scribblings from a crazed author's life
Even if I woke up late and missed the 9:30 ferry. I can still catch the next one and will be leaving shortly.
It’s a long trip and I don’t expect I’ll have the energy to blog when I get home, so I’ll see y’all tomorrow.
In the meantime, here’s a picture of a fire. My mom built this up. She’s good at fire-tending.
Whoops. Here’s a picture of a dog!
But I slept until 3pm, so that did not happen. (Too late to catch a ferry and actually make it home today.)
I don’t have much to write about today, and I’m very tired with packing up the car. So here’s another picture of my dog, being cute. (He’s upset, because he knows I’m leaving, so he’s curling up on my bed and looking cute in an effort to make me stay.)
The habit comes from me; the discipline comes from my own head — the part that’s not trying to constantly sabotage anything good in my life.
I broke the chain. I didn’t write yesterday.
I thought I might have some energy to pound out 411 words when I got to my mom’s place — perhaps not in blogging, but in something countable at least. A short bit of crappy fiction, a poem about my day, or a blog post for Monday morning that I could edit when I woke up. Maybe I’d even reach 750 words!
This did not happen. Yesterday was a day full of travel and it was a pretty shitty day on top of that. My car was too full for me to nap in the back seat on the ferry rides, as I usually do, so I was awake the full trip. By the time I reached my mom’s house, I’d been up for 13 hours. My brain was fried. I was ready to sleep right then but I forced myself to stay up, because I knew if I went to bed too early I’d wake up at 2am and be unable to get back to sleep.
Something similar had already happened on Sunday, even though I’d gone to bed late. I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t seem to get back into slumber, to wake up when my alarm was set (6:30). I sighed and got out of bed and started to finish doing the laundry. I thought, briefly to myself, that maybe I should sit down and write my 411 words right then. I decided against it, thinking laundry and packing the car were higher priorities.
The thing is, I was only half right. Packing the car was a higher priority if I wanted to make a morning ferry, but I had 2 extra hours during which I mainly folded and hung up clothes. That wasn’t a priority — I didn’t get the house as clean as I was planning, so a little bit of extra mess in the form of clean clothes sitting on the couch wouldn’t really matter, in the long run. I could have stopped at sorting and then sat down to do my words.
I let my brain get the better of me in convincing me I didn’t need to do my daily words just then, and I ended up with a wordless day.
I suppose I could have sat down when I got to mom’s place and pounded out 750 words of nonsense on 750words.com, getting my count in and not breaking the streak, the chain. But that’s not the point of writing every day.
The point is to write something of substance. If the point were to just get the streak badges on 750words, or to pad my yearly wordcount, then I could just copy past several paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum and call it a day.
The point is to form a daily writing habit. 750words.com, Don’t Break the Chain, Get Your Words Out, Inking It Out, the spreadsheets those communities provide — these are tools to keep me on track. They are not the habit itself. The habit comes from me; the discipline comes from my own head — the part that’s not trying to constantly sabotage anything good in my life.
I let the saboteur win yesterday, and I regret it. I’m not repeating that mistake. Let January 5th, 2014, be the only day this year where I do not sit down to write something.
Often I need to hit a point that’s just below overwhelm to actually accomplish things; if I have too little to do, I procrastinate, and if I have too much, I escape from the stress by doing anything except what I’m supposed to.
I feel as if I’m simultaneously taking on too much and not enough at the same time. It’s an odd sensation.
On the one hand, I’ve been incredibly productive since the year began. On the other, I’ve noticed my tendency to get distracted is in full swing. Often I need to hit a point that’s just below overwhelm to actually accomplish things; if I have too little to do, I procrastinate, and if I have too much, I escape from the stress by doing anything except what I’m supposed to.
I cleared up some necessary things in the first few days of the year, striking them off my to-do list. Right now I’m looking at trying to finish cleaning my house so I can go visit my mom in Powell River. Yes, it needs to be spotless before I leave. Is it? Not remotely.
I worked as hard as I could yesterday doing this, as well as several other necessary things. (For example, writing every day — while a pleasure for me — is a necessary item. I view it as something I may not skip out on. Thus, I sat down to start a story and maybe write 750 words yesterday, and ended up penning just over 3,000. This morning I finished the story with another 1,144. It’s fantastic that I’m going so far over my word count goal, putting me far ahead of my current YTD goal for both Get Your Words Out and Inking It Out, but I need to reel it in a bit — if I expend too much of my momentum in one day, I often think to myself I can skip the next day. The point is to build up a steady habit of writing, not continue in the cycle of boom and bust.)
I think I’m just way too tired, physically, today. When I woke up this morning I could barely make it to the kitchen to get the coffee I so obviously needed. And my body did that thing it likes to do, again, where I went to bed at 10 pm so it woke me up at 3am for no particular reason. Luckily I was able to fall asleep again, but I slept in — instead of waking up at 5:30, I woke up at 6:45.
So I’m working on cleaning as fast as I can, but trying not to overtax myself. I’m having a big breakfast and moving as my back allows. I still have hopes of leaving by noon, which will put me at my mom’s place sometime in the early evening, depending on the ferry.
Here’s to continuing productivity, even if I would have rather stayed in bed a bit longer. Every day in every way, I chip away at my undisciplined self, reaching the productive adult I know lies somewhere within. Deep, deep within.
It just has not been edited yet, because I have been set back on EVERYTHING because of Stranger Skies edits/proof-making. I haven’t even worked on my Nano for several days.
I would like to say I’ll be getting to it this weekend, but I won’t. This weekend is for relaxing at the Ogre’s. I am terribly sorry, but I am also unapologetic of the fact that I need time to recoup spoons. I am so tired you guys. You don’t even know. I have been up for 20 hours right now. I am so tired.
In the meantime, my humorous short story The Sleep Avenger is available for free on Kindle, today and tomorrow. Go pick it up, read it, have a laugh. I’ll see y’all on Monday evening.
zzzzzzzzz
Note: this post was originally written at the beginning of May. I forgot to push “publish”. Tense has been edited to make more sense to it being published now.
I honestly would probably be perfectly fine with a bridge from Vancouver to Vancouver Island.
It’s not that I don’t like boat rides. The ferry itself has done nothing to annoy me.
It’s the company that runs the boats that go between the islands.
They’ve raised the prices again. Now instead of $14.85 for a walk-on ticket, it’s $15.56. Every week from the beginning of May until June 17th, I spent over 30 dollars just to ride a boat back and forth.
Well, maybe they need to raise their prices so they can give you better services! you say, if you’ve never had to deal with BC Ferries in your life.
What services? The hard seats that squeak when you sit down? The overpriced gift store? The cafeteria of food poisoning roulette, now only 16 bucks for a portion size that wouldn’t fill up a mouse’s stomach? The decided lack of wi-fi (“coming soon, no, really, we promise”)?
Nope, raised ticket prices go one place, and one place only: to pad the salaries of the head honchos.
This is what privatizing essential services does. This is capitalism in action.
When I went to Spring Mysteries Fest this year on Easter weekend, we had to take a Washington State Ferry to get to the festival. (Theoretically we could have skipped the ferry and driven south all the way to Olympia before heading north again, but who would want to do that?)
I nearly had a heart attack when they asked me for the fare. I had 3 people in my car. It cost us under 20 dollars for all of us and the vehicle. I was sure I was dreaming; I’d dozed off while in the lineup and my brain was making up crazy scenarios to try and wake me up.
Nope. Really only cost about 16 bucks.
4 people plus a car on BC Ferries costs well over a hundred dollars.
Something’s wrong with this picture. Hint: it’s north of the border.
So BC Ferries rolled out the Experience Card, to try and give us hardworking British Columbians a bit of a discount. Except that the card is available for anyone, resident or not, and it’s not applicable for all routes. When I asked why I didn’t get a discount for using my card travelling between Nanaimo and Vancouver, the employee working the ticket booth told me it was because there wasn’t anything in Vancouver that I couldn’t get on the Island.
Ikea, sex shops, and hospitals that don’t misdiagnose you, give you a concussion, and discharge you don’t apparently count.
So a bridge across the Salish Sea would be okay by me. Especially a Skytrain bridge. I could have taken transit to my last class at VIU this summer, or easily visit my friends in Nanaimo anytime I want.
And I wouldn’t have to deal with quite so many screaming hellspawn.
-Kat