A Day of Cleaning
This has been a good weekend, because I got many things done while still having a lot of time to sit around and unwind and do whatever I happened to want to do at that point. Would that all my life were like this.
I slept in again, partly because it got quite chilly overnight and I didn't want to get out from under the covers. Eventually I did, and I closed all the windows and turned on the heat. I stayed around 50 most of the day - brr! Actually, that's pretty typical for this time of year; we've been lucky, otherwise.
After reading the paper, I spent the early afternoon watching the video of The Maxx I bought last week. The animation was certainly bargain-basement, but otherwise it's a cool piece of work. It really makes me lament how the comic book tailed off in its later issues. (I'm still looking for a few issues of the series, which are pretty rare because they came out around the time the series was airing on MTV. They're not especially valuable, they're just not available. A low supply and a low demand is almost worse than a low supply and a high demand.)
I especially like the character of Sarah (who "just doesn't buy it"), but all three of the principles are good characters.
I also decided that part of the reason I'm not doing any fiction writing is that I don't have a comfortable place to write. I have to own up to the fact that my desk with my computer is not such a place. It's too distracting, being right next to my comic books and having all my Internet software on it.
So what I did was I moved all my writing stuff (i.e., books on writing, and writing resources such as my dictionary and some scientific reference material) into my living room, and set up my laptop on my dining table (which is been used infrequently for dining this year). It's near an electrical outlet, and I cleared some shelf space for the books. And then tonight I sat down and wrote for an hour. So maybe this will work.
I think the best piece of advice I've gotten on writing in a while came from Anne Lamott's book Bird By Bird, in which she says you have to allow yourself to write "shitty first drafts" and not to succumb to perfectionism. Doing revisions has always been a problem for me in any sort of writing (certainly I revise hardly anything I write in this journal), and I've given up on many a story because I get partway through act 2 and (like Sarah) I just don't buy it. Of course, I'm not supposed to buy it... I'm supposed to sell it.
Incidentally, Nisus Writer's word count function tells me that the 1000+ words I've written have an average word length of 4, an average words-per-sentence of 12, a "Flesch Reading Ease" index of 72, and a "Reading Grade Level" of 9. Does this stuff mean anything? I think not.
Later in the evening I decided I was tired of reading science fiction for the moment (no, the first four pages of Einstein's Bridge didn't drag me immediately into the next 100) and instead I caught up on the last six weeks' worth of The New Yorker. Which means I only have another 3 months' worth to catch up on.
Of course, looking for a house introduces new logistics into my life. What order to I have to do things in? How much time can I devote to looking (and to learning how to look)? My apartment lease runs out at the end of July; should I rush to try to have something set up by then? On the other hand, my reading of the lease (and tenant activity I've observed in my building previously) suggests that I can end my lease with a month's notice at any time, so I should find out if that's the case. And so forth and so on.
Boy, I get worked up about stuff, don't I?
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