less than this

So, there's the one thing that I'm not going to post about here OR in private/friends-only posts at least until something happens with it one way or another. I write a lot about what I'm planning, what I'm hoping, what I want out of this time or that experience, and for this thing I'm just going to try to let it take its course and see where I end up and THEN, MAYBE post about what happened. If you're my good friend, you can ask me about it when we're alone in person and I may tell you. It's not a total secret. I just feel that not putting it here right now is the way to go.

And then there's that the management and/or HR where I work may be checking up periodically on my website to see what's here. I got written up a couple of weeks ago for visiting "non-work related" internet sites (Modern Evil included) - officially, the severity of the punishment goes from 'none' right up to termination, there's no standard. According to the HR person who heard that I might have looked at my own website from work and had IT get a 30-day-log of every HTTP Request my system had made, the default reaction, whether I'd only visited one or two sites or many (I've visited many; for the last 9 months or so I'd basically had one window open to something interesting to read and the rest of my screen up for me to continue working at full speed while I read geek articles and what-not, so from the logs it looks like I would start 'surfing' as soon as I walked in and then sit there reading these web pages for hours at a time, and if I'm doing that, how can I be working?), the response of the company is 'always' 'supposed to be' termination. Luckily, I'm only just sitting on the verge of termination for at least the next 6 months there.

So: No posting about work. That above may be too much, you never know. Again, if you're my good friend, you can feel free to ask me about it. I'd even use email or IM for this subject. Heck, if you're my good friends, you probably already know everything I have to say about employment right now.

I don't even want to think about my grandparents' worsening condition, let alone post about them in detail. It's not nice. Worse, I feel simultaneously glad that I'm not the one who has to do all the work and put up with my grandmother's failing mental state day in and day out, I feel bad that I'm not doing more to help them out. And what productive thing is there to say about that?

I may post about stucco'ing later, or about helping Zoe move, but not now.

I certainly don't want to post about the hub-bub surrounding trying to do something with my sisters this weekend for my birthday. One or both of them might read it, and then maybe start crying again.

But I've been working on cleaning the house this weekend. It's starting to look reasonably good. Yay!

I think that one of the things I do with the extra hours I gain by not sleeping is to get the things done that I didn't get done while I was overcome by depression and anxiety. I'm not sure I come out much ahead in the long run compared to where I might be if I was never struck down by this crippling sadness, but I think I come out close to even.

I probably won't finish Book Three by the end of the day tomorrow (my 27th birthday, two years after I finished my first book), but five finished books (four of them novels) in two years is a pretty nice accomplishment anyway. Six books in two years sounds a little better, but if I keep things up I might just reach a dozen books in three years, and that's better still.

Depression and lethargy (not specifically related to being tired, just to losing the will to move) sapped me at about 24k words in and again at about 42k words in, but I'll be done soon enough. The cliffhanger ending I'm working into drives the action of the next trilogy rather than just the next book, so I've got to be sure I handle everything just right. Which for me seems to mean doing stream-of-consciousness writing most of the time and complex math and research here and there.

I was looking through my paperwork from grade school and middle school earlier, and while the actual grade reports from everything but 7th grade are missing from my copies, the documents I do have indicate that I was always a pretty bad student. I didn't do my homework, I didn't get good grades in class, and I didn't meet expectations. But on standardized tests I scored 93rd percentile and above overall, with my lowest areas being Math Computation, Spelling, Capitalization, and Punctuation. Yep. Understanding math concepts, no problem. Overall math scores, great, but on the test in my equivalent of 8th grade, with most of my grades well above average, my math computation scores actually managed to go below average. Not just low relative to my other scores, like my spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were, but actually below the national average. I was getting B's, C's and D's in my classes in 7th grade, and at the same time I tested out to 93rd percentile.

I suck.

Anyway. I'm going to go watch TV and maybe cross-stitch a custom design.

Click to pop-up larger image

I am not going to get into what compelled me to go get a professional portrait taken, maybe not for quite some time, but the portrait itself I will share. Because this is the one where I looked the least like the wretched creature that I am. And I guess I didn't consciously realize how ugly I am until I had a handful of photographs of myself in good lighting and cringed at the horrible monster in the pictures.

Sigh.

I'm sure I have something to say.

I'm not sure why I can't say it.

I'll keep trying, you keep reading, we'll get there together.

Single-Sitting-Book zip file

The above linked file is a zip file (created on a Mac, so email me if you have trouble with it on Windows) that contains three files. One is a PDF of the actual unedited text of the 'book' I was working on, Untrue Tales Book Three, which was a bit under halfway done when I stopped working on it. Another is a raw text file called 'booklog' which is a log I was keeping of when I was writing and my progress and when I was taking drugs or eating or using the bathroom - it was created for my own personal use during the course of the weekend, so I could be sure I ate appropriately, notice if I stopped urinating or something, see how long since I took pain pills, whatever, and it may or may not be interesting and/or offensive to you on its own. The third file, the "Combined Experience" is a PDF which combines the two chronologically, so you can read the novel I was writing and the log I was making of non-novel activities as they occurred in the text (approximately; I did not do the integration until yesterday, and the log was not quite complete enough to be 100% accurate) and get the full picture of my first Single-Sitting-Book attempt experience.

The PDFs have been formatted in a faux-galley layout. If you print them out as they are, single-sided, you can read all the pages in order as though you were looking down on an open book. The pages are numbered for your convenience. Unlike some of my previous PDF-book releases, this one should be easy to print out and read on paper.

It's important to realize that this is NOT a finished work. There's a lot more to come, not the least of which is the duel between Trevor and Satan and how Trevor and his companions cope with the unexpected result. Since I never intended for there to be a sex scene in this book, and am not 100% clear on what the future implications of what happened in the one that wrote itself into my mind against my intentions.... I may think about removing that and completely re-writing Nirgal's experiences. But that's hard to say. Another thing I've considered is re-arranging things, so Nirgal's comes first, to create a different sort of dramatic tool than irony, but it depends on how things come together in the 1k-2k words after where I stopped. Anyway, there could be major changes to what has already been written, or none at all (save for spelling and basic sentence structure, perhaps making dialogue punchier and more realistic in places), this is the untouched first draft, poured straight from my head. I recommend reading it combined with the booklog.

Also, if you haven't read Book One and Book Two, you may want to do so before attempting this one. I don't bother re-explaining everything.

Ugh. I ought to be sleeping.