Tag: writing

NaNoWriMo Update

November 28, 2020 3 of 8

It’s 6:27 pm on November 28, and I’m not even to 30,000 words yet. I think this is definitely a personal best for me, as the last time I registered at the website, I only got in the 15,000s, but I’m not going to make it to 50,000.

I also have 16 scheduled unposted posts. I was scheduling them out a week, and then for some reason, I did several days of scheduling for November 30. So I just spent half an hour straightening out my future schedule. I think they’re technically out of order, but I’m pretty sure that I have Alex’s suspected COVID case (his test was negative) in order, so there’s that.

Now since I have 16 unposted posts, I’m too far ahead to schedule them for a week out without messing up my schedule, so I’m scheduling them for Christmas now. This is scheduled for 1 am on Christmas. I’ll go in later and move it to the . . . 8th, I think?

I was also going to start socializing with the other WriMos, but that never worked out either. Variable work schedule, stress from Alex moving out this month, COVID, Thanksgiving. Yeah.

I think that writing a bunch of posts in a row and scheduling them ahead of time will work pretty well, though. I don’t think I can do an unofficial NaNoWriMo in December or January, but February might work. I may have to go back in and spread my scheduled posts out to one a day or one every other day to fill in the blanks of December and January, though.

Now for our Gratuitous Amazon Link. We’re back to Discworld today with Reaper Man, a book featuring Death.

I Really Need to Stop Procrastinating

November 12, 2020 1 of 8

Although what I’m doing while procrastinating is kind of helpful for the long haul, I need to literally and figuratively get off my butt and do something more immediately productive.

I’ve basically spent the whole day reading comic books so that I can fill in those blanks in my Goodreads page.

Meanwhile, one of my friends has a sick dog and her paycheck was short this month, so I’ve just offered to spot her some money so she can take him to the vet.

Additionally, back in 2018, I found a pair of sandals I really loved (Earth Origins Nellie) and so I bought a bunch of them. By the time I found out that I was going to love them, the local DSW was sold out, so I had to scrounge what I could online. I ended up with one pair of black (the one I got at DSW), and one pair each blue, red, and brown. I wore the blue ones until they were just about worn out and the red ones until they were completely worn out. That means I wore the red ones for running around the house and things for a year or thereabouts. So the insole finally completely fell apart last night and so I’m changing to the brown ones.

Since I’m used to the sandals being red, every time I look at the brown ones I feel like my eyes’ color balance is off. It’s very disconcerting.

Since I realized how old these shoes are, I decided to see if I could still get them. I was very, very surprised to see that I actually still can. I honestly thought that my current pair was the last pair in the world. The store at Amazon.com has both black and white in my size, so I’m getting three black and two white. That should hold me until, well, if they last as long as the ones I got in 2018 did, 2022?

Boy, that added up fast. But for two years’ worth of comfortable sandals? I think it’ll be worth it.

I had to go back and look over all of my soon-to-be posted posts to see if I can figure out where I left off on Gratuitous Amazon Links. It looks like I was on the first Squirrel Girl compilation so, I bring you: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 2: Squirrel You Know It’s True, by Ryan North, Dan Slott, Erica Henderson, Matt Haley, Kieron Dwyer, and Ty Templeton

One of these days I need to go back through my Gratuitous Amazon Links and make sure that they are still good and that they lead to the books that I’m intending them to. That day will not be today, because I’m trying to focus on writing. Maybe I’ll do NaNoEdMo this March and do it then.

I Had So Many Writing Ideas . . .

November 9, 2020 2 of 8

Earlier when I was walking, I was, “When I get home, I’m going to write about this, and about that, and . . . .”

And then I got home and it all disappeared.

I was going to write about the recipe I invented by accident, but I’ve pretty much been writing about cooking while making the dish itself. I just texted Alex to see if he wants to have dinner tomorrow. If so, I’ll see if he wants that dish. If not, maybe I’ll stop and get chicken tenderloins on the way home and make it tomorrow night anyhow.

Oh, I was going to post about the weird dream I had last night. It was weird enough that maybe it could make a post of its own.

I also need to post about the two parks I went to yesterday.

As I said, I went for a long walk today. I think I’ve already posted about my greenway picture-taking project. Evelyn and I are looking for shady places to take the dogs for walks, and so I’m taking pictures every 10 minutes while I walk and am going to make movies of them so we can get an idea of which trails/parks are the shadiest. I’m up to 11 photos (the greenways are out-and-back, and I don’t take pictures on the way back. So 11 photos is 3.67 hours of walking.

Oh, and I’m working on my last? Next-to-last? hour of continuing education for my pharmacy technician registration. I need to knock those out tonight so I can get that together.

Since I’m on a Ms. Marvel roll with my Gratuitous Amazon Links, next up is Mecca, by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona. Technically, this should have come before the one I used for my first post today, but since there’s no continuity here, I don’t think it’ll matter.

Home from My Errands

November 2, 2020 4 of 8

I went to the seamstress’s shop and dropped off my purse. I’m getting a new lining with the internal pocket and everything for a very good price. I hope her work is as good as it looks like because I will promote her services to all and sundry if it is.

Then I went for a walk and played Pokemon Go for a couple of hours. I also started a new (slightly imperfectly implemented) project. As I think I mentioned earlier, when Evelyn and I went walking with the dogs this summer, it was hot. Like hot-hot. Like “surface of the sun” hot. And the dogs weren’t fans.

So we’ve been looking for the most shady paths to take. It’s all pretty subjective, though. I mean, “Hey, that place we went walking last week was pretty shady.” So we go there and it takes X amount of walking in the sunshine to *get* to the shady place.

After I dropped off my purse, I hit the Leon Creek Greenway. While I was walking, I took a picture every 10-ish minutes (I missed one and took it three minutes late, so the picture before that was 13 minutes before and the next one was 6 minutes after). I stopped right after my sixth picture and the next time I have time to walk on the greenway (mid-November, probably), I’ll start from where I took that picture and then take pictures every 10 minutes.

This was the most shade I photographed on this outing. We’ll see what happens in future trips.

Then I’ll do the same thing on the Salado Creek Greenway and make movies of each greenway and see which areas of each seem to have more shade and next summer (if there is a next summer), Evelyn and I will take the dogs here.

Now, as I said, this is imperfectly implemented. Ideally, I’d take these pictures from, like 11 am to 1 pm or something, but I enjoy having a job. I don’t have the time to visit the greenway every day during that two hours in order to get a perfect view.

So, the shadows will be longer in some pictures and shorter in others. Maybe if my dad wins the lottery, I can buy a drone and zip the drone down a greenway at noon on a weekday during the summer when there aren’t many people on it and get one perfect shot of exactly what the shade on the greenways look like at noon.

But for now, as long as I’m doing this with shoe leather and a cell phone camera, we’ll get what we get.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time, we have The Authenticity Project, by Claire Pooley. Julian Jessop, a fairly well-known artist, decides that most of our problems stem from an inability to be honest about our true selves. So he writes his truth in a notebook and leaves it in a coffee shop, inviting the person who finds it to do the same and leave it somewhere else. In the course of the book, six people find the book, and then they find each other and their lives become more intertwined. I really enjoyed this one and hope that by putting this here, someone else will also find it and enjoy it like I did. This is the Kindle edition.

Writers’ Block

November 1, 2020 3 of 8

So I just had a long conversation with Evelyn and came up with a number of things to write about. And now I can’t remember one of them.

So here’s my list of topics:

  1. travel
  2. writing
  3. reading
  4. crafts
  5. “content creators” (i.e. YouTubers, podcasts, etc.)
  6. medicine (I’m a medical librarian, after all).
  7. adventures in cooking
  8. walking
  9. pets
  10. games
  11. languages
  12. childhood trauma (because why not)

This looks like a good place to start. I can pick eight of these every day (I don’t know if I’m going to really go into my childhood demons or not here in public. But God knows it’d be a fertile topic. I could ramble about that for pages.

This list is just off the top of my head. In future posts I may take this list and rank them from most to least useful. Or maybe I’ll just randomly choose one based on my mood. We’ll see what happens as the month progresses.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Using my latest idea, to go in reverse chronological order through my Goodreads list, next up is The Tower of Nero, the most recent book in the series (is there a term for a series of series?) that Rick Riordan started with The Lightning Thief. I’m never sure if I should do this as a Kindle edition or hard copy. I opted for Kindle this time. If I ever get a critical mass of readers who do buy these books, I’ll crunch the numbers and see which goes over better then edit as necessary.

Warmup Post NaNoWriMo 2020

11/1/20 1 of 8

I don’t know how long this is going to be. I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about. Maybe I’ll just ramble for a couple of hundred words and then post. I know that I’m normally up until, like 1 am or whatever most nights, but I’m already pretty punchy and will probably go to bed soon.

Do I need to do any laundry tonight? That’s a good question that I should research once I’m done with this.

I think that my first post once I’m actually, you know, awake should be a real introduction post like I did in 2015 when I started this blog and then once I finish it and polish it and whatever, I should take Facebook up on the credit that they’re always offering me to promote that post. And if there’s no offer like that now, I guess I’ll wait until there is an offer like that.

It kind of sucks that the first day of the first year in a long time that I’m really putting the effort in on NaNoWriMo I have to work. It’s a short-ish day, though, starting at 10 am and ending at 6 pm. I’ll have to throw together post 2 of 8 during breakfast. Unless I oversleep, in which case I’ll just have to punt.

I should probably try auditioning some more speech-to-text apps. Then I can write while I drive when I need to. I guess that would count as writing, right?

Ack! I just realized that if I’m going to write 240 posts, I need 240 photos and 240 Gratuitous Amazon Links. Maybe I can press my Goodreads account into service here. I’ve shelved 270 books and I’m still digging more out of my subconscious. Maybe I can post 240 of them in reverse chronological order by date written. Well, kind of a hybrid chronological order would be better, I guess. The book that I just finished last night was Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. The one before that was Tower of Nero, which relies on things learned in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Heroes of Olympus and the first four Trials of Apollo books and skipping those would be counterproductive.

On the other hand, the posts aren’t going to be read in any particular order, so would it really matter which order I post the books in? I don’t know. It’s almost 12:30 am and I’m not thinking really well at the moment.

This would mean, of course, that the very oldest book I’ve ever read (right now the oldest books I have there are the first three Nancy Drew mysteries) would never be a Gratuitous Amazon Link this month.

Thinking of my Goodreads account, I just realized that I’m really far behind on updating them. I just took a break to update. And so now my Read shelf has 274 books on it and so now I have a bunch of Gratuitous Amazon Links lined up, but not anything like 240.

First up, the most recent book I’ve read, Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. It was published in 2012, and there are eight more books in the series so we’ll see how this goes. I really enjoyed this book and some not-quite-spoilery things I’ve read make me think that I might enjoy the rest of the series.

Maybe I’ll write about it later today for my first book blogging post for the month.

Now, let’s see how many words I’ve racked up so far.

Word tells me that it’s 592. That’s a respectable number. Not nearly enough for today, but enough before bedtime.

I’m Starting to Get Nervous

I was really nervous on my way in to work this morning. Not about work, though. About NaNoWriMo. I think I like my plan of attack — eight short posts a day, on various topics including travel, parks, books, cooking, etc.

And, of course, on November 3 and 4, I should have a pretty good topic in the presidential election. If Trump wins again, I should be able to rant about that for quite a while, and if Biden wins, I wonder how many words I can get out of pleased astonishment.

Also, if Trump wins again, I’m going to be sucking on a shot of my dad’s Harvey’s Bristol Cream, so we’ll see what that does for my output.

Gratuitous photo time. This is what I’m pretty sure is the original Espada Dam in the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. I’ve been walking down the River Walk and I reached this part last time, but totally forgot to take a new picture. This is from 2009; it probably looks pretty much the same now, in all honesty.

I’m going on a short road trip on the, like, 7th and 8th. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work, since “my” dog is being spayed on the 6th at my vet’s office. I might take her with me, since she needs to be watched to keep her from overdoing and opening her sutures. How better to keep an eye on her than to have her seatbelted loosely in the back seat of my car, which I am driving?

Well, I’m using too many November words here in October.

I think I might just be able to do this this year.

Wish me luck.

Ack! I was in the process of posting this when I realized that I forgot my Gratuitous Amazon Link. I almost panicked, going, “Oh, my gosh! Which book am I completely going to fail to sell them this time?” Then I realized that Allie Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems, has already been released. So go forth and don’t buy this book, either.

Two Weeks to NaNoWriMo

So I need to come up with some kind of plan. I remember telling y’all (or yelling into the void, whichever) that I need to write about eight 200-word posts a day to make my goal. Eight and one-third, to be precise.

In addition to travel and book blogging, I think I may add a round of food blogging as well. You see, I’ve got a whole bunch of cookbooks and I’ve hardly ever used them. So since Alex is grown and hardly ever home, I’m going to start to, well, use them.

I cooked Diane Seed’s version of Pasta al Boscaiola, which is the rosso version. The rosso version uses tomatoes and the bianco version uses cream. You basically sautee garlic in olive oil, then add mashed up tomatoes, salt, pepper and parsley. Then you top with sauteed mushrooms. I love sauteed mushrooms.

I knew that the recipe I was following was supposed to feed six people, so I cooked a bunch of mushrooms and then realized that the mushrooms were a topping and not an ingredient in the sauce. So I topped the spaghetti with a few mushrooms and ate the rest as a rather odd dessert.

Today’s gratuitous photo. I took this at the San Antonio Botanical Garden in 2009. The sculpture there is one of my favorites. I don’t know if the gardens own it or what, but I look for it every time I go to the garden. Speaking of which, I haven’t been there in more than a year, I don’t think.

It was really delicious and an excellent way to start my exploration of these cookbooks.

Not-so-gratuitous Amazon Link this time. The book I got the recipe from is The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. I’m going to try posting my Amazon link with an image. Let’s see how it turns out:

ETA2: It didn’t. It was just a big block of HTML. So, back to just text links for now. The Top Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed.

ETA: This post was 253 words. If I can do that consistently next month, I’ll have over 60,000 words for the month

New Theme. Is it a Keeper?

I stuck the picture that Alex liked better in as my header image. I think it’s kind of busy, personally, but it might grow on me.

I’m working on getting a good picture of the Arsenal Street Bridge with the Pioneer Flour Mill in the background to see how he likes that. He liked this image because it wasn’t just a bridge and thus is more “travel”-y.

I think that I’m too short to get the picture I want, though. Maybe I can get Alex to drop me and the stepstool that we refer to as the “fish stairs”* off there and go around the block while I take a picture from a slightly higher elevation. Or, even better, maybe we could find a place to park and we could walk down there together, so he can keep me from getting so wrapped up in getting the perfect picture that I fall off the stepstool and break my leg or, worse, fall off the stepstool and into the river.

Will I be able to do this before the end of the COVID-19 outbreak? Will I need to wait until the outbreak is over? I look it up pretty much daily and everything I read says that outdoor recreation is still acceptable, even for people in the most locked-down areas of the US, like in San Francisco, just as long as you don’t get too close to strangers. Going out with people in your family is still acceptable. I guess that if I could get Alex to go with me during a work day or very, very early on a Sunday when we’re not likely to bump into strangers we could do it.

Of course, both Alex and I are “essential workers” right now. This means that we both have to go to work until we get infected. Alex is working for a restaurant with a drive-through, so he’s providing people with food. I’m a pharmacy technician and providing people with medical care. So I guess we’ll see if/when we get this thing.

Oh! A new-today discovery about COVID-19! It seems that one of the first signs of the illness is a decrease in ability to taste and smell. This may also be a symptom of a subclinical case (one that never develops really obvious symptoms). So I guess I need to keep something with a strong taste or smell around and test myself daily just in case. I had Indian food for dinner and could taste and smell it just fine, so yay!

Crap. I’m not sure what to do about my Gratuitous Amazon Link. Amazon has announced that they’re going to stop accepting non-essentials in their warehouses. I still want to hopefully be able to make a few cents (and maybe someday dollars) from this, so I hesitate to skip the Gratuitous Amazon Link. However, choosing an “essential” might not work long-term. And what would I pick? N95 masks? That might be useful for anyone who stumbles across my blog right now (and can wait until April 14 for it), but long run, maybe not. Maybe an electronic delivery. A downloaded music album, maybe? A Kindle book? Is clothing an essential? I’ve got it! Lupin Leaps In, by Georgia Dunn, the creator of the Breaking Cat News comic strip. Hers isn’t really the sort of small business that is likely to be affected by COVID-19, but a small business it is, and we really should support it.

* I had to stand on it to take care of Alex’s aquarium when he was little.

Foreign Language Update

I’ve really been slacking off on the foreign language front lately. And since that’s my best chance to be able to retire (well, not retire as such but switch from a “punching the time clock” career to a “do it on my own time” career, which is probably the closest I’ll ever get to retiring), I need to step it up.

To that end, I’m listening to less foreign language music and have just started working on the podcasts at Radio Ambulante. Radio Ambulante is a project of NPR telling human-interest stories from Spanish-speaking areas. And they cover a lot of territory. Some of the accents are way more challenging than others, but it’s good practice.

I also blew a couple of bucks on a 3-month Rosetta Stone subscription for Castilian Spanish. I figure that’ll give me more to work with than I get from speaking at work and doing Duolingo.

I’m still doing Duolingo. I’m laddering Spanish and Mandarin. They don’t have Mandarin for Spanish speakers, so I’m doing Spanish for Mandarin speakers.

And I’m still working (slowly!) on reading in my target languages. In Spanish, I’m working on the translation of Prince Caspian by CS Lewis, and Ciudad de las Bestias by Isabel Allende. In German and Italian, I’m still in the translation of the first Harry Potter book and in Chinese, I’m about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

And, as always, I’m paying myself. 1¢ per Duolingo lingot, 2¢ per minute of Rosetta Stone, Radio Ambulante, and audiobooks, 1.5¢ per minute of music, 15¢ per page* of foreign language book (because that takes the most concentration of all). At an estimated $400 per credit hour for tuition and fees, I think I have my first four credit hours of my modern languages degree paid off, and it only took two and a half years to get there.

Crap. I’ve got to work harder, don’t I?

*Per paragraph for Chinese.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Why not? City of the Beasts, in English and Ciudad de las Bestias in Spanish.