Dawn over Mt. Petit Jean Outcrop
7" x 9 1/2"
Pan Pastels on white ClaireFontaine PastelMat

A month or two ago, I got some incredible review products from Colorfin LLC -- the five color Deep Dark Shades set of Pan Pastels to try and a small pad of ClaireFontaine PastelMat. I've written about both of these before -- but this time I put them together.

Wow. I love the PastelMat.
( Review of PastelMat and other art supplies ramble )
Soon, I go back to writing mode and begin editing Curse of Vaumuru. Somebody wish me some willpower!

• 05:48 Early run this morning... #
• 14:35 Going to practice pool...yay #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Ari. My cat is my best friend. He sleeps on my chest, he purrs me to sleep and slithers into my lap while I'm writing. We're that tight. I can't choose just one of my human friends as Best Friend more than the others, all of my closest human friends are that close and know who they are. So the cat gets the "best friend" title.

I'm starting to stress over it too much. I had a zero day yesterday. Or on the fourth, depending on how you look at it when I wrote the article that counted at one in the morning on the fifth.

I slept, a lot, around the clock. I read a Terry Pratchett novel without putting it down. I didn't do anything.

I needed to not do anything because I accomplished a whole lot at a heavy, immersive pace. I like that. I do well in that kind of thing. But I can't sustain it without actual deep breaks in between.

I also had five days in November where I got zero count. Not bad. Means the weather was half decent for it. Some years I get a lot more sick days than that.

I've been stressing too much about time and deadlines and everything I want to get done in December. Including some art goals, like finishing Estemmenosuchus and participating in the Pastel Strokes event that I'm hosting. Art days aren't always writing days. I can count on doing one thing in a day, whether it's a half hour thing or a ten or twelve hour thing depending on the day.

So trying to pace myself to any "every day" habit is a recipe for disaster. It only means sooner or later I will reach this point of exhaustion where I'd have to force it. I've done that sometimes at other times in my life and paid the price, sometimes for years as with the typesetting job.

Writing isn't something I can do like that, just showing up for it isn't enough. Instead, I need to get so much done on my good days that the days I lose don't matter, that overall I average more than a thousand words a day. Which I do. An easy sustainable chapter a day pace still gets me five thousand word days.

So I'm going to let that go in favor of returning to project-based goals.

If I don't manage to finish reading through Curse of Vaumuru in under 24 hours then it takes as long as it does. I'll keep going once I do, head into the new ending and get that done. But the thousand-word challenge actually interfered with that because I know I've taken longer than a day to reread my own fiction, especially when I may be line editing during the process. Sure, it could count. But it still choked me -- and if something isn't helping, I'd better stick with what works.

• 06:22 Yay! Snow! #
• 11:51 Got my new laptop today, woo hoo!!!! #
• 17:18 Drinking a Rogue Dead Guy Ale...want one? #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

2,759 words in the preceding LJ entry, answer to "Writer's Block" question. I copied it off and word counted it.

So that is decent public words, not a friends only entry, my blog is something I'm looking to improve. I feel good about that.

LOL -- a thousand words is never enough if I have something real to say.

Got diet candy once in high school, which you ate a piece twenty minutes before a meal to spoil appetite. It worked, along with dropping all carbs. I lost a lot of weight, about 50lb. I got thin, bony, sick and looked in the mirror to see that I didn't look any better bony than I had stocky, so gave it up and went back to eating.

( Thoughts on dieting, diet aids, television advertising and health )

Dawn at Outcrop on Mt. Petit Jean
Pan pastels on white PastelMat paper, work in progress, about 7" x 10"

Or something like that, I didn't measure the pad. It's the size of the small pad of PastelMat that I got to review and it isn't done. I think the sky is pretty much done, the rest of the landscape is just blocked in. I had fun with that but it's as far as I got.

Today was the wiped-out OMG my book is actually over feeling. December is on me. I need to get started reading Curse of Vaumuru to get going on it and wanted some time off in between. So call today my day off, it was a day for relaxing and playing with Pan Pastels and doing some cleanup after letting my table pile up with anything that wound up on it during November. Including lots of reference books.

I shelved lots of reference books today.

I also got my Amazon package with Terry Pratchett's latest, Unseen Academicals, in hardcover no less. About football, which is more like soccer crossed with rugby crossed with war (but without the consideration and general graciousness) when played Ankh-Morpork style. It's fun. What can I say, it's a Pratchett! A new one!

I was good and didn't buy a whole lot of art supplies so I get my Pratchett.

I can work hard again after I'm done devouring his latest wonderful looniness.

Greenwood Home, December Finish:
Nanovel Five 2009 End Count 65,415


There's the end of my fifth Nanovel.

Tomorrow I might write that horror story that crept in around the middle of this and wound up in an Ideafile, to have something to send out fast. Then plunge into Curse of Vaumuru and read it enough to keep on going and finish its new ending.

I got in a word war from 9pm to 1am and finished chapter 16 before it ended, so finished the book. Wow. Done. Not the greatest ending I've ever done but it's an ending -- and can get cleaned up a lot in the rewrite. These can be that rough. It's okay to write loose and sloppy and refine through successive edits.

Sight probably, though I would not ask for that condition at all since I live for writing, drawing, reading and so on -- it's all so visual. Horrifying thought considering that I've already got so many limits and disabilities to be stuck with more. I do use all my senses such as they are, hearing, smell are diminished compared to other people and touch includes a fair lot of pain. When my eyes get tired it scares me.

Greenwood Home, December Finish:
Nanovel Five 2009 End Count 65,415


Third day keeping up, battle didn't go as planned, things went well though. Don't know how much more plot there is, much sorting out to do.

I've got a scheduled Word War tonight so may get in a second chapter too, which would rock.

• 19:44 Still having cable issues, waiting on the cable guy, sigh... #
• 06:20 My kitten Cassie is just not getting the concept that my tubes of paint are not cat toys... #
• 17:36 Practicing pool...it's an addiction... #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Greenwood Home, December Finish:
Nanovel Five 2009 End Count 65,415


Okay, so this chapter was a lot more than a thousand words. I just have that for a minimum now to write or edit a thousand words for that challenge -- and report online. That's part of it too. Big part of it is having to post progress and admit it when I get zero days.

Today I am very proud because I got in the day's words before doing email or reading online or even going online. Go me.

My writing. There's no question about it after this Nanowrimo. I wrote four books complete and won with the fifth over 50,000, did two chapters on it since Nanowrimo ended, plan to submit my 2004 Nanowrimo Curse of Vaumuru this month. I found out again how much I love doing it and that it is the best thing for me to do with my life.

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

• 12:15 Check this video out -- Painting on blogTV 12 03 09 aprox 12:30 EST www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX2PaCLXa2g #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter