The Struggle Ain't No Snuggle

Don't worry if that title doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you. It isn't that clear to me either. It's meant to suggest some sort of adversarial something or other. Yeah, I know. It rhymes real nice though, don't it?

This week has been a fairly rough one for me. I started off good, getting a lot done on Monday. But I got really sick Monday night (stomach bug), and spent the next few days moaning and groaning. And deeply disinterested in doing anything but lying in bed. I wasn't able to avoid work, so I basically stumbled through my day like a zombie then came home and crashed. Not fun.

Even so, I managed to write a short story (based on a rather feverish dream I had, and remarkably non-Lovecraftian considering that fact.) I did a critique for a friend on Thursday, as well as one for the online critique group I frequent (Critters.com, great group BTW.) I did several revisions on old stories that needed touching up and turned in eight submissions to various paying markets.

One of which has already come back with an accompanying rejection. Sigh.

On the plus side, the nausea helped kick my weight loss into high gear. I am down about ten pounds since New Year's, right on schedule and feeling great about it, even though I didn't feel so great. Some times we have to dig a little deeper to find the bright side of things, huh?

I did manage to get some voice recorder work done on Monday, but when I decided to reorder the structure of the story I was working on, I got a little thrown. I am planning on taking another run at that story tomorrow. I also wrote the dream story start-to-finish on voice recorder, then transcribed it (with heavy edits.) That was more the normal process, though, which works great for short pieces (this one is about 2k.)

This week, like the last few months and like the months that preceded NaNoWriMo, has been fairly unproductive compared to my first six months or so writing. I take solace in the fact that my actual output, while smaller, is of a higher quality.

All of this is meant to be a short explanation of why I don't feel like doing the blog this week. Snort.

Media Breakdown:

I finally saw the new Underworld movie (Awakening.) Great special effects, fun fight scenes, barely passable plotting, as illogical as ever. The movie felt (and was) very short and incomplete. I suspect this was originally a very long movie that's been chopped into two parts.

I also caught the first episode of the second part of the second season of The Walking Dead (phew.) It was good. Not much in terms of action, except for one brief and fairly awesome scene, but I am still enjoying the often hammy and overly dramatic zombie goodness. The show is one step away from a soap opera, and mostly keeps my attention by virtue of being the only zombie show on TV, and therefore the best. Plus the zombies look great and the squick factor is very high.

That's it for this week. See you next time.