matt_doyle

 Posted Chapter Thirty, if anyone's still reading.

I've still been entirely absent from this portion of the blogosphere.  Not writing, and sadly not reading.  It just hasn't caught my interest.  It isn't that I don't miss you all, because I do.  It's just that with depression and anxiety, I have to triage my time to get anything done, and this is one of the things that got cut.

Maybe as the weather gets nicer (and I get more productive as a result) I'll return.  I'd like to, certainly.

 1) Writing.  165,000 words by the end of the year, or ~450 words per day.  This is well within my capabilities, especially if I can get a good head start on productive days.  As before, no beating myself up about bad days or off weeks -- just looking for new ways to increase productivity.  No giving up.

2) Finish my current writing projects.  If I work at it I can have Hellion Prince done in March or April.   I have several unfinished short stories and some barely-started novels, too -- producing finished work takes precedence after chasing new ideas.  Even though my wordcount as over 120,000 last year, under half of that was on the projects I had made priorities.  If this emans more polishing and editing and less new work -- even less overall words -- so be it.

3) Get an agent.  Speaks for itself.  I'm not ruling out self-pub for some of my projects, namely Swansong, but I need to query Hellion Prince and Running In Her Veins.  I want them both being shopped around before I turn 29.

4)  Sell a short story at a professional rate to a legit publication.  I've had short stories published, and I've been paid to write, but never both at the same time.  Once Hellion Prince is finished, and my query letters are out in the wild, this is priority numero uno.

5)  Publish a gaming project.  Whether a LARP or the Periodic Tome of Elementals.  Whether self-pub or traditional.  I game too much not to turn it into a revenue stream.

6) Blog three days a week.  I burned out on five days a week.  Let's try this.  Low priority, though.

7) Track what I read / do the 50 Books POC challenge.

8)  Get my weight down to under 200 lbs.  That means losing three pounds per month, every month.  Not sure how I'm going to go about it yet.  I'll work out a plan, and I'll get it done.

9) Pay down my college debt.  In the last few months, a fierce desire to continue my education and return to academia has woken up.  Rather than a pie-in-the-sky plan to pursue a dream degree in an unforseeable future, in 2014 I want to go to a local grad school and get working on a Master's in English Literature.  In order to do that, I have to stay current on my loans, pay down about $4000 I owe directly to my alma mater so they'll release my diploma, and do the GRE.  I can do that.  Good TA programs mean that school itself will cost me between nothing and $3K/year, and I can manage that too -- paying my alma mater will be good practice.

10) Renew my faith.  It's been rather in crisis this year, but it's also been the most successful tool in my mental arsenal for battling my panic attacks.  Both as a practical and a spiritual matter, I want to reconnect the parts of my beliefs which matter most to me.  Maybe that means Bible study.  Maybe church attendance.  Maybe activism of a more secular kind, or writing sermons regularly (there are websites that pay you for that one).  I don't want to be too mercenary about this, but the fact is that my faith is a help to me.  Maybe a crutch, and maybe a ladder -- it's possible to see it either way.  But I have to pursue epiphany, not just sit and wait for it (unless meditation turns out to be what I need to do).

Anyway. That's the plan.  Ten resolutions.

 My resolutions last year:

1)  Blogging/Writing.  Continue blogging 5 days a week, but make an effort to get more interesting.  Write 550 words of original fiction every day.
2) Publishing/Gaming.  Start typing and self-publishing gaming supplements. 
3)  Track what books I read.  Both in order to review them, to complete the 50 Books POC challenge, and to appreciate my latest Christmas gift -- a 6 month subscription to Bookswim .
4)  Fitness.  As a first step toward getting in shape, I'm giving up soda again, cold turkey.  I'm going to try to reduce the amount of sugar in my coffee.  And once the weather allows it, I want to spend at least an hour a day walking.  
5)  Political aspirations.  All right, so I'm not going to be signing every petition that comes my way.  I can still pick at least one cause or current event each month that matters to me, blog about it, lobby for it, call my congresscritters, and see if there's any sort of personal difference other than rebroadcasting I can make.

Point by point, let's review:

1) I was steady in my blogging until September or October, and then more or less gave up completely.  I just didn't have it in me.  I've also mostly been microblogging on plurk.  Say, is there a plurk aggregate the way there's a Twitter aggregate?  Eh.  probably wouldn't use it, but I'm curious.

Bluntly, this is a failure, but it's one I don't really care about.  For whatever reason, daily blogging went from desirable to a chore to a touiil to flat-out abhorrent.  I would like to get back to occasional blogging, but daily?  Can't be arsed right now.

Writing.  I wrote 115,231 words this year.  That's far short of my goal, and it's short of last year... but it's still better than triple my wordcount in 2010 or any year before.  I can live with it.  When I post about my resolutions for this year I'll talk more about this, but in short, I'm not really disappointed in my 80,000 word shortfall.
2) Total fail.  I was too busy with other things.  This year, I'll just have to redouble my efforts.  I've sold my second LARP, locally, so I am making money for gaming-related pursuits, but this was still definitely something I fell down on.

3)  Like blogging, I did great for most of the year but I didn't stick with it.  This year, I'll try again.

4)  Fitness.  Well.  I've reduced the sugar in my coffee!  I walked... sometimes.  I'm back to drinking soda and unlikely to stop at the moment.  And I'm heavier and more out of shape than ever.  I'm not sure the New Years' Resolution model of goal-setting is helping me very much on this front, honestly, so I dunno what I'll be doing this year.  But I haven't given up the dream of getting under 200 pounds and a 36-inch waistline!

5)  I didn't really track this, but I was active, involved, and thoughtful over-all, and I got to work in canvassing again, which was as satisfying to my soul as it was punishing to my feet.

Still pondering how to handle it in the upcoming year.



Later today or tomorrow, I've got a new list of goals -- ten or twelve of them -- and some more reflective musings on the busy-ness of my life and the way my plans have changed and evolved.  I think I'm healthier (er, mentally) and happier now than I was last year, and I want to capitalize on that in ways that, since the cessation of my blogging daily, I haven't really told you about.

 Yuletide is live!  I received a Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya story called Not a Harlequin Romance, told from Yuki's perspective, and it is positively the cutest, sweetest thing I could have imagined.  Readers, I melted. 

 Hi everyone, I promise I still exist.

Anyway, two derams last night.  In the first, a friend and I were guests in a large house -- but so were a number of other people, and so we wound up having to share a bed.  There was audible noise from more than one of the other beds, indicating people having sex, and I made a joke about the music of the springs.

My friend swallowed, looked me in the eye, slipped his hand into mine, and said "Would you care to waltz, or do you prefer to tap-dance?"

Which is, I think, the smoothest, classiest proposition I have ever received.



Anyway, the second dream was a much larger narrative.  As is so often true in dreams, different casts of characters and intersections with fictional narratives came and went, so I'm going to trim my summary down to the truly relevant.

There was a large victorian house in town -- four or five stories tall, but it fit on a normal-sized lot (with very little room for yard left over); and in that house was a middle-aged women who ran a knick-knacks business of some sort.  In the course of bargaining for trinkets, she had the habit of setting a hook into the souls of her customers -- not all of her customers, but those who had known significant misery and deprivation.

She would then make over one of the rooms in her house so that it suited them perfectly.  After a couple weeks in town, she would vanish, and the interior of the house would vanish along with her -- and so would anyone she'd hooked, if she could lure them in.

Personally, I didn't qualify as sufficiently miserable, but the majority of my friends in this dream did -- at which point, facing the notion of their being hypnotized into a kidnapping where they would live forever inside this mazy house, seldom leaving their rooms and never exhibiting any emotion but a dazed, manic cheer -- yeah, then I met the qualifications, too.  i tried to bargain with the lady to let my friends free, or I'd cause trouble for her -- instead what I got (in exchange for the promise of a place in her collection), was a sort of non-interference pact.  She wouldn't kick me out of the house if I wanted to snoop around for a way to save my friends.

While snooping, accompanied by a few of my more distant pals who did NOT meet the misery qualifications, and whose main job was to pull me out of the house if I started setting up house in a spare bedroom rather than searching (this happened more than once, and it was terrifying); I discovered that the house could change shape, and that the lady hadn't created it.  She was no witch, really -- just the inmate who had been there longest, the only one who could remember a time when the house was an asylum, and before that a circus.

Something about that knowledge worried her enough to start directly kidnapping my already-snared friends, and to send thugs (some sort of goblins, who rode on flying mufflers that only worked if you were over a street) after my unaffected pals -- but she couldn't touch me.  So I was left with the knowledge that, somehow, I was close to getting what I needed -- but no notion of why or what to do next.

That's about when I woke up.

 ...around the time Yuletide assignments went out, I had computer hardware issues, and totally forgot to post a Dear Santa letter.  Obviously you've had your prompts for me for some time -- I think I was pretty detailed in them, so just run with it, and all should be well, I hope.  Sorry about the lateness of this note.

So, attempting to do NaNoWriMo this year, but not on the official site or anything.  A friend and I are hammering out a rural fantasy road trip bildungsroman vampire hunting novel called Fang And Thorn, loosely based on a dream I had a while back.

...apparently I didn't blog about that dream, as I was going to link to it to explain the plot.  Damn.  Oh well.  Here's a link to somewhere I discussed it, anyway.

Besides that, I'm trying to maintain .5 NaNo quota on The Hellion Prince, which is the minimum I can do and have it doen by the end of the year.

Which I am going to do.

 In the first dream I recall last night, I was living in a secret underground commune.  The social mores were very... Spider Robinson-esque.  However, in the time we were there, time seemed to be passing at a different rate on the surface, so when we tunneled back up, we found ourselves under a residential area, and the locals were very concerned and alarmed by the notion that a bunch of troglodytes might pop up under their floorboards without warning.

Not a terribly coherent dream.

Like several of my dreams, it incorporated a lot of surreal architecture, some of it familiar from previous dreams -- my high school cafeteria does, in fact, have large stairwells on either side of it, but those stairwells do not, in fact, lead down into a multi-story underground library.  However, I've had several college-centric dreams where that library has been there was well.  It doesn't use the Dewey Decimal system, either -- as you descend, the subject matter becomes more arcane and secretive and mysterious.

Also, one floor was a carbon copy of the Eagan public library, whose architecture in the real world is just strange enough that it always seemed like a magic palace of some sort to me when I was growing up.

In my second dream, I was taking weird public transit all over the Twin Cities, and kept bumping into two of my friends --on several separate occasions, on different days, in different parts of the city, suddenly there they were, on the same bus as I was.

Especially strange since, though those friends do live in the Cities, they sure as Hell don't take public transit.

 For archival purposes, a recipe I have yet to try but really want to.

Neko's Chai Cookies

 So due to a sudden increase in my stress levels (detailed in a locked post; for purposes of public discussion let's just note that it is eustress not distress and move on), I had positively wretched dreams last night.

First, I dreamed that due to a paperwork technicality, I had to go back and repeat my last semester of highschool at age 28.  This meant returning to my hometown and moving back in with my parents.

Also I stumbled on a secret crime conspiracy at school which half the teachers hated and half were complicit in.  Both halves thought I was on the other side.


After that dream wrapped up inconclusively with me carrying a sleeping baby on a rocky bus ride; I dreamed that Steampunk Moriarty had kidnapped hundreds of people across a dimensional barrier.  We all wound up on a world that was one giant trainyard, our track was switched wrong and jammed, and we were all going to crash.  Nobody on the train but me realized the significance and immediacy of this problem, so it was up to me and only me to evacuate hundreds of disoriented, mistrustful, stubborn people from the train with under sixty seconds to spare.

When I woke up we were maybe five seconds, ten seconds from the crash, and I had evacuated all of three people and was about to bail out myself.


My head.  Ugh.