I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII quite a bit lately trying to relax. I had to restart the game almost, from about ten hours in, which is rough as I was over a hundred hours in.

Hubbie is recovering fairly well. He’s still in a lot of pain, but he’s recovering well, and is able to eat solid food.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is writing quite a bit. I started a new FanFiction.net account: at this place so that I can re-write and edit my work without as much issue as I was having, and that’s going well. I’ve already re-submitted several pieces and they’re getting some hits, and I’ve been receiving some encouragement from reviewers, which is nice.

I had a flat tire over the weekend but was able to get it patched yesterday and didn’t have to replace the whole tire. My mechanic told me that in another 2000 miles they’ll rotate my tires again and then I should have another 10000 or so before I have to replace them, so that’s good to know as that’s going to be about $300-$350 to replace all the tires.

Today I have therapy, we’re doing weekly appointments now. I have to drive to a different office this week, but it’s only about fifteen minutes from my friend who is babysitting’s house, so that’s going to work out fairly well.

I’m very happy that my yin for writing is actually coming back. I’ve written a few short poems over the past week or so which is more than I’ve written since November and it’s not forced out for once it just flows, so that’s nice. Hopefully I can press that forward into some thing more because I have an article due for tarot world magazine in about a week. I have the outline written I’m just waiting for someone to get back to me with some information, and I’m thinking I should be able to start putting the bones of the article together over the outline and just fill in some more information when I get the other interview back.
What did we ever do before the internet??

I’m going to do a small writing exercise, fictional, writing from the perspective of our new cat and see what comes from there also. I figure if I start writing just some random short exercises it’ll do me some good before I try to plunge back into any of the ongoing novels I have going. I may need to try and outline and re-write some of those from scratch. I tend to suffer from not being able to clearly see where they’re going when I start.

I got my copy of the magazine that I’ve been published in today. It’s so exciting to finally see my work in print.

I have another article in process that will be published in the second issue of Tarot World Magazine, and my third one is due in April. I’m just trying to narrow down my topic so that I can start putting hands to keyboard for that one.

By that I mean, before I get disconnected. I’m trying not to be so post-floody, but I also pride myself on getting my work done. I hope that things I’m writing are at least marginally entertaining, given I have writer’s block again on this article I’m writing for Tarot World Mag I thought I’d attempt to write something else in the hopes of proving to myself that there are words in me and they’re not all curse words along the lines of, “I know I just had some bleeping way to go with this why as soon as I got back to the computer has it gone a-bleeping-way?!”

It’s times like this I miss the laptop. I could have had the laptop right by me at the box I was working on and as soon as the words came into my head turned and typed them down rather than having them apparently get shaken out of my ear as I zipped across the apartment to the computer to write them down. Hopefully this means there are some better words that will come out in a few minutes.

I’m finding it quite humorous that today they’ve finally fixed the gate here at this apartment complex. It’s been broken for five months or thereabouts and today it’s working again, two weeks before we leave. There are just so many things about this place I’m not going to miss. I will miss the ellipticals at the gym, and the pool but that’s about it. The noisy neighbors, the abusive neighbors, the people who leave beer bottles all over the apartment grounds for my son to find…not going to miss any of them that’s for sure.

The cursor was accusatory. It had been content to move across the page slightly ahead of the trial of letters, but now it was stationary, so it winked and winked and winked at the writer demanding to fulfill it’s purpose, but alas she was unable to comply.

For the writer’s muse, it had left. She’d thought perhaps it had just gone to get coffee, but now it had been two days, and the words they would not come. It seemed the muse had gone all the way to Columbia for the coffee, if she tried, the writer could faintly make out some of the tale dangling behind the muse as she had left, and force some words onto the screen, but they were horribly distorted and not helping at all.

****

I’m stuck. At the moment I’m just over 2000 words behind the target for being “on track” I know we’re not that far in, but it’s still frustrating. I haven’t completely written nothing today or yesterday, but I’ve done maybe three hundred words over the past two days, if I’m lucky.

Hopefully I’ll get out of this slump soon. I’m doing well with NaBloPoMo though. I’ve done at least one, in some cases two, posts per day on my other blog, however NaNo…the only contribution I’ve made towards Sanctity really over the past few days, is making an imvu avatar which looks a lot like Abigail one of the characters.

I mentioned a while ago that I was accepted as a columnist for Tarot World Magazine, I write the Business of Tarot column there.

Well, I just found out that my first article was green-lighted. So, much relief there. It will be published in the premier issue of the magazine which is out on January 2008! My second column idea has also been given the go ahead. Great relief! I was nervous that I would be told that I sucked as a writer and should give up and go away, but the editor loved it! She said it was “amazing!”

I broke 6K just barely, but I’m still a bit ahead of the game, which is good. I got a little stuck this morning, and haven’t had much time to write since the first day, but I got a good head start that day because I had a feeling things would be tight over this weekend. I’m a good way into the second chapter though so that’s nice, although I’m sure when I actually go back through and re-read there are going to be some parts that really suck.

But the main point of this is that I’ll have the ideas out and have written more consistently on ‘Sanctity’ than I have in the other drafts and snippets that I have dotted around the hard drive.

I was trying to leave you guys with a portion of Chapter One where Hajime was emailing back and forth with her friend Abigail, but for some reason whenever I copy-paste the text into the entry and then try to save or publish I get a 404-error. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ll try and post it as a separate page and link to it see how that goes.

I’ve set up a page on the blog for updating about NaNo a lot. You can access it from the header of the blog. I managed to surge ahead a bit yesterday writing just over 4000 words. The average to beat NaNo on time is to write about 16-1700 per day. I’m not sure if I can keep that pace up, but it’s best to get ahead as soon as possible so that you can allow for days you might not be able to write so much because of Thanksgiving, or in my case the fact that a lot of the weekend may be taken up by gaming or coffee shop visits and things like that.

Other than that yesterday was fairly uneventful. I took the munchkin to the play park for a little bit, and tried to work out, but was foiled by the fact that the munchkin decided playing in the toy room was less fun than trying to climb up on the exercise equipment with me.

I did the winner of Free on the Fours reading, and put up the new sign up for the latest contest which will be drawn on Sunday, if it actually has sign-up. I may have to rework things a little and see if I can’t improve the way that things are done.

So, I have opted to go with Sanctity as my novel for this years NaNo. Last night I had decided I would work on the other because it’s been on the cards longer, but this morning I was struggling at barely 300 words after two hours of on and off attempts. I figured it’s the first day I’ll put that on hold and see what I can come up with for Sanctity instead, and within a half an hour have almost 800 words, so I think that is the one I’m going to go with.

NaNo is about just rattling things out, putting the words and the ideas out there, and pressing forward, if I’m already butting heads with the text that’s not the way to start. So, I will continue on and off for the rest of the day and see what happens.

I won’t be posting everything I write for Sanctity. I have a few people that I will probably let see more things as it goes on, but on here I will just post snippets here and there, and perhaps a few sections as short stories will go up on my portfolio later on.

For now here is the first portion of Sanctity as a taste.

Even though they’d been at the police station all night giving miraculously similar testimony, or excuses, depending on which way you looked at it, and the fire department had been working tirelessly the whole time, the fire was still there. They had beaten it back, and the building seemed as though it might still be usable after everything finally died out, of course there was the crime scene factor on top of that.
Dan wasn’t sure he’d ever want to set foot in there again, which might be problematic if they did open back up as art was a big part of his major and it was the main art studio on campus. It would all come out in the wash. There was still the issue that his head might explode, so maybe none of it would matter. He was walking back towards the apartment building. He hadn’t seen head nor pointy forked tail of Leela since the night before, or any of her cronies either, so he was clinging to the hope that they wouldn’t be anywhere near the place, and he could go in, get his stuff and sort something else out, provided they hadn’t burned it all out of spite. He could see the burnt husk of the car in his mind, everything smelling sour and hissing still. The cops and fire department going, “Oh, wow, Mr. Isthmay imagine seeing you again so soon. Are you sure there isn’t something you’d like to tell us?” but as he rounded the corner of the street there were no lights or sirens, no gawking neighbors.
It was so quiet that he stopped and back-tracked a few paces to double check the street sign, and then read it twice, just to make sure. He stopped short of getting out his wallet to double-check his driver’s license. His brain still hadn’t finished putting itself back together after the past few days, and he wouldn’t put it passed the universe to shunt him over into a parallel reality in the mean time.

He was on his third trip down the stairs to the car when the universe pulled a hat trick. The trunk of the car was open, as was the back seat. He was piling clothes into garbage bags and what few boxes he could find he was filling with everything else. In the mean time he was just stacking certain things in the trunk, and going for the essentials first, computer, important papers, certain DVDs. So, that if anyone showed up he could just slam things closed and drive off, and hope that no one hit him with a fireball in the mean time.
His hand shifted on the keys when he saw movement. It was that point in the horror movie where it turned out to just be the cat, right? The black guy usually dies in the horror movie. Shut up, brain. Hopefully he would get a reprieve from that being a non-American black man?
“You’re not going to die yet,” she said, shifting position on the hood of the car so that she was out of the glare from the sun and he could make out that it was not in fact Leela or any of her cronies, but the one who had rescued him, after a fashion. He knew he’d been told her name several times, but what it actually was escaped him. She twisted her mouth into something of a smile as she flipped a replacement cigarette out of the black and white packet and then the something of a smile vanished again as she lit one cigarette off the remains of the other.
“Not comforting,” he pointed out, moving down the remaining four steps and going past her to deposit his things in the trunk, “and how the hell did you find me?”
“Hell had nothing to do with it,” another hit and run smile. She stubbed the finished cigarette out on the sole of the combat boot and flicked it neatly over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
“And I’m supposed to believe that considering the events of the past wee—month, whatever?”
“Believe what you want,” she answered.

Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, and I’m also signed up for NaBloPoMo as well.

I’m going to do the Blog Writing on BeyondMirrors.net so that I get more content on that place, and start keeping up with it.

I’m still not sure which story I’m going to do for NaNoWriMo though. I have decided NOT to continue Dark London at the moment. The version of it I won NaNo with last year…I never went through and edited, tweaked, corrected or anything on it, so it’s in this horrendous state of disrepair and needs much work before being continued.

So, my choices are:

Can’t Cry For Yesterday
Science Fiction. A terrestrial world with two distinctly separated cultures, one polytheistic, one monotheistic live together in a delicate harmony on a planet several galaxies away, after a chance encounter with the ship Condor from the Alliance they begin to war against each other. Kerem struggles to look after her younger sisters and younger brother, while her older brothers and boyfriend are on the front lines, hoping to find news of her parents who were taken as political prisoners.

and Sanctity.
Fantasy. Hajime starts at St. Aurous College only to discover that her school literally is a portal to Hell. There are ghosts living in her closet, and a group of other students fighting a war over opening the gateway, are they really angels and demons? and who keeps talking to her and calling her “brother”?

Okay, so those are my choices. I need to sort this out before tomorrow otherwise I’m going to be way behind before I even start.