Yes, that’s really what St. Thomas looks like. We took that photo with our camera. The trip was amazing. I had no idea how wrapped around the axle I was about life in general until I got out on the beach. We arrived at the airport in St. Thomas, it took us a couple of hours to get to our hotel (there’s no sense of urgency out there), we ate, then hit the beach. I had a stack of books to keep me company though and, for the record, I did get out into the water a lot and even got sort of a tan. Not much, though. You know me: Fear of the sun. I marinated in sunscreen.

YES THAT IS ME WITH A TAN AND TOM WITH A SUNBURN! I DID GET SOME COLOR ON MY SKIN! STOP LAUGHING!

Since I returned from St. Thomas, I haven’t had the desire to do much of anything. School kicked into high gear the week after we got back and I was flung back into my overwhelming list of priorities, to-do’s and other obligations. Although I was excited and motivated to do these things previously, when I came back from vacation, nothing made me happy. I backed off of almost everything on my plate and the things I didn’t back off of were just ignored completely. It took me a while to figure out my problem, but I finally did.

I have time to do lots of little things half-assed, and zero time to do them all in the way I want them done. Everything I do feels like it’s only as half as good as it could be, because I don’t really have enough time to invest myself fully in everything. When I get an inspired moment and I want to try something new, I sort of throw myself out there, feeling around as I go, but with no real focus. It’s fun for a while, but I start a million new projects and then can’t finish any of them.

And now I’m living with the mess, unsure of what I should finish first.

I’m going to take a semester off from school. Next semester. I emailed the head of the Interior Design program about it. Though I can feel his reluctance in the email, I think it’s just something I have to do for now. But I’m not going to give up - there’s a lot of my house that I started and haven’t finished yet. For example, the kitchen. The first month we lived in the house I started ripping up the wallpaper and started painting cabinets. It’s been sitting like that for two years. Ugly. Depressing. I couldn’t stand to spend time in there - impacting my cooking and baking hobbies. I like cooking and baking, but I can’t stand to be in the kitchen. Result: No cooking or baking. Ripple effect: I haven’t posted on AwK in a long time.

On Friday, I took a half day off from work and used it to work in the kitchen. The walls are mostly painted, one side of the cabinets are sanded and primed and given one coat of paint. They need one more coat of paint and the doors are going back on.

For the record, my kitchen walls are a neutral brown/khaki color with white cabinets, black hardware and appliances, and small touches of earthy green (teapot, etc.) and it looks awesome.

One section of a wall needs to be finished in the Cliff Rock color, and I need to sand, primer and paint one side of the cabinets, but it looks so great with some color in there. I’m excited at the progress and it’s actually motivating me with other ideas on how to finish the rest of the house - but I won’t act on them until the kitchen is finished. Unfortunately I have too much going on over the next three weekends and won’t be able to get back to the kitchen until December, but I’m looking forward to having it finished before the end of the year.

Though I haven’t been blogging, I’ve been writing. While out on the beach of St. Thomas (no, I won’t horrify anyone with bathing suit photographs) I started reading some mystery books that helped me to look at story creation in a new way. I also picked up a copy of “Plot and Structure Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish” and it was really helpful. Through the summer I had been kicking around a story idea in my head, and after I got back from vacation, I had it. About a month ago I sat down to write it, and I’m already on chapter 6. This is the fastest work I’ve done to date and different than anything I’ve done yet, and I’m very excited about it. It’s first person and takes place in Rochester, NY.

More about that later.

Church worship has its ups and downs. Since we last talked I have a totally new team, and a woman who is leading worship once a month. Though she is going through the learning process, she’s getting better every time, and that makes it worth it. She is up again to lead this coming Sunday. Starting next year I would like her to alternate leading every other Sunday, that way I can start focusing more on planning and developing other people. Eventually I would like this to mean that I get at least one weekend off every month, but with Tom doing sound every week, I’m not sure what will happen. I’d like to get another sound volunteer so he can take break, too.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back with more, later. I promise.

Not that I mean to bore anyone with my progress in writing, but it’s my blog and if this bores you then you can skip this part! LOL

With school over, I want to get back into the writing grind. The two writing projects I started last year are unfinished, and it is my goal to finish at least one of them before the fall. I have selected the story that I started about my World of Warcraft guild because it’s published on our guild website and it looks rather silly sitting there only half done. It’s also the piece of work that has taught me the most about the writing process - at least to date. And also because I actually like the story. It’s funny and fun, it doesn’t have to be taken seriously, and I feel like it’s something that I can really play with since it’s about my friends’ gaming characters.

It’s been a long while since I have contributed anything to it, so I have decided I would start doing an edit process on what’s already been published. Oddly enough, I’ve learned a great deal by going back and reading what I’ve written and, not only am I looking forward to cleaning it up, but I think the lessons learned will be helpful going forward. This weekend I will be working on chapter 10. It’s about half way done, and I’d like to say that I plan on finishing it but I have no idea. Over the past year, I have gotten faster at the writing process, but it is still very slow going for me.

Anyway, since it’s been so long that a chapter has gone up, I may just hold onto the whole thing until I’ve gotten a big head start, and then start publishing chapters on a regular basis. But we’ll see…

The older I get, the more I find that the saying is true: It’s the little things in life that bring the most happiness. I love the new AwK site that a group of friends and I have been contributing to. When I find that I’m in a blah mood or feeling unhappy about the stress of my life, I turn to AwK. Writing a short blip about some stupid thing I cooked somehow brings me an enormous amount of happiness. Not only do I get to write, but I get to write about something that I really enjoy: Food.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed a recipe that I dug up in an old Bon Appetit magazine, called Sweet & Sour Tangerine Chicken Stir Fry. I made it again last night and was so thrilled with the results. The recipe is a two-serving dish and, for minimal effort, anyone can put a nutritious meal on the table. I even made a little extra tangerine sauce and drowned my rice in it. It was so good that I can’t stop thinking about it.

I’m just venting now.

I have been working hard on chapter 7 of the LoO story and I was all pumped up to remain one chapter ahead. This intent has quickly fallen apart due to the fact that chapter seven is the most important chapter of the entire story and thus, has ended up taking a lot of time to write. Stupid chapter. I hate you.

My apologies to anyone who is annoyed with my continued documentation of my ongoing journey into the writing process. This is another one of those posts so feel free to skip it. Talking it out here is just my way of processing what I’ve learned.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve posted two more chapters to the guild site: Chapter Five, International House of Pain, and Six, Moving Targets.

The good news is that I’m getting into a routine. Chapter five was originally supposed to include the material in chapter six, but it was getting way too long. A friend recommended that I break it up in half and, after a great deal of reluctance, I did.

It was probably the best thing I have done yet. Over the past month or so, I had been thinking about how great it would be if I could post these things on a regular day and always stay one chapter ahead of schedule. So, for example, if I was scheduled to post chapter six, then I would be done with the first write up of chapter seven. Then I could take then next week off until I was ready to sit down and edit.

Edits have been my biggest problem to date. It takes me an excruciating hour just to pound out 500 words. By the time I’m done with an entire chapter, my brain is fried. If I try to go back over the material too soon to make edits, all I see on the page is “blah blah blah.” Seriously. So splitting chapter five into two parts actually worked out well for me.

But then I had a problem. The of chapter six was slated to be an action-packed chase scene that I had been noodling around in my head for the past month. As I’ve said previously, action scenes are really hard for me to write because I keep telling myself how bad I am at writing them. Yes, defeated before I begin!

I got half way through writing the scene three times, but they truly were all crap and ended up being deleted. It wasn’t true to myself and what I had in my head to write. The chapter was set aside so I could write up chapter seven.

On Wednesday, I edited the first three-quarters of chapter six, which was everything that I had so far since the ending wasn’t written. I’m happy with what I did there and I stand by what came out. It’s like Top Chef - you have to stand by your dish.

On Thursday night, I grabbed the laptop and started again with the dreaded chase scene. but didn’t have much time to work on it. Friday morning I got into work, ran down to the cafeteria for the biggest cup of coffee I could get (no sightings of the Coffee Nazi) and a yogurt that had fruit and granola to give you the illusion that you are eating something healthy, even though sugar is probably the #1 ingredient in it. When I got back up to my desk, I didn’t get up until the chase scene was finished, which was about lunchtime. By then, my brain was so fried that when I tried to go back over to edit, all I saw was “blah blah blah” all over the page. I tried doing some edits, but I was just burned out.

This morning I was too terrified to look over what I had done, but forced myself to look at a paragraph or two of the chase scene. What I read made me sad, because it is a skeleton of what could have been a good scene. When I wrote it, I didn’t savor it - it’s truly a first draft. I also fear that the sequences are a little confusing, but I can’t bring myself to do it over. Maybe I won’t look it over again. Something seems so narcissistic about re-reading my posts.

At least I’ve learned a very valuable lesson. I didn’t always think the editing process was a good idea because I wanted my first write-up to be a magnificent literary achievement, and that’s just not how I work I guess. Hell, I’m still trying to get something to be a decent literary achievement. I’ve learned the value of the editing process now, and will try to stick to it. Chapters will now be released every other Friday, unless I can get faster and better at this. Maybe someday I will be able to release a chapter every week?

I doubt it.

Let’s start by talking about how I’m feeling. Yesterday afternoon, one of the girls from HR called me to say, “I’m sending an email to your boss that is about you and confidential, so please do not read it.”

I knew it was about my promotion, but I still stressed out about it for three hours. My boss finally came back and told me how he was working out details with HR about the promotion, and in the end HR was going to formally tell me — we don’t know why they wouldn’t let my boss do it. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to my boss or me, but HR doesn’t normally make much sense.

This morning, I saw the HR chick on the escalator and she said, “Hey, I have to talk to you today. I’ll call you!” And she made that phone-call-signal with her hand to her ear. I knew it was about the promotion, and I know I already have it, but fifteen minutes later the stress-induced migraine came on anyway — the kind that screws up your vision for the next 45 minutes.

It’s two grande coffees and four Advils later (2:00pm) and she still hasn’t called. And I know she hasn’t forgotten about me, because she was up at my desk around 11:00am chatting with me about hairstyles and the pants she’s wearing and the necklace she bought to go with the pants, and one or two work-related topics.

An hour after she left, I succumbed to the curiosity and stress and tried to open the email she had sent about me, but it is encrypted so I can’t read it unless I go to my boss’ computer to read it. Which I could, but I won’t.

I don’t know why I’m stressing out about this.

In the meantime, I’m still trying to finish up one of the chapters that I’ve been working on for the WOW/LoO related guild story.

It was a good idea to start with. The whole point was to practice my writing, by just forcing myself to pound out whatever came to mind quickly, in short, stupid chapters. No plotting, no planning, just writing.

I’m on chapter three, and I’ve been staring at it for nearly 3 weeks now. It’s not going the way I planned - and that’s where I’ve gone astray, I think, because the point wasn’t to plan. It was to write something funny and stupid. Unfortunately this is not the way chapter 3 has gone at all. It turned out a bit more serious than I wanted it to be, because it’s developing a plot. It’s also developing the characters and some of the character interactions, but it’s gotten longer than I wanted, and more serious than I wanted.

No, that’s not correct either. It is what I envisioned, and maybe that’s what is bugging me. But it’s longer and now I’m feeling the pressure to put out another chapter that is as good as the last one. And it’s different than the chapter 2, which was totally different from chapter 1.

I’m afraid of this sucking.

Now I’m about two and a half weeks late in getting this thing out, and I’m paranoid about the writing itself sucking. Now I stare at the page, the sentences that I want to put down are running through my head, but I can’t force them out. I can even envision the words in my head - I know exactly what sentences I need to type out, but I’m so afraid of it sounding like the writing of a second grader that I can’t force myself to type. So I sit and stare at the page for an hour, loathing the chapter itself. And there’s some good stuff in there, I’m totally happy with a lot of the content because I need it for other chapters later, I just can’t continue because of stress and worry and self-loathing. I’m sick of looking at this chapter and I just need it to end.

Meanwhile, my head continues to run ahead and cook up the story. Now I have enough information in my head for a few chapters, but I can’t get past chapter 3 because I’m too worried about it sounding like garbage.

Does this flow? Are the sentences too basic? Do I suck with the language and grammar? Maybe my style is horrible! I don’t know. I wanted these chapters to be no more than 5 or 6 pages, but I’m already on page 7 (3000 words) and I am worried that it’s too long.

I hate this chapter. I want it to die.

Kerry has shamed me into updating my blog. It wasn’t anything he said; no, that would be too easy. Instead he has been updating it every damned day with fresh tidbits. Damn those tidbits! Admittedly, that is by far the most offensive machination. My inclination is to wait until I have a million things to say and only then will I sit down for hours to spill out pages of rambling verbiage - I think that’s one of the reasons I abandoned my blog - but those tiny tidbits of random asides intermingled with news of goings on in his life have chagrined me into returning to this particular stage. I am committed to adding to it as much as I can, even if it is littered with nothing but miscellaneous tidbits.

There are a couple of reasons I abandoned my blog, halffull.org, and, worst of all, the LoO page. (Oh, LoO website! How I miss you!) Unfortunately for you, I typed up those reasons and then my internet exploded so I’m not going to retype them out for you. Allow me to sum up:

Nothing I was writing really intrigued me and I was developing a serious creative block, and I knew it was because there was something that I really needed to express. It’s similar to “writer’s block.” According to the Oxford Dictionary, “writer’s block” is: the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing. For many writers, there are a myriad of reasons as to why one ends up with that kind of blockage, and the condition is discussed on many websites. When this happens to me, it isn’t for any reason other than this: There’s a topic or issue that needs to be expressed, and until I can eradicate it from my soul, I have a hard time writing about anything else. The problem with this is that it usually takes me a while to figure out what it is that is bothering me, and by the time I figure it out, it spills out in some tumultuous spewing of emotion. Ask Tom. He just loves it when I do that.

The difficult part was that I had no idea what that something was that needed to be expressed. I needed a new project that I could really sink myself into, but nothing I could contribute to halffull really excited me. I thought it would make me feel better if I had a blog and could write whatever I wanted. Perhaps, I thought, it would come out on this page. I really wanted it to, but it never did.

During this time, some other things were happening. Another friend had this idea of building his own NWN world and I had been dreaming and scheming up a storyline for this. When that project fizzled, Kerry had started an online roleplaying thingy. I had never done such a thing before, and it was really fun. Every Saturday we looked forward to playing it, even though it was kind of on an inconvenient evening - Saturdays were hard to make. One day, Kerry asked me to help him build the world he was creating this story in. At first I was a bit reluctant because the last project I had started thinking about had fizzled, but of course I couldn’t resist the temptation. A lot of things were dreamed up in my head, and of course, that project eventually fizzled out as well.

I tried returning to halffull a few times; the page stayed up on my screen at work for entire days while I tried to think of something to say, but I never did. It depressed me because I really wanted to write. I’m still not sure what happened to be perfectly honest, but one day it just hit me: I needed to take some of the things I had envisioned from those two past creative projects and use them, build on them, and bring them to fruition:

So, I’m writing a novel.

For some reason that sounds really stupid to me, but I’m doing it. My days and nights have been filled with nothing but writing and reading about writing and planning and plotting and scribbling - one of the books I have read recently (can’t remember the title offhand) cautioned writers that your spouses will hate you for secluding yourself in a small, dark corner every night and day. I don’t want to do that, but I simply can’t help myself. Right now I have no plans or wild ideas about what I will even do with this once it is finished; there are no secret fantasies about getting this thing published and becoming the next great novelist. This is something I need to do in a way that I can’t explain. When I am done, it may not even be very good, but I am doing it anyway. It’s the brave thing to do, and I needed a project. This is it.

So that’s what I am working on at the moment. I’m still in school, still working, still everything - while I’m writing. And last night I think I hit my stride. I’ll be back with more of my life and damned tidbits.