever I try and write it I come up blank.  If I could draw, I think I would have more success with this one. Amateur Heroics is more episodic, despite the overarching plotline, and I don’t have most of the episodes worked out yet. The Bridge is still feeling pretty sweet, but it’s also getting wierd enough that I don’t think I WANT anyone reading it until I think up another pseudonym.

I’m losing faith in New World Samurai, at least until I can develop a better or more suitable narrative style. Peapod is also a little similar, it doesn’t feel right to do it from a first-person perspective anymore.  alternating first-person / third-person might work, sort of how the old RA Salvatore books had first-person segments written as diary entries, or little private musings, etc.

This doesn’t leave much! I’ve got Soul Lenders, my three-time NaNo failure. I’ve got Last Curfew, which I’m still tooling with.  I’ve got my so-wrong-it’s-right post-apocalyptic Pokemon story (tentatively titled Poke-pocalypse), which might work well since I’ve got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING planned out for it, and I can just type like a madman. I’ve STILL got Tempus Letum, which might be interesting to come back to.

…

Ffffffff, I dunno.  Help me out here, guys!

In the meantime:

Ok, I think the Universe is being a little less subtle with me right now.  When I change browser tabs to this one so I can post, the laundry machine starts emanating shrieks of protest.  when I change browser tabs to ANYTHING ELSE, the laundry machine stops.  I tested this three times.  Anyone remember when Bink went to Humphrey to ask what his magical talent was? Except for every important detail, this is like that.

Back.  Ok, it was just the buttons on a sweater.  Stupid laundry machine, getting all upset over some buttons.

Some good news: My last post was June 22, I think, and for a few days I didn’t do much else.  I was sketching out some ideas for Soul Lenders, Origins (which I am calling Amateur Heroics now), Big Sky Theory and even New World Samurai. I think of good stuff all the time while I’m driving, but that’s obviously not a very good place to write stuff down, and I rarely remember it after, so I tried to make it a point of writing down all the ideas and inspirations, and even just individual words that struck my fancy, before I go to bed. Jotting down 50 or 100 words quickly became 500 or 1000, since once I start typing I find it difficult to stop.

And it escalated.

I’ve written 30,000 words from July 1 to 15, and I’ve been accelerating over that time period, so I wouldn’t be surprised to bang out 40,000 more by the end of the month.  THATS A NANO AND A HALF! Well, a NaNo and two-fifths, but still.  That’s more than I’ve ever written in that sort of time frame, excluding the original draft for Soul Lenders, and now that I’ve started I can’t let myself stop.  I’ve been staying up too late, but since I spend every night staring at the backs of my eyelids for an hour or two before drifting off to sleep I figure it’s not that big of a sacrifice, and I think that I might actually be falling asleep faster once I do drag my sorry carcass to bed.

Two weeks and I’ve written a solid novella.

Two months is a solid paperback novel.

A terrible novel, to be sure, but still a novel.

Obviously there’s more to it than that.  Proofreading, editing, re-writing the passages that suck, ignoring the parts that contradict the other parts, and of course overdosing on opium (I’m told this is mandatory to become a big-time writer). But seeing what I can do in my limited spare time has been quite an eye-opener.

When I’m not sleeping at work, that is.

Then my eyes are closed.

Ok, so there was a slight miscalculation with how much free time I would have post-move.

As far as I understand how ‘orders of magnitude’ work, I’ve somehow managed to become nine billion times more busy now that we have a home with enough space for everyone and everything. Still trying to work this out, but I suspect my children multiply while I am at work, and they all manage to blast-fuse cheese to every dish in the house.

I’m going to plant cameras to catch it.

But apart from that, the move has been awesome.  The place is awesome.  I have eschewed using my new office as it’s become crammed with every box we’d like to forget we didn’t burn, and instead get most of my writing done in one of two comfy recliners, my new chosen location for creative… stuff. My back has been giving me guff and the recliners are just marvelous for being able to type comfortably.  For some reason, I am sitting in the uncomfortable one right now, and regretting it.

Wait, when did we buy this chair? I don’t remember buying this chair.

The chairs are replicating.

Before I disappear under a Katamari-like orb of children and home furnishings, I should probably finish writing something, eh?  I’ve been scattershot lately, putting in between a dozen and a thousand words in when I can on any of my umpteen tales, and even started working on a new one.  I’m still hounding the short stories and posting chapters for review in a few locations.  Go figure that the most popular one by far is a gay romantic comedy worldbuilding exercise, while my vampire story has actually evolved considerably through my sporadic posting for review. I still think it needs work, but now I know how to actually get that work done.

And, of course, music is still my muse, and lack of sleep my enemy.  I have more of both than I can possibly handle, so it’s a toss-up as to which will win.

Assuming that by “star”, you mean the universal comic-book symbol for pain.

I realize that I say a lot of the same things over and over again on this blog, and I’ve been inspired by TFS Frieza to keep a little list of them.  See if you can spot it.

This has been a really rough month for me (#37). Work has been more of a pain in the ass than usual (#19), my pointy-haired overlords have been unusually hostile (#5), and idiots have been making my job nearly impossible (#116). Several of my kids are sick (#13), keeping on top of the mess they make is nigh impossible, (#54) and I haven’t been sleeping very well (#99). Finances are grim (#44), stress levels are high (#84) and I just haven’t felt overly motivated (#29).

If it’s too subtle, I can recap all of that later.

There have been a few genuinely new things lately, though.  There’s been a few occasions during the past couple weeks where the most pressing thing on my agenda was to sit with one of my kids and just sort of hang (usually with my youngest, who is a little attention-starved). Dinner is all cooked and eaten, the dishes are washed and put away, the worst of the toy-related fallout has been cleaned up, and laundry is no longer my pressing evening concern. I’ve checked my e-mail, Facebook, games and forums (which is now down to requiring only about ten minutes per day), and I realize that, if I want, can just… sit.  And rest.  Or read.  The only times I’ve been able to just sit and read since we moved have been when the kids were asleep and I could hide in the bathtub for maybe half an hour, but now I can kick up my feet on the couch and read a few chapters while the Greyspawn cuddle up with me and watch a movie.

And part of me hates it.

I’m not sure if it’s because of how I was raised, my overdeveloped sense of responsibility to my family, or the constant reminder of my lifelong habitual uselessness, but anytime I’m at home and NOT being productive I feel like a failure. Using my spare time to get some writing done makes me feel self-conscious, because I’m only home for a precious few hours per day and I don’t want their only memories of me to be of me hunched over a keyboard. When they’re asleep, though, I need to use that time to write.  There’s a couple writing and short-form publishing websites I need to look into, and my writing partner from several weeks ago has completely forgotten about our deal to motivate eachother (I completely forgot, too, but I’m pointing fingers first, so that means I win).

I have in general been feeling a lot more motivated and less overwhelmed (except when shit went down at my dayjob and my name was mentioned along with many tens of thousands of dollars of back-costs incurred, where one small miskate on my part was missed by all parties until it was way, way, WAY too late to fix), and I’ve been a lot more in control of myself. Time to start harnessing the power of my positive thinking…

… and rule the world!

But until then, please enjoy this excerpt from the greatest movie of all time.

Except my buddy is a red-headed female midget… from the future!  Not as good as a talking pie, but still pretty awesome.

We’re going to be competing and supporting eachother in our efforts, and I plan to start spending more time on some social writing sites like WriteSF and Protagonize.  In a vague attempt to appear professional I also need to start updating THIS site a little more regularly, particularly the Fiction pages and maybe put my newer stuff on the Random pages. Stay tuned!

Or don’t. Whatever.

Two minor setbacks in the world of making new vids: one, my new laptop has some really serious (and unaddressed) Windows 7 incompatibilities with my editing software, so that it just picks a random point in the audio track, and absolutely will not go past it, and two, my old laptop always desynchs the audio during replay so the only way to see if it’s properly synchronized is to fully export the finished product and give it a listen, which takes about half an hour, and you can’t use it for anything else during that period.

Crapbaskets.

So looking forward to the move.  New house. Real yard. Quiet town. Nice views. And maybe, just maybe… my own desk. So beautiful.

Well, this has sure been a week for the ages.  Or the recordbooks.  Or for repressing. Whatever.

And it’s not all bad or lame news, either.  I mean, a lot of good stuff happened. REALLY good stuff.  But a lot of bad things happened. REALLY bad.  And there’s been nigh zip in terms of downtime, and less sleep than usual, and heavy lifting and lots of driving and terrible traffic and sunshine and rain and snow and sleet and sunshine again and… GAH! It’s been EVERYTHING!  EVERYTHING WENT UP TO ELEVEN! IT’S ONE HIGHER!

*twitch*

On the plus side, I’ve been struck with the inspiration bug.  I’m halfway through two new music videos right now, but they’re ones I wanted to do just because I thought they’d be cool, not because inspiration cracked me upside the head with a toaster.  With all the lifting and driving and staring at the insides of my eyelids I’ve been doing this week, I’ve had a lot of time to think and listen to music in a pseudo-hypnotic mild coma, I’ve been hit with THREE video ideas that  just seem… perfect.  All of the videos I’m really proud of hit this way, so I’m looking forward to it.

…

Next week.  This week, I’m about a month behind at work, in the middle of moving to a new town using only a minivan, and trying to fight off the pink elephants that keep spelunking out of my closet and prevent me from sleeping.

…

I might have hallucinated the second thing there.

Movie time!