railenthe: (Default)
I'm about ot confess something that I never thought I'd say:

I'm burned out on writing.

All this time, all these years, I lived the life of a writer. But now, it's hard for me to post even a status update.

I don't know how I got burned out on writing, but every time I think about doing it, I feel my brain deflate, and I just can't drum up the excitement for it that I used to have.

And that scares me.

I've been writing since I was like 12, pretty much nonstop. It was like the stories were begging to get out of my head and into the world...but now it feels like I'm not doing anything.

I hope this passes. I pray this passes.

I miss how good writing used to make me feel. It doesn't do that anymore. It feels like working with an asshole boss, except in this case it's me that's my own asshole boss.

Please let this pass.
railenthe: (Default)
 If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed that I am more here than I have been in a long time. That's partly because I'm putting myself through what is almost a boot camp.

 

I mean, it's a self started boot camp, with only one victim participant, but it's a boot camp.

 

I've been working on a few things lately. One of them is getting a schedule drilled into me again. I'm supposed to stay on it a minimum of three days a week--three updates a week. I'm going to go for more than that if I can because the more that I write, the more that I can write. It's been about a week on this new schedule and I already am starting to feel like my hands are getting back into the swing of things.

 

I'm also working on getting a gaming channel started. I have a FB presence, an avatar specifically made for it...I even have an app on my phone that'll let me stream mobile games. And the offerings for mobile games are good indeed lately.

 

I finally have everything I need on the new rig, christened Sheba.

 

I HAVE A DIAGNOSIS FOR MY BACK AND LEG PAIN. Turns out? Sciatica. It would appear that we've been missing it for YEARS. Physical therapy starts next Friday. It was supposed to start today but there was a snafu with getting a ride.

 

-crack- -pop-

 

OK, my hands are getting sore, and I've managed 1.2k words. I should rest.

railenthe: (Default)
 

OK but first off:

Hey, Wordpress, explain the following? Please?

A picture of the Wordpress App GUI from Windows 10, showing that the "New Post" command is located under the Window menu for some inexplicable reason.

WHY THE ABSOLUTE HELL is the New Post command hiding under 'Window?' That is the most counterintuitive thing that I have ever seen, and I have put up with lots of free apps that just approximate the thing that I need at times. This is official shit. Also, you need a dark mode.

Ok, now that that's out of my system...

___

I've had this computer for a little under a month now. It was a gift, and BOY do I love this thing. It's zippy, runs my favorite games at full crank with no lag, and has an app that lets it sync to my phone so I can use the apps on the computer, or text, or whatever. The only hang?

I, uh, skipped the free install of Win10 on my other rig because it couldn't run it well, so until now I've still been on Windows 7. So basically, I know fuckall what I'm doing. Every turn is learning something new.

For instance, the finger-number shortcuts on this touchpad. It's so much easier than stretching for an alt+tab--or an alt+shift+tab if I'm going the other way. It's a double blessing because my hands aren't used to keyboard work anymore, after freakin months of disuse. At one point, my hands would cramp up and go useless after only 300 words. That's not good for a writer.

Then there's my bad habit of having like 19 things shortcutted to the start bar. I mean, I'm TRYING, but I want to avoid the desktop chaos I had before. I mean, I had a widescreen monitor and almost every inch of space was SOMETHING on the desktop.

...come to think of it that's an even worse habit. Must break.

The sound on this thing is phenomenal, too. And if I need to cover myself, my Skullcandy headphones connect to it via bluetooth. No more wires! AND THE MIC WORKS. You know what that means? I can do gaming videos again.

...do I sound hyped? I might just be.



EDIT:  No, you're not trippin;--I changed my blog's look for the first time in literally ever. It was time for a new look.

railenthe: (Default)
 It's like 11 at night. I'm writing from my gaming rig, slightly stoned off ...a lot of things, but mostly cannabis.

There's been nothing much new to report except that my doctor got me on a new pain medication, one that seems to be working far better than the last one did.

Darling Prince, the cat, sits at my side with his head on my elbow. What an awkward place to be, kitten. 

I'm setting up this machine without really knowing what I'm doing, since I'm coming from Win7. But I'm slowly getting it.

There's a few things to do right away that I can think of:
  • find the damn silver,
  • find the damn towels, and
  • get Pestilence Couch mk. 2 outta here.
Oh, didn't I mention? The bugs followed me. They colonized the couch I was sleeping on. And as it turns out, I'm allergic. After a week or so of sleeping elsewhere, the whistle I had developed in my throat that I thought was something else? It cleared up. I could breathe

You want to hear something disturbing? That 'throat-closey' whistle I'd developed? I was getting that while taking heroic doses of Zyrtec.

I do not wanna think about what could happen to me if this gets worse.

Whewf...I got stories. So many stories. And if I was more awake I'd tell more of them. But my point is, I still have stories. I still have a life.

I don't have to stop writing.

Even if last year kicked my ass, I don't have to quit.

I'll get back into it. I have to bring the joy back into my life.

And I'm going to start by telling my stories again.
 

 
Watch out, world.
railenthe: wtf!Cloud (wtf)
 



One of the things that I keep forgetting to do is to get the ink in my printer refilled.

This is *really* ironic because not only am I smack dab in the middle of a draft, there's another project in the back of my head that basically requires working printer ink and glossy paper. After four days of attempting to contort myself sufficiently enough to kick myself for forgetting to write it down I remembered that I remember things much better if I can look at them at the same time—this being why, at work when suddenly something is changed, I'm very likely to bust out the phone to take a picture of the changes and study it.

Back when I didn't have a phone that could do this would take notes on literally every detail, sometimes in the shape of the detail. Yes, I got made fun of at work for this... But I got things right. And now here's the note to get ink just like at work... Because when I took this shot I realized I'm also out of paper.

railenthe: (Default)
Keep in mind this is a freaking city.

As a result this is now a thing.

The name of this particular tumblog was inspired by



this moment here. As much as this sort of thing happens around here, and as much as I've done random digging on it, I suppose I've always been a bit of a freelance journalist. This just makes it semi-official. Now to finagle more hours: who knows, I might be able to get EQUIPMENT.

Oh my god.

Apr. 26th, 2014 09:31 pm
railenthe: (Default)


Just... oh my god.

I've been trying to get my brain working again which has been difficult this month because hey, no food stamps and on short rations.

Today, that was fixed.

And then I saw this.

...excuse me while I go write.

WHO GET RENTED?! C'MON MUSES, SOMEONE HAS TO GET RENTED!

railenthe: happy OMG snake (OMG snake)
For once, pun not intended.

After spending time popcorning around like a chinchilla, I decide to get right at it—

WHOOPS SPLINTERS. ALL THE DOMINANT HAND. I can't type on a keyboard for a bit.

Meanwhile, have my attempt at making Sel in the Benchmark. He was SUPPOSED to be the sour-dour stick in the mud...and then he starts mugging for the camera.

http://imgur.com/2iXmCkv
railenthe: (Default)

We are halfway through the month, and I am less than halfway through where I should be at this rate. I have fallen behind, thanks in no small part to the machinations of my peripheral neuropathy dealing incredible damage to my hands. But I've begun to see if I can get the catching up part of this done. I'm making a point of it to NOT have my word count total visible, as when I actually LOOK at the totals, I start to freak out. As of this writing right here...I have no idea how I am doing.

 

And now, back to the grind. I REALLY want to make it Four Times.

railenthe: (Default)

So…I got something done.

 

And then.
ENTER TROLLMAN )

railenthe: (AWESOMEFACE)

The year before last, I was preparing for NaNoWriMo, when I got an article in my inbox spotlighting ‘dubious writing advice,’ as the writer put it. Being morbidly curious—bad advice is sometimes the best thing you can get, because it takes you out of your brain—I clicked on the link in the article.

There should have been a pop-up warning. “NSFW. Probably NSFB [brains].” Because the man is good. His advice is good.

And he’s fricken hilarious.

Incidentally, the coffee was where he got me hooked.

The man’s advice is solid, and his writing—oh, his writing!

…You know what, I could gush all day, but I think I’ll let the link speak for itself.

…and make coffee. ‘Cuz I’m out of coffee.

railenthe: (Black Mage (literal))

If it wasn’t obvious by now, I love to write. I love putting words to paper—or screen, as the case may well be.

It wasn’t always this way.


Gimme a baseball bat. I swing left. If I try to swing right, I just can’t twist that way and it doesn’t work.

Gimme a volleball. Even though my right spike is harder, it’s…well, I’ve seen scatterguns with higher accuracy. So I serve left.

Gimme a sabre. I’ll fence right until my arm gives out—which is kinda fast. Then I’ll switch left and be slower, but more accurate and last longer. …I guess that’s one we can validly call ambidextrous.

But overwhelmingly, if I have to do something I’m going to reach left first.

Which is why writing frustrated me at an early age. I’d thin left, but them Mom would walk by my little yellow worktable and ‘correct’ me—which probably explains the serial-killer slant I have to hold the paper at to even write on a straight line. It was a necessary evil.

It wasn’t until I was about seven, when we got cable, that I thought about writing for a reason that wasn’t a homework assignment. Nickelodeon introduced me to a cartoon called Doug, the main character of which regularly wrote in a journal—giving rise to my realization that writing things like that didn’t have to be a super girly “Dear Diary” moment, something I actively avoided being because—well, I liked videogames and cars, I simply couldn’t do that!

I saved my juice money from lunch for two weeks, then on a family trip to Family Dollar I bought a cute little journal. It had pretty lined paper and a picture of a kitten on its glossy cover. At around the same time, I bought my first ink pens—journaling didn’t seem like something that you took to as lightly as a silly homework assignment. I was coming at this with a pretty blue pen, just like Doug did in his show.

…of course that first entry was a goofy, jokey affair in which I introduced myself to my new journal, gave it an idea of what to expect, and then closed off with a signature.

For the first time I noticed that things around me were interesting sometimes. It was hard to keep to that clearly delineated two pages per entry after a while, and I developed my distinctive TINY handwriting.

I was still journaling when I lost my mother. Most of the following year and a half seems to have been an extended fugue state, and even though I’d think that the time just hadn’t happened, reading over those entries every few months was a reminder that time had simply not stopped, and I hadn’t just fallen out of the world at some point. At that point things were very straightforward accountings of what had happened that day. There were no associated feelings, just facts.

It wasn’t until fifth grade that I realized that writing could also be inventive and fun—hilarious in hindsight now that I think about it—when we get a homework assignment. We were to rewrite the ending to a story we read for class. I remember having the woman go insane, snap temporarily back to forgive her friend for something that hadn’t actually happened, then snap right back into madness (at one point I had her conversing fluent French to a tree). The third part got copied off of me and the turkey never got called for it—but I didn’t care. I’d started having fun doing little narratives.


Fast forward to seventh grade I’m twelve, in literature class, and BORED. I’ve pulled out a sheet of my good looseleaf—the narrow-rule paper—and have started writing down things that come to mind. Nothing I’ve committed to, just little snips of ideas.

Suddenly an assignment. Creative writing. Write whatever, as long as it has a clear plot, progression, et cetera. It must be based off of a legend.

I wrote my first short story for an assignment in class.

I didn’t know if it was well-received for a while…but then there was a thing in the school paper.

For one, suddenly we had a school paper.

For another, my story was in it.

Later that year, when our principal/lit teacher left the school, she flagged me down, holding a box. It had one thing on it: A note, reading “Never stop writing.” Inside was a Cross pen and pencil set.

I haven’t stopped since.

That’s when I get my idea...

Chrysanth WebStory What's your WebStory today?
railenthe: (Default)

I’m sitting here on the edge of my bed, glasses off, and half blind. Food is starting to make me feel sick as a dog, but that is because the only caffeine I have taken since validating my word count was the caffeine that woke me up from my ill stupor earlier—a head-cold has had me groggy, sick to my guts, and woozy most of the day. I don’t plan on taking more caffeine besides what’s in my medications and vitamins.

I’m reading a book that I downloaded from the Nook store almost immediately after finishing the validation count. It’s kind of a bookend moment—it’s the second book in the series that was the last thing I read for pleasure before the competition started. (In fact, here’s my review of that one.)

It feels good to be reading again, feeling the squee at the moments where I really notice how many scantily-clad pretty boys there are, the heat of the romance (surprisingly, in a het pairing), and the laugh-out-loud moments that are liberally sprinkled through Heroine Protagonist Rae Wilder’s journey.

I feel so good reading and I stop to think, then, that I hope that my own writing has the same effects on some readers out there. I know that there will invariably be the “I HATED THIS AND DIDN’T EVEN FINISH IT” sorts, but I know that there will be other readers who react as enthusiastically as I am now to this book that I am reading now.


I…am going to have one HELL of a time adjusting to the sudden reduction in caffeine intake. I spent most of this November neck-deep in either a bottle of energy drink (most of it Sodastream, half a litre at a time [?!]), an espresso, a restaurant coffee drink, or in a few cases a bottle of caffeine pills, violently throwing my way shoulders through in the long stretch of time that the ink was flying around. Several times I thought that I wouldn’t make it—there wasn’t enough time, there weren’t enough words, there wasn’t enough CAFFEINE—and then, working on a fight scene, validating the count after every few paragraphs…I win.

I make it.

I didn’t want to put my hands to a keyboard for the next few months. I didn’t even want to celebrate my victory—premature as it is, the story isn’t done, not by a long shot—and I didn’t want to look at WORDS.

…then I realized that I could read. I could read for fun.

Like everyone else.

I’m going to resume reading now, probably put together a bottle of plain seltzer because the caffeine withdrawal nausea is HELL right now…but diving into a story that another writer put together, pouring her effort, time, frustrations, and joy into it…I remember why I want to do this in the first place.

I’m going back to my reading, icing my aching head.

I can keep writing AFTER the caffeine withdrawal wears off.

railenthe: (Tired)

Well, it's going well for me. Lowell, on the other hand, is NOT amused: Under the cut )


Keep in mind that this is a zero draft! ...but also if you want to tell me what you think so far, feel free to. Sometimes, us inkslinging types need a little scritch behind the ears, just like our kittens do.

railenthe: (Happy camper)
I'm calling it a break for now, because more caffeine right now isn't a good idea and I am beginning to get a kink in my shoulder.

But check this out. It's an excerpt from what I've got so far. Right now, all you need to know is: Brayden is eighteen. Lowell is sixteen. Both of them can be, like, twelve, sometimes.

Meet Lowell and his brother, Brayden… )

I love these two brothers.
railenthe: (Wat.)

From the first time I ever gave it a shot, every year that I’ve done NaNoWriMo, there has been something to come up and make things complicated. Every time, something bad happens that threatens to derail the entire plan. I thought that it was just bad luck the first time, but I soon discovered that I could almost set my clocks and calendars by it.

The first time, it was being basically booted out of where I was staying—a situation that I’m choosing to call a “constructive eviction” as I really was afraid for my safety. Exactly a year later, things got a little different and I wound up with a computer to work on!

…except it blew up. The hard drive went up in smoke and the smoke damage delicate stuff inside the refurbished machine, and I had to try something else. I didn’t get a darn thing done for Nano that year.

The following year, things seemed to be going well. I had a plan, I had an outline, I had the skeletal first zero-draft from the first place I’d been living, and I had my own apartment.

…I also had a catastrophic injury to my left knee—remember that series of rants and lawsuit? That one—and my computer was somehow lost by my now-ex (not why things ended, but I don’t feel like getting into it. Some of you know the deets already, and some of you don’t, but the burden of an ongoing investigation means that until further notice, my lips are sealed). He arranged for me to borrow a friend’s tiny netbook until he could pay off my PC (I hadn’t even finished paying it off when it happened) and then replace it outright. That year, I finished.

I thought the luck had improved by then, that it wouldn’t happen again, but then—this was last year—my battery crapped out. I had to replace my warranty and then replace the battery. I managed to pull it off—and I managed to win, though the draft wouldn’t be finished for another couple of months.

My third shot in a row comes up in a few weeks. The plan was to back everything up, find my notes, make sure that the batteries and things were working properly, and then get ready to get started by creating the Scrivener project .scrivx files. Nothing going wrong here—

A strange error message popped up and I asked a friend what tests I could do. I wasn’t seeing problems in any of the scans I did, so we went to these tests on a CD-ROM.

The first test didn’t detect my hard drive.

“What is that?” I ask with a face resembling this. –> (O_o)

“I don’t know! I’ve never seen that error code.” Delivered with a “the hell is this” awesomeface sort of look.

“How the HELL does this keep happening to me?” I laugh. The pattern was coming back.

“Okay, we’re gonna try something else then,” Seamus*of course the names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent suggested, and we rebooted to the disc and tried something else.

This time we didn’t get an error message initially. We instead got system beeps. Like…loud, painful, I-actually-shouted-“HELL IS THAT NOISE?!”-beeps.

“I don’t know!”

My computer issues are kind of like patients in a teaching hospital: never a dull moment.

BEEP. Lag. Successful reboot. FREEZE.

“THAT could be the hard drive.”

Flash forward to now: I’m backing up my important data to Skydrive and an external enclosure. It’ll likely take days. A jar near my printer contains the money that I am saving for a new hard disk drive. The documents are currently safe, but backing up obsessively is the way to go. I’m not losing my work…again.

railenthe: (TEA)

It has become something of a tradition for me: sign up for NaNoWriMo. Have something happen. Fail to do a damn thing because of weird events happening.

Except when I didn’t fail.

Of course, there are people who don’t get it—“You’re not getting paid for this, right?” “You don’t really USE that every day, do you?” [in reference to last year’s price, a discount on Scrivener] “What’s the point?” Or the most infuriating of all: “This isn’t anything beyond a hobby. Why are you wasting your time?”

…yeah, have I mentioned I’m no longer dating that guy? OK.

The fact is, this thing is a sprint that helps me to remember what it is that I am doing. I like the competition because it lights a fire under my narrow arse and reminds me of the adage, ABW—Always Be Writing.

So the first bit of preparation has begun—outlining. I actually started this outline a little after the end of last year’s competition, but things have changed since then, and so I need to alter the projected trajectory. Things have steadily gotten darker, and I’ve been watching my voice and style form as I do this project. I’m rather pleased at where it is going.


I should get to sleep. Work won’t wait in the morning, now will it?
railenthe: (Default)

…if this seems obvious, just hang on a second and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t obvious to begin with. I didn’t begin blogging for a real reason. I was pressured into getting an account on LiveJournal a few weeks into my first semester of college, after having met my first new friends since grade school who liked to write and share things.

I remember being at one of the lounge computers, agonizing over what my username was going to be, and finally resorting to numerology to come up with something. In fact my first entry was sort of a rant about that activity.

It wasn’t for another month that I began to see why people blogged in the first place: having a place to vent a while is useful; and, as I was between computers at the time, I couldn’t keep a diary as I usually did. (Not to mention that the place where I was living at the time didn’t really have a place where I could safely hide a traditional diary without being caught.) So my blog became a refuge for my mind as well as a place to show off my writing.

Three months in or so, I’d begun to really get into it, even if I didn’t have the comments or the reader stats to back up my thrice-weekly (sometimes more) rambles about things going on in my life, my head, and the world at large. It’d become more than just a case of “do it because everyone else is” by then, and I couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t keep doing it.


After some time, it became second nature. Blogging became a way to determine who actually gave a fuck about me and who didn’t. If someone didn’t understand what the point of blogging was and tried to make me feel like an idiot if I kept doing it, I had to get them out of my life and right away at that. But I’m still amazed that the one person who I thought would give a shit about it never did, ridiculed it as a waste of time, and consistently called me things like ‘eccentric’ for doing it. …honestly, I don’t know why I stayed on so long with him.

…actually, that’s a lie. I DO know why I did it, and it was stupid. But we’re not here to dredge up such things. Especially with me out of nerve pills.


As things have gone, this has become a way to keep myself sane. While I love greeting new readers and sharing things I know (or think), a lot of times, this is mostly me yelling at me, pointing out what I’ve done that could be done better and making sure to drill that point home.

Then there are the times where I really do have something shareworthy, and my closest (in location) friends either don’t get it or don’t care, and I know that there’s at least one or two other people out there who don’t mind listening to a strange woman with a fascination with food ramble about things.

I love that.

And that’s why no one’s going to stop me from blogging even more.

railenthe: (Default)

It’s a heck of a lot easier on me if I set smaller goals outside of wrimos. Even if I only do 400 words on one original a day, it’s work that got done.

I’ve been feeling like I’m in a major slump recently because I took on TWO additional Wrimos this year that I wasn’t able to finish. The first one was due to being in the hospital so many times; the other was because I had a bit of a depressive episode—and I’m not sure I can even call it that, since my attitude was less “WOE IS ME I HAVE NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO” and more “Seriously, I just do not give one little fuck.”

Do I know what might’ve brought that one on? Not a damn clue. But it’s annoying and I don’t like it.



I figure that I can get things done in fandom if I dedicate 15% of my output to it after I’ve done my original things.

Not only will it provide for much needed motivation, it’ll also help me unwind. Largely it is without the pressure of other kinds of writing, and sometimes the reward—those reactions—keeps me flying high for days on end.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to see a large nice gang guy about a plate of omelets and toast. (Yes, this actually happened in one of my stories. Gideon only looks scary.)

railenthe: (*sweatdrop*)

Intended to be a flash fiction challenge prompted by the BG of Ommwriter, wound up being a little longer than I intended. Entirely off the top of my head, written in the span of about a half hour or so. I didn't know where it was going until the punch bowl--which became a running gag of sorts. I'd intended on warming up for Camp NaNoWriMo with this and suddenly...WEIRD.

I don't have a topic for said event but am considering expanding this somehow. I'd better come up with something!

Intro Flag(weird fiction below!) )

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