Dogpaddling to Nowhere

Hi everyone! It's been a heckuva few days since Wednesday. I've been helping students and trying to catch up on some accounting work for a client. Sadly, I've not done much writing.  But I'm still working on my planning, which is the only goal I think I put up for this round of ROW80.

One of the things I've been trying to get done is migrating Fiendish Serendipity from Blogger to Wordpress. I just can't figure out a way to do it.

Any input would be welcome!

I hope to have more to report on Wednesday.

Until then, happy creating...

Gotta Remember My Mantra!

Hi everybody. It's been one wild week -- and not because I've been having a great writing week. In fact, I haven't done much of anything, writing wise.

I've been dealing with several financial crises, most minor, but added together became a bit more problematic. To deal with them, by the grace of God, I've been able to pick up a few more tutoring students. Paying the rent today, in full, was nothing short of a small miracle. My pantry is stocked well enough to get us through next week until I bring in some more cash. And, I've ended up in the black, even though it's by a very small amount.

Whew!

Kaylee was right - everything really is shiny, and I shouldn't fret.

I've been staying away from the grocery store, and all the processed food. Snacking has been on clementines, before they go out of season again. I love those! No chips!

Okay, now that I've taken care of urgent stuff, time to get back to the creative stuff. See y'all Wednesday!

Happy writing...

Why Negative Coffee Times Negative Coffee Equals Positive Evil

The end of the semester is winding down here at the college. I didn't have a lot of students Monday, and when afternoon rolled around, I was fading fast. I'd only slept a few hours on Sunday night, and not well. My  coffee addiction tried to send me to the coffee stand downstairs, but my logical mind prevailed, reminding me that if I had coffee in the middle of the afternoon, I'd face another sleepless night. Oh, bother.

So, Kris, who was in the lab with me and studying for a Calculus final, began sketching my babbling on the board, in the form of a graph with a cracked coffee mug. The mug was slowly dripping coffee into the negative quadrant of the graph (any value here will be negative). We all know that, in algebra, a negative multiplied with another negative will give you a positive; in physics, we'd need to determine how fast we'd have to drink the coffee. (A linear function -- f(x) = x -- was drawn through the graph, bisecting the coffee mug and giving us an arbitrary line from which to determine how much coffee we had available to drink. Once it dripped below the line, we'd be * outta luck.)

So, by extrapolation, here are the parameters of the graph:

coffee = good
-coffee = bad
(-coffee)(-coffee) = +evil.

Makes sense, right? (Yes, and I agree, we should have had more work to do that afternoon!)

Goals? Oh, right, let's talk about that.

Pages: Met, thanks to Nano.

Exercise: Nope. I've been tutoring or dealing with pre-Christmas stuff whenever I've not been working.

Planning: Yes. So much so that around 4:30 this morning I woke up, realizing that I needed to find out the age of the "death" of Akhenaten so I could reasonably determine whether he had grey hair or not. Nothing like obsessing, right?

Food: Managed to stay away from the fried chicken still. Pizza, though, I ordered some because the guys asked me to. And since there was a new pizza on the menu, I tried it. I didn't like it. Yay! I did order a vegetarian pizza with light cheese, just so I could feel a bit better about my bad behavior.

How's everyone else doing?

I've Made a Decision

Greetings, everyone. Here's a rundown on how I've been getting on...

1. Exercise. Not the best. I've just done some gentle walking because of my back. It's been feeling much better over the past couple of days, though, so I reactivated my gym membership yesterday and I'm hoping to go back and start swimming in the next couple of days.

2. Writing. To my disgust, it also hasn't been that great. That's because I had to make a choice to take on a couple of private tutoring assignments that turned into more than just a few hours of work. It was lucrative (over $300) but took a lot of time that I would otherwise spend on writing. That finished yesterday, so I'm back on track. I think.

3. Planning. My planning is coming along slightly, but just in my head. I decided that my heroine has to die at the climax of my book. She has to be the one to take the ultimate risk, and in order to be successful, she has to die. The plot won't be satisfied otherwise. That was a really hard decision to make, but I feel better about the direction of the story, so I guess it's worth it.

4. I've made a decision about NaNo. I find I work better if I can flip between two projects, so I'm going to be working on a contemporary suspense (nope, no paranormal elements here!) called "Broken." I'm having a great time with it so far. Lots of death, pain, and viciousness - but none undeserved. Except that foisted onto the victims. It's okay, I promise. They'll get their revenge. Le Comte du Monte Cristo would be proud.

How's everyone else doing?

What Planet Am I On...?

It's been a bit crazy this week. I pulled a couple of muscles on the sides of each legs. You know, the ones that curve from your butt to the top of your legs? Wow, talk about pain!! I walked like someone who was about 120 and lame to boot. Yeah, the dreadmill stuff didn't work so much this week. Today was the first day I was able to walk without too much pain. (And I still don't know how it happened...)

Writing? Planning? With final exams upon us, my students are grabbing all my time. I haven't done a thing. Except one. I did have a new story idea slam into my head. So I wrote that down and put it away in my file.

Exam last two weeks - they start tomorrow - and for my students they end on the 24th. I'm not foreseeing a lot of work accomplished until then.

This week I plan on pushing through the mud and getting through the exams to the freedom of the page!

Where Did the Time Go??

The past few days have just blown by, and I'm ashamed to say that I haven't written anything. I've been swamped with students who are trying to get things done before spring break. Time just got away from me. That, and my math class.

I was supposed to take a math test on Friday. I've been unable to figure out a particular problem, so I didn't take the test. Luckily, it's an independent learning class, so I can take the test anytime I want. As of this posting, I still haven't figured it out, but I think I have a handle on it. I'm taking the test tomorrow afternoon, sometime between 1:00 and 4:00.

After that, I can concentrate on writing until after spring break. That will be refreshing.

I think I can take some time during the break and learn to organize things better.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point.

Oh, and somehow I need to fit some exercise time in. I just saw myself for the first time on Skype. Let's just say that on a sliding scale from unhappy to horrified, I'm sliding quickly toward horrified.

See you Wednesday!

Losing Werewolf Bits

I'm continuing to get better. So much so that I'm feeling guilty about not hitting the gym quite yet. My day will come.

Something really crappy happened on Wednesday (which is probably why I forgot my semi-weekly post!). I wrote a relatively long bit of material on werewolf genetics. I went through about 5 or 6 pages, deciding recessives, dominants, reproductive cycles, hormones, pheremones - the whole thing. I loved it. Then I lost it.

I checked my computer. I checked my house. I even checked with my writer friend Olivia, because we'd gotten together earlier in the week. Nothing. It vanished. Poof. Into thin air. I came to the painful but necessary decision to rewrite it. And, boy, am I glad I did!

In the process of pulling it all back together, I discovered an incongruity. If werewolves and shifters reproductive systems only kick into gear when they meet their perfect genetic match, they would only reproduce with other weres or shifters. Anything else would be less than ideal, and would not be in keeping with species survival. So...it turns out there's a combination of genes that need to be inherited for the shifting or the were ability to be actually expressed. And that's better, because...

Our twin werewolves each "recognize" a person who is not a shifter, or not pack. However, both of these mundanes are of Italian descent. It turns out they each carry a few genes from that original Etruscan werewolf pack. Potential problem solved. Whew!

Now, how to solve the problem of writing what appears right now to be pure dreck...? Today it all seems like it's blowing chunks. I mean, do my readers really need to know what Dawar's compound looks like? I'm bored writing it, so I can only imagine people would be bored reading it.

But, I will take La Nora's advice. In a nutshell, it's this, paraphrased: vomit it out and get it on paper. You can always fix it later. But you can't edit a blank page. I'm going to try and make that my mantra. And, while I'm sitting here in the bookstore waiting for one of my students, I'm going to yank out a blank page and keep going.

(No, I'm still not caught up....)

Grrrr.....

Yesterday's writing adventure blew chunks. Big ones. I couldn't think of a bloody thing, and so I ended up in a scene which probably won't be needed later. I feel like I wasted my time. For all I know, I made as much sense as a chimpanzee trying to do calculus.

I'm heading to Starbuck's shortly to work on today's round of words. I'll report back later.

It's now later. In fact, it's really later. It's the next day. Here's what happened: Not much.

You see, I'm also a math instructor at a local college. Since I can't get full-time hours, I supplement my income with math tutoring. Well, guess whose student was waiting for her at Starbucks. Yup. Mine. Sigh.

The only words I worked on were word problems.

Oh, well, tomorrow is another day...

Lara