Yes, music does sound better alphabetically…

I’m having sleeping issues.

I’m a night person.  I will admit to that.  I like the quiet of everything around me, the totally free feeling of being the only person awake (alive), and I love to sleep in the morning sun like a cat.

Lately, however, I’ve been worse than usual.  Nearly every night for the last two weeks, I’ve been awake until about three in the morning.  A couple days, I went to sleep early, at one or two.  Keep in mind that a few of those days, I had to get up at 5:30 AM for work.  Well, okay, my alarm starts going off at 5, and then by 5:45, I finally drag myself into an upright position.  Geez, that’s after six alarms on a nine minute snooze.

Sorry for the math there.  The division there startled me.

Anyway, the problem isn’t so much that I’ve been staying up so late, even when I have to get up early, or that I have been getting up around ten or eleven on days I don’t have to be up early.  No, my weird problem is that I haven’t been napping.

Now, I don’t nap like a normal person. Twenty minutes?  Why bother?  An hour?  Just getting started.  Two hours?  If I only needed two hours of sleep, I wouldn’t be napping in the first place.  No, for me, napping is often a six-hour affair that takes up the entirety of an evening, probably from five until eleven at night.  Then I get up for a while, and probably crash again at three.  It generally takes place when I have a few 7 AM shifts in a row and I have to sleep when I’m able or I’ll be trying to function with fifteen hours of sleep spread over about five days.

And I generally don’t have much of a choice about whether I nap or not on those days.  I will fully pass out if I don’t go to bed.  I’ll be idly sitting in my chair and suddenly it’s dark outside.

But not lately.

Today, for instance, I worked 7-2, and thought, what a lovely day to go home and stretch out in bed and take a nice luxurious, relaxing, rejuvenating nap.  I thought about my bed and the comfy pillows and my uber-soft fleecy blanket.  I thought about how all the soreness would just ease away, melt right into the mattress.  And how I really didn’t have anything else I needed to do so desperately that I couldn’t blow off the rest of the day.

Well, except that while I was out, I should go to the fabric store.  There has been a particular idea I’ve been toying with for a gift and I hadn’t yet found the perfect fabric for it.  So I walked through the remnants and the clearance aisles, and spent about five dollars on a piece of fabric, three cameo and cabochon pendants, and a flower sprig.  The clearance gods were kind to me today.

And also while I was out, I was craving (American) Chinese food.  I might as well stop by and pick up supper, some nice cashew chicken which I crave like it’s the last chicken on earth.  And the crab rangoon were so perky.  So I got some takeout and watched a show on the dvr.

Nap?

Nah, I should try out the things I got from the craft store, see how they look.  I’ll just toy a few minutes.

Six pm rolls around and I’ve sewn a pillow and have another half-finished craft project on the table.  I go to the bedroom then, because I can only sit in a chair for so long before my back tightens up.  Play on the computer for two hours without a yawn, drowning out the Taylor Swift stuck in my head from work (she’s okay, but I don’t deliberately listen to her) with Norah Jones’ song Miriam (three repeats) before letting itunes move on to Offspring, Prince, Puddle of Mudd, and the Raconteurs.

And after a bunch of wasted time, hoping to feel like taking a nap, it is now nearly 11:30, and I’m not in the least bit tired.  I might as well have been sleeping, though I did craft some, but the rest of it was spent watching television and playing games.  Not writing or editing with the seven-plus hours I’ve been graced with alertness. Bah.

I’m sure dragging myself out of bed when the alarm goes off tomorrow will be utter alcohol-free hangover-time.

 

Take a short trip to a place called Done

When I started up my MS Word Starter today, that was the message in the little ad box in the corner.  I thought it was wonderfully appropriate.  Done, done with one thing and on to another.  Done, a place I so rarely visit.  I have a great ability to start things, but rarely to finish.

That’s been some of what this summer has been about.  Getting things done.  Getting work on Smashwords represented getting something done.  I wrote a blog post last night and then afterwards, wrote several pages in my notebook about that weird story I made a cover for a few weeks back and never jotted down a word.  It may be mainly brainstorming and writing down whatever popped into my head regardless of cohesion, but it’s more than was ever there before.  And I find it much easier to work on something when I’ve already started it.  A whole new story, starting from scratch?  It happens, but it’s much easier to pull something out, polish it, and call it done.

This afternoon, I wrote for a while, then typed a terribly trite few paragraphs about the rain as it poured down.  It didn’t matter if it was awful.  Writing begets writing.  I realize that what I do is drown out the thoughts I have when I should be writing them down instead.  Sometimes it can’t be helped: I’m working, I have to sleep, I have to fold the laundry before it’s a wrinkled mess.  But all to often, I play a game on the computer when I could be writing on the computer, and the addictive little music just seeps into my brain and drowns out every other thought.  Good enough for settling down to sleep, but awful for the massive time-waste it is.

I hope to have a new trio of stories up on Smashwords by the weekend.  I found a section of story I’d toyed with ages ago, and after the work this afternoon, it’s getting ready to go.  It’s not done yet, but it shouldn’t take too long.  It was in my files labeled “chapter” and I opened it, forgetting what it was a chapter of.  I had conceived of an erotic novel between Teague and Lauren, had a snappy title (which I swear I wrote down somewhere and cannot find and cannot remember), and even an alternate ending for those who prefer a little romance to their porn.  I had a few strong scenes in mind, characters I liked, but never went much farther than that.

I think this story had arrived at a point in my life where I had given up.  I still wrote, but I didn’t have much hope of ever publishing anything, not really.  This was before NaNoWriMo and well before Smashwords.  This was when I read a lot of what I wanted to write, but didn’t have any focus.  I lamented a lot about it to online friends and sometimes shared things in a minor way, but I was directionless.

I have more direction now, and somewhere to end up.  That place called Done.  It’s not an easy road, and probably not a fiscally responsible road, but it’s my road.

 

A Weekend Mostly Well Spent

This weekend I have a three-day weekend.  I needed to use up a personal day before the end of the month, so I scheduled some down time.  Now, I never plan for my down time to actually be down time.  Vacations, weekends, even regular days off sometimes, I expect myself to write and make some progress.

Of course, then I feel guilty because I rarely do much more than watch Shark Week.

(huge, whiney segment deleted here)

This weekend, however, I have gotten something accomplished.  While it may not have been precisely what I wanted done so far, it was definitely time spent on work ending in a finished product.  I made my next ebook cover.

I decided I wanted to publish my story Anniversary Gift in an ebook short story collection.  I’ve been toying with the idea since late June, I think.  I have put the story itself up on Literotica.com, and it ended up being quite highly rated, which I was very proud of.  (Though the ratings have been drooping into the 4.6 something range, when it took a long time for it to drop below 4.7 *sulk*)

When I had originally written the story, I had started a continuation, but never made it more than a few paragraphs down the line before dropping it.  Somehow, this summer, I pulled a whole other Elise story out of my head.  I’m honestly not really sure where it came from or how it ended up a completely written story.  “Cowpoke,” for instance, I wrote in an hour or two after dreaming most of it during a nap.  This one, I just haven’t the foggiest when I actually sat down and wrote the bulk of the pages.  It’s less than six weeks old, and I’ve entirely forgotten its creation.

Poor baby.

Memory problems aside, I really like how the story turned out.  I’ve considered cutting out or replacing a scene in the middle, and I might yet do that, but I’ve turned most of my attention onto the third story that will be in the collection.  As I’ve said before, I have a story I ripped apart so much that I basically lost interest in putting it back together.  I have the abandoned sequel fragment.  I have a few other stories that might be closer to finished but they don’t really fit the theme of the collection.  I don’t want to go with just two stories, one of which is already published (and will go first in the collection as the free sample section).

So what I really wanted to accomplish this weekend was to pound out the third story.  I did some editing and I created a cover (with a photo I’ve been coveting on dreamstime.com for weeks now).  I sat down in the craft room with the computer and worked, and that was good.  But I still feel guilty.  And stressed about money.  And I’m hoping to get this out of the way so that I can edit that novel sitting there in its binder on the floor.

Jeez.

Or I could work on that bizarre sci-fi erotica story I made the cover for a few weeks ago just out of ridiculous delight for the idea.  If that ever makes it to the public, I can only imagine the very WTF reviews that would get.  Perhaps I’ve been unduly influenced by Cecilia Tan.  She edits these fantastic anthologies of fantasy and sci-fi erotica.  I’ve read the most intriguing stories in some of these works, and back when I first started writing smutty stories, I hoped one day to publish with her and Circlet Press.  They’re still around, but I suppose I’ve bypassed that point in my life, both the aspiration towards the subject and the need for a publisher’s approval.

Still, maybe I should rekindle some of that long-forgotten hope.  It would definitely be cool to feel like a chosen one.

 

What skills do you bring to the apocalypse?!

I’ve been thinking lately about that school assignment we all got, where the world is going to end and you can only save 7 people (or ten, or five, or twenty).  You have to pick people to save in your little pod, bunker or spaceship filled with food and oxygen, and by doing, pick people to die a horrible, gruesome death outside in the barren landscape, flood, or zombie-overrun desolation.  Do you pick the pregnant woman because she is a proven reproducer and you’ll eventually need to repopulate the planet?  Or do you not pick her because the baby will take up an extra person’s oxygen or otherwise be a liability?  Do you take the historian, so you can preserve the history of all those who came before you?  Do you pick only young people even though they might not have the experience of survival like the old farmer?  Do you pick the engineer, the politician, the grocery store clerk, the athlete, the doctor?  (Hint, bring the doctor, especially if he is Hawkeye Pierce.  That man is awesome under pressure.)

I the politician was the first crossed off most of our lists.  Useless smarmy bastards.  We’ll learn to mediate our differences on our own without some more-equal-than-others bastard lousing up our new utopia.

Where does the erotica writer rate there, or any writer for that matter?  This is not a self-condemnation.  No, I’d rate myself fairly high.  Writers know a little bit about a lot of things.  I could write a passable brief history of the human race (because who will be around to contradict my version of things?).  Moreover, I hold porn to be an important part of the apocalyptic future.

Why?  In some cases of apocalypse, sex could be dangerous, distracting, and the resultant jealousies could destroy the group.  Pregnancy could be deadly, beyond just the giving birth in squalid circumstances possibility.  It’s hard to waddle away from a zombie horde, after all.  If there is only so much oxygen on a space vessel, a boom of children would suck down all that air long before we’d reach another livable planet.  Erotica could be a more excellent birth control than the dwindling supply of condoms that will disintegrate as time goes on.

We may eventually want to repopulate the world, but porn could help us control when.

I was glad my draft auto-saved, because of course, when I hit Publish, my IE froze.  Bleh.