Being Sick Sucks, Especially When You Have Work To Do

A Happy Valentines Day to you all, or Hallmark-created shopping spree take your pick.

So, while I posted all that neat stuff yesterday, I've been battling a nasty cold, which of course taps right into my productivity (i.e. almost completely kills it). Gotta love life and the various curve balls it throws you, huh?

Instead of whining about it, I decided to see if any other writer friends of mine have some advice on how to plow on forward when you're not feeling your best. I found some great gems out there. They may not be recent, but if you've never seen them then as NBC says, "They're New to You":

From Daniel Swensen's Surly Muse:

Writing When You’re Sick, Tired, or Just Hate the World

And for comedic value, from the Absolute Write forum:

Why Can't Men Handle Being Sick

Awesome picture from Nikki Hampson.

Anyhow, time for me to get back to work... And my DayQuil.

My writing or My Seemingly Sisyphean Task

This is what it feels like to be a writer at times.

This is what it feels like to be a writer at times.

Well, it’s been since last October and I figure I would inaugurate the new look of the blog with a blog entry talking about how things are going:

The Blog’s New Look

I finally got around to updating the look and feel of the blog. I had decided to remove the old theme, mostly due to errors that were getting tiring to trying and fix, and also since it never seemed to quite work as well as I wanted.

So, after throwing my hands up, I decided to go the framework route and obtained the Genesis framework and a child theme Streamline. What a night and day difference as far as site maintenance goes. This is so much simpler. I should’ve gone this route to begin with and not wasted money and time with the other method.

At the moment, all of my blog content is up and working, but not my works content. I’ll work on that in the coming months as I get time to make pages for them. Using a portfolio system in retrospect wasn’t the best idea for writing.

My Writing Works List

I had posted this list before and have replicated this in order to show what was going on with these projects. There are not in any particular order:

  • Calling Home: Damaged Echoes – I have completely failed to bring this online as I wanted to. It didn’t help that the old website had died a horrible breath and I also need to re-work it. I think I’ll go a similar route that I had for Renegade Sanctuary here in order to get it back online as quickly as possible. As far as Comicpress is concerned, I’ll be ditching it since the comic has ran its course and will provide the comic in either a PDF or printed format for a small fee. As far as the story goes, I have the characters done and need to work on the beginning of the story and get back into the groove of writing it once the site is back online. I’ll be late but I will get it done this year.
  • SF Short Story – This short feels like I’ve been working on it forever and I think it has to do with my lack of writing. I’m definitely in the longest dry spell I’ve had in a long time. I’ve decided to take a different angle for this short and turn it into my newest favorite genre: SF Horror. Only thing is I haven’t written a horror story before but I think with the help of a couple of horror writer friends of mine I can do this.
  • Memories of Ys: Angel Down – This is in the same place as it was previously. I’ll leave here what I posted last time since the same still holds true as of right now: My thesis work at Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. I had unsuccessfully attempted to find a publisher for it, so I plan on looking over the manuscript to see if there are revisions that can be done to improve the work. This is a lower priority since I want to focus on newer projects like the others mentioned here.
  • Childhood’s Sentinel (working title) – Same thing as above. I’ll leave the previous status of where this work is at the moment: This is a YA/teen fiction project I am working on as a gift for all of my nieces. I wanted to have a book that featured all of them as characters and it was also to be an experiment for me in writing non-adult fiction. So far the project has stalled for a while, but I want to finish these before my oldest niece (hello Emily) starts collecting social security.
  • Memories of Ys: Rules of the Heart (working title) – I still haven’t started this at all, and the ideas and pieces are still on the ground before me as it were. I’ve left the previous staus posted since I’m in the same place as I wrote this in June 2012, and I will try to remedy it: This is the 2nd novel in my Memories of Ys series, and I had started preliminary work a long time ago, but I want to start it up again since I really want to keep the series moving forward.

So, there it is. A concise list of things I need to do. Now I just need to get to doing them and everything will be all set. I think this video best sums up what I need to do:

YouTube Preview Image

 

Context 25: The New Face of Publicity

Sitting in on The New Face of Publicity panel at Context 25 with David Day and R.J. Sullivan.

 

Learned some interesting things concerning separating your audience between personal and professional personas. Also some interesting tidbits on blog tours. Not entirely sure if I can apply it to my work right now but it’s still great information.

WordPress Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux