More Survivor

Yeah, I've been writing for most of my day today. It's rewriting. Survivor's more interesting, especially watching Brendan lie with a straight face and still manage to be likable. Well, I might feel different if I were on the show with him, but that's not something I think I'd ever try to do. Anyone watching the show who hasn't seen Episode 3, spoiler alert.

Brendan's got the immunity idol, and is very popular with his tribe. No idea how far he'll go; I don't normally watch the show so I don't have insightful predictions about how the group dynamics work, but it would seem that this is a recipe for going very far. I have to hand it to him, he is very good at games.

Meanwhile, I'm exhausted. Last night was another night without sleep, and your brain starts doing weird stuff when you get this deprived. I had a couple of days of the kind of insomnia people envy - what most people think of when they think insomniac. Boundless mental energy and sharpness. I took a four week online digital scrapbooking course in two days and can now scrapbook on Photoshop Elements faster than I could on Shutterfly (and Shutterfly's got a real easy interface). My retention of what I learned was near 100% after seeing the techniques just once. But then today the energy started to wane. I am still up for hours and hours on end, but even placing pictures on the page is taking me hours, not because I've forgotten how to do it, but because I can't focus enough to not make the pages look dumb. I'm getting stupid again.

So I save what mental energy I have for writing and otherwise am sort of sitting around, useless. Three more weeks until my due date.

Ouch!

I'm getting beaten up from the inside. Oh well, at least it means the baby's moving. Every now and then it gets me in an especially sore spot and that's no fun. We had our last sonogram today and yep, it's definitely a baby in there. It had the right number of limbs and organs and everything, and is situated head down, ready to be born. According to my OBGYN, it's fully viable, so now we'll just see when the birth comes. All three ultrasounds indicate that this will be a boy, meaning we'll be really, really surprised if it's not.

The problem is I got beaten up so bad last night that I didn't sleep, at all. Not even the usual ninety or so minutes I can get with my insomnia raging. The kid's got a powerful kick and a fully developed skeleton. I'm only now sitting down to write. Being exhausted really slows me down, but it's important not to let a day slide past without writing.

Well, it had to happen eventually

My full blown insomnia's here. I've been fighting it off throughout my pregnancy, but there's no denying it's taken hold now. I'm feeling awake and alert and totally out of it and stupid at the same time. It's hard to explain, rather like my mind is all revved up and ready to go but my body's drugged. I feel somewhat better at night, but am completely useless during the day. I've sort of just padded around the house in my bathrobe, trying to nap and slowly doing mundane stuff like getting bills paid. But, at least I keep on writing and revising this novel. As long as I get some of it done every day, I try not to despair. At least I feel like that's going well.

The baby's wide awake too. In fact, it keeps kicking me in the same place and last night made me so sore in one spot that it woke me up from my kind-of sleep. Oh well, at least movement is a good thing.

Now I'm going to wander off in my half-daze and see if I can get some laundry done. That seems pretty hard to screw up, no matter how out if it I am....

Go Brendan

Dare I admit that I'm up this late in order to watch the latest episode of Survivor? It's like this, I have to. The news sites are already posting who got voted off and I didn't want any spoilers.

Brendan, one of the contestants, is my brother-in-law's business partner. No, we have no idea how far he went; he's not allowed to say. In fact, for months, my sister and her husband weren't even allowed to tell people he was on the show or where he was. This episode was fun because it focused on him so much.

He and my brother-in-law built up Bear Naked Granola (the new parent company still uses Brendan's likeness on the site), and are now looking at another company - more details if they decide to buy in.

And in other news

I'm now, finally, able to announce that my sister and only sibling, Stephanie, is expecting her first child in August. This will be very cool to have cousins so close together in age!

Why I have the best in-laws ever

I didn't blog this weekend because I had houseguests. Trevor's mother and two sisters came out to set up the nursery - by "set up" I mean transform it from a plain storage room into a beautiful place. Here are some of the before pictures:

This is Trevor's sister, Tara, taking the insulation plastic off the window, and Jakob helping as usual by sniffing things.

This is what the room looked like. Plain beige walls that were rather dingy because the paint was old.

And then here's an after picture of that same corner, but the best part is below.

Above and below are pictures of the ceiling. That is all original art that they did, a gorgeous night sky mural. Above is an aurora borealis and below is a moon and comet. Trevor helped design the moon and wanted to do a comet, but ended up not liking it. I had to beg him to keep it, because I think it's neat looking.

The stars were done in glow in the dark paint, as was the moon and little streaks in the aurora. The effect is gorgeous.


And below is the work crew, from left to right: Tara, Teddie, and Tianne. Teddie, if you can believe it, is Tara and Tianne's mother and my mother-in-law - and no, not all of Trevor's family have name's beginning with "T". It's kind of a fluke that we had all of them out this weekend. Behind them is a star they hung on the wall which, at night, provide the perfect level of illumination to let you see to change a diaper, but not over-stimulate a sleepy baby.

To give you an idea of how ridiculously generous Trevor's family is, they did the whole nursery, brought shower gifts (I would think a nursery would count as the ultimate shower gift???), put away all of the shower gifts and other baby stuff in the closet, reorganized another storage closet, and when I went to take a nap Sunday afternoon, they set up a bookshelf and shelved all of the books that I was very slowly moving from one room to another. I'm a writer. These were huge piles of books. Tianne also made the baby a handmade hat in her "spare time".

We tried to show our gratitude by giving them some gift cards and taking them out to lunch. I wanted to feed them more, but then my mother went and prepared a bunch of homecooked meals for them which she delivered and served up in our home. Suffice it to say I feel rather loved, and overwhelmed.

Oh, and yeah, my father-in-law also made us a crib and dresser/changing table that the family will drive down. He's a professional woodworker.

Jakob actually behaved this weekend, I think. I know most dog owners lack perspective, so for all I know he was a total nuisance, but people assured me he was very sweet and mellow and didn't stink too much.

This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams

Last I checked this book was only up for pre-order, but you should pre-order it. It's Walter Jon Williams latest and an impressive display of his talents. Besides that, it's just a cool premise. The main characters of this book are ARG designers - Alternate Reality Games, for anyone who doesn't know, are usually launched online, i.e. via a website. People from around the world log on to play, and clues will be hidden in the launch. The website might just look like a company page, but if you call one of the phone numbers, you'll get a voicemail with odd clues or maybe even talk to a live actor who'll drop hints. Other clues will be objects that appear in pictures on the site or the way the company logo was rendered. Together the players post on forums to figure out the puzzle which opens the next level of the game. Sometimes players will get phone calls from the game, and parts of the game may be acted out by live actors at preselected locations.

Walter's written a lot of games, including an ARG, a hit video game out last year, and a lot of RPGs for local NM writers. He knows this territory well. In This Is Not a Game, one of the ARG designers is clearly hiding something, and it appears he is using the players of his game to solve his real life problems. The other designers are thus stuck playing a game within a game - figuring out his secret while they try to keep the game on track. Throw in a murder, a stalker, and the collapse of several countries' economies, and things start getting really complicated.

That synopsis doesn't really do the book justice. I had ridiculous amounts of fun reading it and highly recommend it.

Unclean Spirits by M.L.N. Hanover

M.L.N. Hanover is Daniel Abraham, who is in Critical Mass, so like most Critical Mass books, I can only really speak to the draft of this book I read. It was great! Also like many Critical Mass books, it's in a genre I don't normally read, so I don't know how it compares to the competition, except out of loyalty I will assume that it's way better. The title is Unclean Spirits.

Honestly, though, it's getting great reviews on Amazon and I found it a fun ride. The premise is that one Jayne Heller inherits everything her rich uncle owns, including his paranormal investigation service and a large host of friends and enemies - who are not always easy to distinguish from each other. Given she's only 22 and a college dropout, she feels a little in over her head, but she's got a strange talent for the family business. This book takes place in Denver, but Daniel will use his character's wealth to set different books in different locations. The second one, which I've also read (the draft at least) takes place in New Orleans. And yes, having read ahead, I can say that this is a series worth investing in. Daniel doesn't drop the ball. In fact, if you know his Long Price Quartet, you know that he has the ability to make each book better than the last.

It promises to be a fun series, for anyone interested in paranormal mysteries. The name of this series is The Black Sun's Daughter and not, as one mis-listing on Amazon has it, The Black Son's Daughter.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

No, Neil Gaiman is not a personal friend of mine. I've never even met him face to face, only seen him at the occasional con. But I do have a writer friend story about him and his book Coraline. My friend Carrie Vaughn went to a reading of his at a con several years ago, expecting to hear a short story. Mr. Gaiman said that instead he'd like to read part of a new novel he'd written for his daughters. He said he'd wanted to write something for them before they got much older. So he started on Coraline, and read the entire book that night. Several times he offered to stop, and the audience urged him on. I guess that was the first public reading of the novel, before it even came out.

Yesterday, Trevor and I went to see the movie. I'd heard from the reviewers that it didn't much follow the book at all, so I didn't expect it to. I was rather surprised at how much it did. It kept a lot of Gaiman's weird, totally freakish imagery, which means I agree with several reviewers that it isn't really for kids, or it at least depends on the kid. Much of the story is still in there, intact. In the book, though, it's Coraline who needs to change to appreciate her parents. The movie's a little different; the parents have some real issues too. Hence, the end didn't feel like a complete resolution because the parents don't change much. But, I still had fun. Trevor wanted to make sure to get a date night in while we still can.

Burn out vs. wimp out

I haven't posted in too long; been busy working on my writing momentum. I find that sometimes I'm on a knife's edge between burnout and wimping out. For the first part of this month, I was definitely burned out. I'd done two novels back to back in six months and was in that anti-honeymoon stage when everything I've worked on looks like garbage. When I first got into writing seriously, I didn't let myself believe in burnout. I berated myself and forced myself to keep on writing, even when it was all I could do not to cry when I looked at the computer screen. It wasn't until I joined Critical Mass and had other, professional authors say things to me like, "this looks forced; maybe you should take a break" that I realized I wasn't always just being a wimp. Now I know that if I feel overexhausted, if writing is painful to the point that I am actively hating it, those are the warning signs for burnout. Some time off to recover always fixes it, but the more burned out I make myself, the longer the recovery time. It's best to take the time off at the first sign.

Taking time off can lead to wimping out, though. I know I've got wimpout when I just would rather goof off than write. I don't hate writing, I just find myself staring out the window instead of doing it. My World of Warcraft character has more gold than she ought to at the end of the day and my wordcount is dismally low. So the past few days I've been digging in a little harder on my novel rewrite, making sure I don't give in to wimpout.

My first chapter's gotten reworked and reworked because I can now see that it's key to everything. If I can just get all the exact elements I want to focus on introduced there, the rest will fly. Still, it feels a little silly somedays to be putting so much effort into such a small patch of ms real estate. Kind of feels like painting the front door over and over again when the whole home needs a renovation.