Living a Life I Don't Know How to Live

I have been trying to post more regularly, though it is hit or miss.

Last weekend, Jake came up to spend the weekend with me. It was the first time he's stayed in my new (but not actually new) place. Usually, if we spend the weekend together, it's down at his house, because Dad's down there and Jake's siblings and Oldest Nephew and our friends and often Kris and Neal are in town. Plus the Hawaiian restaurant we love (Island Style) is nearby. We've been hitting it up for great food, excellent company (the family that owns it has basically adopted us all, and they are delightful), and karaoke. Occasionally, I even sing, though mostly I just record and cheer on the others. (Oldest Nephew is freaking amazing. None of us had any idea he could sing like that.)

Anyway, Jake came up here. Sarah and I had a Skype session and writing time scheduled, as we almost always do on Saturdays, and while we worked, he organized my apartment for me. It was AWESOME. He sorted out the boxes, put away the ones I want to keep, took the rest out to be picked up, moved stuff around, set up my kitchen, including my new blender, repotted plants, but in new daylight LED bulbs where I read and write, helped me unload my car -- all in all, just made the apartment cozier. Plus awhile back, Kris picked up a bunch of art supplies and storage for me, and I finally sorted everything into the boxes and have all that set up. I still haven't purchased my living room seating, but the apartment is coming together nicely.

One of the things he did was move these two small bookcases I have. I was using one for my Get Rid Of Somehow Books. Now I'm starting to fill that one a second time, and the other one is being used as my To Read bookcase. I, uh, have more books to read than I thought. There was a point in time when I'd read every book I owned. Not anymore. I need to put some sort of limit on my book buying until I read some of them. At least the physical copies.

I'm up to more than 100 days of consecutive writing. I've also given up soda, and have replaced the fizzy drink with sparkling mineral water (sometimes mixed with flavored tea).

Apart from the organizing and writing, we had some good meals, bought a ton of groceries for me, and went to see Pacific Rim at my new favorite theater. (It has a bar! And red leather recliners! And is generally AWESOME.) I enjoyed the movie a lot, actually, though I would have rather it not been such a white guy movie. I wish some of the characters had been swapped out for men and women of color. It was a fun summer blockbuster full of explosions and pretty monsters and I absolutely loved both Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi. Charlie Hunnam was fun too, though he was fairly Jax-like to me in the role.

I have managed to do some reading lately, and I should do a post in the near future over books I've read and really enjoyed, because there have been quite a few.

Today I had a Skype session with Sarah, during which we finished our current edit of Woods. Now we each have a few more scenes to write, and I am still working on some of the description. It's almost ready to go out to first readers, though. Exciting. Tomorrow we're going to have another call. We may finish the outline for our next project then, so we can get started on writing something new soon. I then finished organizing art supplies, did some more sorting of books, and am sitting down to do more writing. I was going to cook a roast later, using a Kris recipe, but I'm still full from brunch (biscuits and gravy for the win!) and will probably just eat some fruit later. Tomorrow I'll make a roast, though. And some sort of chicken casserole thing.

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ETA Lovecraftian Shenanigans cowriter just messaged me with this blurb for it (complete with DRAMATIC MOVIE ANNOUNCER VOICE!): In a WORLD where HOT DUDES have TENTACLES, WATCH OUT for NUZZLING RAT-MONSTERS!

Bwahaha. And now I can vent to her about this ableist thing I just read instead of blowing up online or being up half the night sitting on my hands so I won't blow up online.

So it's been almost two years since I regularly updated the monthly project updates, but it is time to start them again, because I get a lot more done when I keep track of my writing in a variety of ways.

This month, I thought I'd kick it off with a fun thing, too. When I’m in traffic, to entertain myself, once in awhile I'll come up with blurbs for my fiction writing projects. (I create them for my nonfiction writing projects, too, but mostly those are confidential, so I can’t really talk about them even if you were interested in legal writing projects.) I even say them aloud in a DRAMATIC MOVIE ANNOUNCER voice, sometimes.

(Sometimes the music is up too loud for that.)

So for this month's project update, I thought I'd include some of the recent blurbs. I recommend giving them your own DRAMATIC MOVIE ANNOUNCER voice.

( Monthly Project Update )

So what are you working on right now?

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.org with comments. Read the original post there. Comment here or there using OpenID.