Puttering again

I'm still feeling under the weather today. Everyone who's had this locally has to deal with it for weeks. Yay me. Let's just say if I'd written my creative Day Of Pots post today I could add one more pot. This is the kind you set on, and we'll just leave it at that.

My crud even put a stop to date night, and I'm kind of bummed about that.

I puttered around all day on mini projects. I read a few chapters of an ARC for a friend. This iPad Pro is wonderful in that I can have a second window open for notes. I made a few, but it makes beta reading so much easier.

I bounced around with various social media today. I used a couple of free apps to make graphics for Twitter and Facebook. I found one where you can place a note into a bottle on a sandy beach. I added the cover of Experimental Notebook and posted it on Twitter. It's getting a little bit of action, and reflects one of the stories in the book.

I also made a few like this using the older Lisa Burton artwork. I'm using them to post the new Facebook links.

In case you missed it, Lisa is on Facebook and is the administrator of Entertaining Stories on Facebook.

The app has a Playboy cover too, but that is sooo not Lisa. Gotta stay in character with these projects. She's willing to fish with that bait, but not all of it, if you catch my drift.

If you have a chance, check out these sites and tell your friends about them. Thank you to those who already have, but I'm trying to expand my footprint here. Enough said.

I added a few lines to the retro science fiction story. These include gelatinous water spheres instead of plastic bottles. The characters just eat them. I decided they should also be gelatinous olives in cocktails, and something to bite after a tequila shot. (It sounded fun to me.)

The girl in this story has to convince the guy he needs to give up on his past and face his future. Tequila seems like a decent way to introduce that.

I managed to change my wallpaper too. Let's go with toy robots for a month.

Not a ton going on here today. With all this time on my hands I should have made some bigger progress. I'm afraid I'm going to be puttering along for some time. After this goes live I'll probably look at those critique submissions. They aren't going to read themselves and we meet Tuesday.

A day of pots.

Yesterday I called in sick to work. Today is my rotating day off. I can say with certainty, I have not been very creative or productive.

Something about being sick limited me to one sentence bursts of creativity. There isn't enough spark to chunk out several thousand words. I actually feel worse today than I did yesterday.

I tried. I wound up with a transition scene on the retro science fiction short story. I did something similar with Yak Guy. Books need transition scenes, but they usually don't bring a lot of tension. Both stories involve a character who is pissed off right now, and I wove some of that into the transitions. I'll go back with a clear head and check on them later.

My word count in each place is hundreds of words, not thousands like I need. Even then, I broke it up with obsessively checking on social media, now including Facebook. Somebody do something on Facebook, just to convince me it was all worthwhile.

I managed to print off everything for my critique group, but haven't marked anything up yet. I even made a grilled cheese sandwich using sourdough bread. My focus is crap today.

Maybe a promised ARC from a friend will arrive and I can get some reading in. If not, I suppose I can read my critique submissions. I'd start something else, but I've earmarked time for this project.

For me, colds always start in my sinus. Then they work their way south. Earlier this week it turned into a sore throat. Today there is a cough to accompany all the other fun stuff. I'm a guy who tries to get stuff done, but I've been pretty unsuccessful this week.

So it's a day of pots for me. There is the coffee pot, soon to be replaced by the teapot. There is the Neti pot for my sinus. Then I pulled out the crab pot we used on the coast. I added a bit of vinegar, because that's what mom does, filled it with water and am boiling it off. I'm slowly raising the humidity in here, and it seems to be helping too.

I had a couple of great short story ideas, and added them to my list. I always check the list before writing one now. One is science fiction, so that's kind of cool. The other one is just a murder story, with no speculative element in it. I really like it, but it doesn't fit with my “brand” if I have one of those. I suppose I could enter it in a contest, or save it for Macabre Macaroni next October. It's on the list, and it may stay there forever, but it's pretty creepy and has a lot of potential.

I suppose it's better to be unproductive than to write crap. Then I'd just wind up deleting it, or spending more time than it's worth on repairs. I'm thrilled to update my blog, and am counting that as productivity.

Research, maybe I can do some research. I need to know something about lead crystal.

I get it that men are babies when we're sick. I'm being a baby and admit it. I'll probably bounce from project to project and add small touches until I can charge forward again.

I hope nobody else is in this situation, and you're making the virtual ink fly.

I did not make it to work today

The desire was there. I got up at 4:00 AM, bathed and everything. I simply found myself unable to commute today. This gives a lovely explanation of the problem. Make sure you stick through the opening scene.