My life, which is not terribly interesting why are you reading this blog?

I’m still around! Exams, you know. Terrible things.

What I’m up to:

Spiderwebs

I’ve got a good 2k and change written so far, plus some scribblings in my notebook that are only half coherent because I was sick and also on jury duty (fun times, let me tell you). The plan going forward is:

• Finish scene 2 this weekend
• Write the rest of this bugger
• One final pass for all the bits I left in brackets instead of writing
• I inflict my Masterpiece upon those unfortunate enough to want to read it
• And then I suppose I edit
• And then perhaps I shall serialize it on the blog

Princess

Poking along, very very slowly. I think I’m having perfectionist fears with this one. I have to keep telling myself I’ll never become a better writer if I don’t practice. Silly me.

The Blog

It’s summer! So in theory I have time to update this thing. In practice, not so much, but I’ll give it a shot. Coming soon to a post near you:

• Why I keep reading (and disliking) Holly Lisle books
• Indie Author spotlight: MCA Hogarth
• Updates on my writing, assuming I actually put hands to the keyboard and write something
• At least one more installment of Black Swans (hopefuly more)
• I don’t know? You tell me. What do you want to see here?

Real Life

MCATs, Jury Duty, BookCon, running around the city with my camera and a roll of film, cleaning the house. Some good things, some bad. The usual.

In which I bribe myself with stickers

I’m a little late with this one, sorry.

I’ve been having trouble with Princess lately. That is, I haven’t been writing as much as I wanted to. (Also haven’t been updating, whoops).

The problem isn’t that I don’t enjoy the project, or don’t enjoy writing. I do. I’m thinking that maybe it’s not as good as the Princess I saw in my head, but that’s something I always think, so best just to ignore it and press on.

What is happening is that I’m coming up with lots of fantastic reasons why I don’t have time to write right now. Which is silly, because of course I could make time. Do I really need to reorganize my closet right now? Nope.

So what’s the solution? Bribe myself with stickers.

Every day I write, I get a sticker. When I have 10 stickers, I get a prize. When I have 25 stickers, bigger prize. Then 50, then 75, and so on and so forth. Mostly the prizes consist of allowing myself to buy things I’ve been wanting. At the moment those things are mostly items of clothing, because I really don’t have room to buy lots of books and my TBR pile is out of control anyway. And the other things I want cost far too much to use as prizes.

We’ll see how this goes. It’s a bit juvenile but I think I just need an extra push to get going. Once I’m in the habit of writing every day, it will go easier. I hope.

Say Hello to My Little Friend

Something fun for a Friday.

While procrastinating I decided I wanted to sketch the protagonist of my Saucy Ink story, Miri. With the disclaimer that this is just a sketchy sketch, I am not an artist and don’t art frequently, and her neck is too long, here she is:

 

When I Grow Up

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that I’m twenty and not really a child anymore and maybe I should learn how to do some Grown Up Things.

I mean, I’m going to be in school for a billion more years. But after college, I might be in school somewhere other than New York, and my mother won’t be there to fix everything. So, you know, time to suck it up and act my age. At least sometimes.

Some of the things which fall under the category of Grown Up Things:

-Doing my own laundry
-Going to the bank; maintaining my own checking account
– Keeping my room clean and organized-ish
-Procrastinating less (this is going to be the hardest one)
-Taking more care with my appearance (including good posture)
-Maintain a schedule/planner/to do list so I don’t  forget about things
-Feeding myself

I already do a few of those – like go to the bank and use a planner – and I’m working on others – like procrastinating and keeping my room clean and being more thoughtful with my clothing choices.

Next up on the list? Laundry, which I have a great fear of.

Also? Food. I want to learn to cook. (And also to expand my food horizons and be less picky.)

Honestly I like to bake a lot better but I can’t survive entirely off cupcakes and brownies and cookies. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t be pretty. So I’m working on finding some good recipes, and practicing cooking, and stuff like that. I’ll share if I have any particularly tasty successes or  particularly spectacular failures. In baking or cooking.

I probably won’t share anything about laundry. Too boring.

LOOK HOW PRETTY THE BLOG IS

I finally got around to updating it! I like the background, though I may change it to something more book related. Or not.

I will also, in the fairly near future, be updating the blogroll/website list so that they are not years out of date. And small and sad and lonely.

Also the reading list, although I’m a bit scared of that one…there’s a huge backlog and I seriously doubt I remember everything I read. Then again, do you really care to know every single book I’ve ever read? Whatever, that part is mostly for me anyway 🙂

And of course there will be a post with actual content coming your way soon. Just as soon as I finish the mountains of work I am currently procrastinating on.

A few orders of business

Okay so obviously I got the progress bars to work. A very kind fellow blogger allowed me to copy her code, which I did. I changed the color, but that’s about it. I may change the font if I can figure out what other font I want. If anyone is interested, they are welcome to copy the code from here. Or, I gather that it was originally a WordPress widget.

I’m also going to schedule the rest of the Marvin posts to run on Wednesday – a cute little pick-me-up for hump day. When I get to that – the photos are hiding on my computer.

Hopefully later today I will have a writing-related tidbit to offer you.

I Sold My Soul and Got a Twitter

It’s in the sidebar. Great, now there’s another way for the internet to suck me into a time wasting black hole. I AM ALREADY A HORRIBLE PROCRASTINATOR THIS IS NOT HELPING.

In other news, Lioness has a new page. It’s not very interesting at the moment, as NaNo hasn’t started yet. Maybe I’ll put up some of the pretty world building pictures soon?

The opening scene. Although the gladiator would be a girl.

I’m Pregnant…With Cheescake

Didn’t really do much work on the novel today, mostly because I went to the beach and then the Cheesecake Factory – I am SO full now…

Harry Potter’s on hold because Hermione is much slower than I am.

As for the pages, I realize that my last post was not terribly clear. What I mean, if you weren’t sure, is that I’m going to have a separate page for each project I’m working on, up at the top where right now you see “home” and “codenames”. Like (I think) I said before, the pages will have summaries, character lists, maybe excerpts, word counts and updates, etc.

And the last totally random thing I have to say is that I found a link to this series of posts while fooling around on the NaNo forums and they’re really interesting and are renewing my interest in my fantasy which is currently on the backburner…

I Enjoy Making Lists

1. I love iTunes 69c songs
2. I’m going to do JulNo
3. I really, REALLY have to pack for Boston
4.My writing notebook looks really cool now that it’s covered in my nametags

Damn Those Monkeys!

As is typical for me, I didn’t do any of the things today that I meant to do. Not that I wasn’t productive – I did a lot of cleaning – but I didn’t do anything that I had previously planned to do. It was productive procrastination.

In cleaning out under my bed, I came across a lot of old notebooks from middle school and high school. In pretty much every single one of those notebooks was a bit of writing, from one line to a few paragraphs. Like I said before, I start but never finish.

There were a couple of good things in there, actually! One line in particular has stuck with me:

“…cursing all small monkeys masquerading as humans with wicked humor.”

Not bad for middle school, huh?

In other news, I went to my first roller derby last night. Rat’s been into it for a while (read: obsessed and won’t shut up about it) and so I finally went with her. To my surprise, I enjoyed myself! It’s very exciting. And there’s just the right about of violence for it to be interesting (less that football and hockey, but more than, I don’t know, soccer?).

So it was a good night, aside from the fact that I left my ticket at home and had to go all the way back to get it…