escape yourself and gravity

Wow, hi LJ! *dusts off blog* How is everyone doing? I have been focused so much on work and novel and SWC blog that I have been almost entirely absent here.

I love my job. Every single day I go to work and feel like I have made a difference to my coworkers and employer, and that I have given an excellent experience to our visitors. I don't think there's any way I wouldn't like a job where the mission statement was to "celebrate and renew belief in the power of the individual spirit to affect American history and culture." And one of these days, I'll even finish reading Ben-Hur.

About three weeks ago I swore off Facebook until the election was over. Too much vitriol from either side of the aisle, and frankly I was tired of losing respect for people I had always liked. Tonight I took a cool quiz at www.isidewith.com and, to no great surprise, learned that I side 76% with Barack Obama. (What surprised me more was that I actually agreed with Mitt Romney about...well, um, anything.) The website had sharing links, so I took a deep breath, bit the bullet and outed myself on Facebook as someone who's voting Democrat this year.

Of course, now I'm too cowardly to go read my friends feed, with its three lonely liberals. Ah, the loneliness of being a moderate. You may get to poke fun at both ends of the political spectrum, but you also have twice the number of people pissed off at you. *G*

Because of a request one of my beta-readers made, I've been spending my writing time this week working on an episode in the backstory of five characters. It's not something that will appear in the novel, except as each of those five people remember it from their various POVs. But the more I work on it, the more I love it, and I'm gaining all sorts of new understanding of these characters I've been living with for...um...over 22 years now. Well, most of them. Poor Ranulf, he didn't show up until draft 3, I think. *G* Anyway, it's fun.

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year. I made a miserable attempt at Camp NaNo this summer, which consisted of me signing up for it and promptly refusing to write for nearly two weeks straight. That led to some consideration of my novel-writing process, and I decided that, while NaNoWriMo is awesomely fun, I have learned all that it has to teach me at the present, and I really want to concentrate on finishing my current novel revision. So I'm setting NaNo aside for 2012. I may go back to it in future years, but not this year. NaNo taught me how to plot a novel, and NaNo gave me characters like Zeva and Edmund and Fithian, and I will forever be grateful that I discovered NaNoWriMo. But this year, it isn't in the cards.

In other news, still looking for a second part-time job. Retail and waitressing are out, unfortunately, because as much as I love my job, it requires a lot of energy for someone who is an introvert. I think adding a second job that requires too much interaction with the general public would make me a wreck. And in the meantime, I'm squeaking by financially. I had to borrow $10 from my dad until payday on Friday, but since that $10 is going to keep his and mom's cell phones working along with my own, I think that's okay. And one of these days I'll get around to selling my Gaiam balance ball chair and that Boonton ware I inherited from Gedna and have no use for.

A while ago Eowyn brought me a present, in the form of a not-quite-dead mouse. I'm not afraid of mice, but I don't particularly want them in my bed, so I carried her back downstairs (mouse firmly in her jaws) and put her in a large box. She proceeded to kill the mouse and jump out of the box, leaving the mouse behind to feed me, I guess. I think she's getting the hang of this hunting thing. :)

I honestly can't believe everything I've accomplished this weekend.  I think either the Zoloft kicked in or I kicked my own ass into gear.  Things I've done since Friday evening:

• Went through both closets and four of my five dresser drawers and got rid of three trashbags full of clothes.  Dad dropped them off at Trinity Mission for me yesterday.
  
• Three loads of laundry
  
• Got all my exercise clothes washed and loaded into my gym bag.
  
• Biked several miles on the West Lafayette park system's bike trails with Mom.
  
• Hiked at Celery Bog and saw a green heron, a kingfisher, and lots of the usual waterfowl.
  
• Got my night-elf warrior up to level 37 and fished in the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza.  Didn't win though.
  
• Started working on new graphics for this year's cm_exchange--which will be opening for sign-ups this month!
  
• Cleaned off my desk.
  
• Found DVD #1 of North and South (BBC one) and the padlock I spent 20 minutes looking for yesterday.
  
• Balanced my checkbook and paid all my bills--and even had money left over!
  
• Revised 1500 words of my original novel, including writing a brand new scene with elements of two of the old scenes.
  
• Rediscovered my recliner.

And now I'm off to bed by 10:30!  One of these days I'll manage to get my bedtime moved back to 9:30 on work nights, but 10:30 is pretty good!  G'night, all!

In a lot of ways I feel like I've been in a several-months-long slump in productivity, life-wise. I've been managing to pay my bills mostly on time, but aside from that, very little has happened as far as accomplishing my personal life goals since NaNoWriMo in November.

Last week I started attacking the Room of Doom (the spare upstairs bedroom, aka our junk room) and have accomplished a LOT in terms of cleaning, sorting out books to sell, throwing away old papers and toys, filing financial information and book research, and pulling out clothes to donate.

Today I actually logged in to the USAJobs website and began updating my resume for the first time in a year and a half. My federal tax refund allowed me to start catching up on my student loan, which means I can start the FBI application process without feeling ashamed of myself (because one of the automatic disqualifiers is if you have defaulted on a Federally-insured loan, and while I wasn't in default, I was behind).

I also told astraea36 that I would have a brand new draft of Shaper, the first in my series of original urban fantasy novels, for her to read by the time we meet in Vegas this April. Y'all will note that April is not too far away. I've let her think I'm working away at that, when the truth is that I've only done a little bit of the work needed. At megburden's endorsement, I'm using Holly Lisle's One Pass Revision method, and I've completed Part One, which led me to discover a new subtheme to the novel that I'd barely hinted at, as well as made me realize I want to elaborate on the other subthemes a little. This weekend I am going to buckle down and get through at least the novel's Part One of the manuscript slog. No matter what.

Are there other things I want to accomplish? Well, I need to start brushing up on my Spanish. And I've really fallen off in submitting stories to magazines. Once I finish the novel revision, I need to start looking into representation for it. And the Room of Doom isn't clean yet. Not to mention while I was getting my foot worked on, I fell out of the Couch-to-5k program and will need to start that again in order to be able to pass the FBI's physical requirements.

All in all, I've got a ways to go. But at least I'm starting to recover the will to actually do it.