Thaumatic Ramblings

I am terrible at updating, I admit. I even suck at twitter and that only requires coming up with a sentence.

The truth is, there are things to be said, but every time I think about writing them I feel like I should either be working (at my job), working (on my novel), or working (around the house). Well to hell with that. My boss is loading me up with busy work and for once I'm not going to work through lunch to get it done right away. So here goes:

NY Comic Con: I was there from 11 to 4 on Sunday. It was awesome. I spent maybe an hour and a half walking around and the rest at panels. Verily, it is Geek heaven. It's also amazing how many people bring their wee little ones (I'm talking babies in strollers). I promised my wife I would never dress up our daughter as a comic book character (without her consent).

The two panels were writers on writing discussions, though the second focused on female urban fantasy authors and their kickass heroines. It got pretty hilarious. I got a lot to think about from both. The third session was Penguin/DK discussing (and giving away upcoming titles). I was hoping to win one of the two Dresden Files books, but got the eighth or ninth Sookie Stackhouse book instead, which I traded with some woman who actually wanted it. I ended up with one of the few non-fantasy titles. Blegh. I did, however, find out that there's a supernatural CSI series out there, so hopefully there will be a market for a supernatural medical series soon too.

The Novel: I'm working on it in fits and starts. I'm considering the first draft done, though it be crappy and without real transitions between scenes. The second draft will involve adding transitions, fleshing otu characters and description, and adding a fourth storyline to tie together the other three, which hopefully won't make it even more confusing.

Upcoming: Starting in May I'm going to be doing an exercise in writerly publicity on twitter (with a little on LJ). Can't let you in on the secret yet, but hopefully it will be a cool little literary social networking phenom.

My office is closing at 1 pm today, which is awesome. And of course we're off tomorrow, which is still awesome. And we're off Friday, which is doubly awesome. AND the other two people in my department are going to be out between Christmas and New Years, which is superlatively awesome. I'm actually going to be able to work for 2.5 work days without constant interruptions, unnecessary busy-work, griping, whining, micromanaging, passive-aggressive comments about my work, my skills, or my lack of experience, derogatory remarks about my lifestyle, my religion, America, capitalism, the holiday season...

I could go on. Point is, I'm going to get a s**tload of work done without Bill Lumberg and the Grinch hanging around. (And maybe even some writing at lunch time. Heck, maybe I'll even be able to take more than 10 minutes for lunch!) The hilarious part is how nervous my manager is about me being unsupervised. She very nicely has offered to be available if I need her, but it's just a little ridiculous. I'm smarter than either of them and work twice as hard, but because I haven't been working in market research for 10 years I'm just not good enough to do my own job apparently.

3.5 hours left...

Have you ever woken up from a dream thinking it was part of a recurring pattern, but then realized that the pattern itself was all part of the same dream?

Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I had a possibly recurring dream about going back to my old job and then deciding in the end it wasn't worth the paycut. (Also dreamt about Harry Potter characters and apocalyptic behemoths, but that's normal for me.)

So now if I have a similar dream again, I can go back to this post and confirm that indeed it is recurring.

That is all.

Daylight Savings Time is over and I've got to leave work at 2:30 to get home for Shabbat-ifying, but damn it, I already packed in three hours of work and it's 10:30. I need a break. So, some quick thoughts.

Obama's appointment of Rahm "Josh Lyman" Emanuel is really cool (to me). I hear he can be a bit of a bulldog, which I wouldn't want in a President or VP, but I think it's excellent for a Chief of Staff. He's pretty left, but pro-Israel (I've got to assume), so that's OK. And the fact that the world is mirroring West Wing's final season is pretty freaky as well.

Work is crazy. 40 hours so far this week, not counting my 10 minute lunch breaks. I deserve another raise, but I'm guessing that's going to have to wait until June. On the plus side, my department head (who is awesome) is giving us two extra days off between Thanksigiving and Jan 9. So I'm going to be off five Fridays in a row from 12/5 to 1/9. Which means way more participation on blogs.

My daughter has started saying "dada" which is beyond awesome. She's a fantastic kid and I can't wait to spend more time with her over the holidays.

NaNoWriMo is coming along nicely. 9,100 words this past week. That's in addition to about 18,000 previously written. I'm probably going to finish my scenes by Thanksgiving and start organizing (I've been writing out of order) so that I can start filling in some spaces.

Oh, and my supernatural medical mystery short story Occult Infection has received its eighth rejection. I'm putting it to rest for a while as I work on the novel it connects to.

That's my story. Back to work.

So as I mentioned, i started NaNoWriMo early and since Saturday night I've written 9,155 words, which was 405 over my goal for the week. I'm hoping to be just as productive in November and to utilize all the holidays in November and December to actually finish a really rough draft by New Year's.

I am also at that point where if I enter one more quarter-hour on my timesheet and my daily averages hits 8.00 hours worked. That's an extra hour per day than I should legitmately be working if I were an hourly employee. I did take six days off this month for holiday observance, but still an extra hour each day for 17 days is more than two whole extra days of work.

I think's it's time for lunch.

At last the Jewish holiday season is over and, though I'm still swamped with work, I plan on taking time to get back to my writing. I've got a few thousand words of old material from Spring and Summer but rather than try to pick up where I left off, I'm throwing myself headfirst into some novel writing frenzy. Starting Saturday night I've begun my own personal Novel Writing Season (PeNoWriSe, I guess). I'm aiming for 1,500 words a night (Saturday through Thursday) of any scene that strikes my fancy. I've signed up for NaNoWriMo, too, but apparently they have rules against starting before Nov 1, so I'm not really competing, but I am curious if anyone I know is.

Anyway, that's my update.

Who doesn't look forward to Fridays? I know I always have. Until recently, however, looking forward to Friday just meant looking forward to the weekend. But thanks to Fantasy Magazine (and the fact that work is usually slow enough to let me post on Fridays) I've been enjoying Friday for Friday's sake. Or from Freya's sake, if you're of the Norse persuasion.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end (albeit temporarily). As summer ends so too do long days and, for those weekly reverse vampires known as Sabbath observant Jews (and many Seventh Day Adventists), that means leaving work early on Friday to get home before sundown. The trunctated workday, however, is going to mean packing in more work in less time (and staying late the rest of the week), which will undoubtedly mean less time to post on Blog for a Beer.

Of course this is still weeks away and I'm just being melodramatic. The only reason I even thought of it now at all is because today's BfaB topic is childhood tv shows and that always brings up memories of how I never got to watch Saturday morning cartoons.

And, yes, I do complain too much.

Also, on the topic of Jews and cartoons, I am convinced that David the Gnome was Jewish. He wore a yarmulke, had a beard, and was a doctor. I bet he changed his name from Dovid Gnomowitz when he moved here from Europe.

I'm sitting at my desk after a long day of work, parenting, and walking/standing in this lingering summer heat. My legs, arms, and back ache, my eyes don't want to stay open, and my brain is barely functional. And I have to ask myself, how am I supposed to write like this? How am I supposed to ignore my sore, weary body and concentrate long enough to stick two words together?

And so I ask instead, how do you do it? There are those of you out there who manage to write more in a night than I get done over my best weekends. What's your secret/trick/quick-and-easy solution that requires no sacrifice whatsoever? Is it Zen mastery of the self? Psychological programming? Drugs? Trained monkeys who do the writing for you?

It probably has something to do with not wasting time on LiveJournal.

Well, while I try to keep my cast of characters diverse in my writing, the latest topics at fantasy magazine (on vampires and elves respectively) have made me realize that I've been too focused on a diverse human cast. I've now got some ideas bubbling for African and Asian (India and the Far East) forms of vampirism, possibly some Native American "elves", South American werejaguars etc.

I am, in fact, super busy at work, but everything's due Monday, so why not take some time for Fantasy Friday?  I'm doing my best not to be ticked about still waiting to find out who won last week, but I realized that having a miniboycott only punishes me (and possibly the 9 people who post and don't get anything.)

So, Star Wars. Snooze... But my own post got me thinking again about the topic of Salvage Fanfic. The only peice of fanfic I've ever written was a revision of Matrix Revolutions, because the film was so disappointing. Has anyone else ever rewritten a movie/book for themselves (*cough*StarWars*cough*)? Or do people who say "Well, I could have done it better!" make you want to hurl?

So not only did I get to spend (too) much of Friday posting about vampires over at Fantasy Magazine, my wife and I went out on Sunday to celebrate our second anniversary and, spitting in the face of romance, saw Dark Knight. And it. was. awesome. Frankly, I don't think anyone needs me to tell them that, but I had to say it anyway. Ledger's performance was brilliant, and the rest of the cast didn't slip one bit from the firsrt stellar film. I'm thoroughly pleased with what they did with Dent and Dawes, it worked. It just damn worked.

Because I am a fantasy junky through and through I can't stop envisioning what Batman and Joker would be like if I were writing them in my universe. Outwardly not all that different, but the internal forces at play that can drive two men to the lengths they go would take on a much more literal approach to Good vs. Evil. I've got a supernatural superhero story bubbling in my head now. I'll have to take a few notes to save for whenever I'm done with my current project. It would definitely be an interesting take on secret identities. But I digress...

Anyway, I'm going to wait patiently to find out the winner of Blog for a Beer (make mine a Blood Light!) and say "Fangs for posting everyone!"

I am so corny it hurts.

As luck would have it, today's Blog for a Beer open forum happens to come just a few days after I decided to work on some diary-style flash fiction. I think it came along pretty well. It's background for my novel setting and something I've been meaning to set down on paper. Clint had some similar points to make about magic and WMDs a while ago, so I wanted to throw in my two cents as well.

Ever have the problem of having no idea where to start a book? How much background to set up before the action begins?

I'm also struggling with how much to explain in narration and how much in dialogue. The setting is a world not quite our own, so there are plenty of important differences, but I don't think the trope of using a character who needs everything explained to them is going to work.

The good news: I got my performance review (and a raise) so things at work are looking up.

The bad news: I'm having a bug infestation in my apartment which is pretty much awful. My wife is having hysterics (you try opening up your dishwasher and finding company) and I'm quite nauseated myself. Exterminator is coming tomorrow and we pray he brings good tidings and blessings from the god of small deaths. We spent Friday and Saturday nights with my in-laws and I came back home Sunday morning to find a roach happily hanging around our dishwasher. Spent the rest of the day on the couch on account of a tension headache and fasting (Summer is not a fun time to be an observant Jew. Come to think of it, neither are Fall and Spring. Winter is fantastic, though. If you don't count having to run home before sundown on Fridays like a reverse-vampire.)

Watched a lot of USA Network. Burn Notice looks promising. Law and Order CI/SVU are disturbing as always. In Plain Sight might be good, if it's not the same format each episode. (For some reason I can't stop saying the name "Cristián de la Fuente" in my head. It's a great name.) Psych (which I watched on DVD with my wife when she came home) is, as always, fantastic.

What I did not do yesterday (or the day before OR the day before that) is write. I owe myself about 900 words, so I'm going to aim for 500 a night this week and hope I manage to avoid the Block.

 Kintern

n. Teenage child of an employee who comes in to work for a few days during the summer despite there being no need for an intern.

v. To work at a parent's office doing meaningless paper shuffling and "learning" about the working world.

Still didn't get our hero anywhere interesting, but I laid a lot of groundwork.

Saturday I decided to start an official writing regimen. I was going to ease into it, writing a minimum of 100 words a night (yes, I realize at that rate it would take me a decade to write a novel, but it's a start dammit). It went pretty well (I did about 1,500) until last night when I crashed on the couch, watched Golden Compass (supremely disappointing) and barely had the energy to make it to bed.

Tonight, despite needing to work late, make a showing at an engagement party, and attend a post-wedding celebration for friends, I'm going to sit down and write 300 words. Sleep will wait. So help me God I will get my protagonist somewhere interesting already! It just isn't fair that one of the secondary characters now has his own sub-plot where he gets to converse with a coprse, infiltrate a shady corporation, and run from the bad guys, while our hero is stuck in Human Resources hell.

Just. Not. Fair.

I usually get in to work at around 8:30 to get stuff done before my boss arrives and begins to pester me in the middle of projects. She's on vacation this week, but I still came in early in the hopes of having a good half hour to sit and type up some snippets of a second chapter for my novel. (My desk at home is not really all that ergonomic for typing) But of course as soon as I get in there's more work to do. Such is the joy of having 1001 bosses. Well, at least this is the last full day of work for the week.

This is the last time (I hope and pray and beg) that I'm going to use this blog for my soul-draining job, but here it goes.

We're still trying to get 16 to 29 year olds to complete this work/life/internet use survey. There's a $100 gift card prize (choice of Apple or Amazon.com).

The New Voices Project

So if you know anyone between those ages who likes taking surveys, feel free to pass the link along.

Thanks!

Got sick on Friday spent saturday in bed, went to best friends' wedding on Sunday and hopefully didn't get anyone sick, went back to bed for Monday and Tuesday, dragged myself to work on Wednesday, and now I'm pretty much recovered, except for feeling like my body has been through a wringer.

With the return of my health I'm going to try to get back to the novel writing. After the first chapter things kind of fell apart, so there's much work to do to get everything back on track. My goal is to have enough (3 chapters and a synopsis) by February so that I can try to stop by the New York Comic Con and chat up some publishers and send them what I've got.

I've started diversifying my reading and steering away from fantasy for the time being. Mostly going with more pop fictiony things that have similar themes as my novel to see how it's done by professionals. I just read Simple Genius by David Baldacci, CIA conspiracy stuff, not as clever as I was expecting, but still a good read. Now I'm in Seizure by Robin Cook. Medical "thriller" though a very slow start. There might be a big of an SF twist coming, not sure. Also, despite being medical, it's not set in a hospital, so now that I think of it, it's probably not that helpful for my novel.