Liminal Space

I'm not going anywhere (all my spare money is currently being saved up for buying winter tires), but the sheer luxury of having two weeks without any work-related stress! I spent today with cleaning the house and writing the rest of my assignment for retrotvexchange. The deadline is tomorrow, and I still have one more scene to write, which tells me that with my current (and, as far as I can see, future) work load, signing up for exchanges isn't really a good idea...

I still think I'll make it - barely. This cleaning-writing-cleaning strategy works really well. Whenever I get sick of writing, I go and clean another room. When I don't want to clean anymore, I go back to my laptop and crank out another 500 works. I got half of my scenes, and half of my apartment done that way.

Aside from deep-cleaning the house, I want to get the garden ready for winter, repair some stuff that needs repairing, and re-establish my cooking and exercise routine. Since I don't have to work on Wednesdays, the plan is to meal-prep work lunches for Monday and Tuesday on Sunday, and for Thursday and Fridays on Wednesday. Saturday is Cleaning Day, so I don't think I'll have more than a sandwich on that day; no cooking needed.

My physiotherapist bullied me into adding strength training for my back and core (which was something I had intended to do anyway, honestly!), but despite my best efforts, I failed to keep up with it. I just can't do anything on my work days, I'm just too wiped out when I come home. So I decided to push exercise to my off days, too. Three times per week shouldn't be too bad, right?

I also want to practice autogenic training more regularly again. I had done it three times a day, every day, for four months, and in all that time, didn't have a single migraine attack. That was the longest time without a migraine ever since they started about five years ago. Usually, I'd have them every six weeks or so. When I lost my dog last month, I stopped, and promptly got a migraine. Granted, I was greatly distressed by the loss, so that may have played a role. Still, I like being able to physically relax in the space of four minutes! And I want to use it as a launch pad for longer meditations, too.

I want to start drawing again, too. I hope I haven't lost all the progress I've been making... only one way to find out. And lastly, I hope that all the good stuff I want to reintroduce into my life will survive going back to work...

I love summer, it's my favorite season, but I'm glad this one is over - it hasn't been good to me. In July, work exploded once more with the arrival of a new doctor, and the practice was beset with weird, uh, incidents (we joked that the only thing missing was a meteorite impact or aliens landing), and in August, I lost my dog. She was almost seventeen, and that's a really long life for a dog, but it's also a really long time spent together and I was devastated.

But I signed up for three exchanges, and the deadlines were a good reason to force myself to focus on something outside work or grief, and a story is always a good escape hatch into another world, where I could focus on fucking up other people's life creating exciting adventures for my characters.

Writing

I'm making good progress on the exchange story with the closest deadline, but my PotA WIP is stalling, and I'm kinda cocking my head and squinting at it trying to find out what the effing problem is.

And it seems to be that my problem is writing fluff.

For thirteen stories now, I've been making life hell for these people. They've been hunted, tortured, shot, temporarily enslaved, almost drowned, attacked by mutants (twice), buried alive... I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

But in this story, they're getting a reprieve. It's short-lived, and there are evil things brewing under the surface (and surfacing for an instant even in this story), but on the surface, they're now living the peaceful, boring life of good citizens (albeit under false identities) in a peaceful little town, and only have to solve a small-town problem. It's slice of life, it's fluff, it's cute, and most of all, it's absolutely necessary because it introduces the plot strands that will fuck up their lives during the rest of series 2 (and beyond), but oh my god it's too peaceful for me to write, apparently.

I will finish this story, because despite it being too harmless for my evil, sadistic writer self, I still like it and as I said, I need the developments in this story in place for future stories, but I wonder if I need to introduce some spicy challenge for myself in order to progress at more than a snail's pace.

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Drawing

I haven't returned to drawing yet, but I plan to do so on the weekend. I guess I'll do some ellipses in planes as warm-up, do my first five boxes of the 250 Boxes Challenge from Drawabox, and then draw the oranges that I bought weeks ago. I took a photo, because of course the oranges are long gone by now :) So this will be the first time I'm drawing from a photo as reference. New things are good :)

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Reading

I discovered a new book about the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator) - well, not exactly, but it explains the four functions that underlie that system: Intuition, Sensation, Thinking, Feeling - and it does so better than any of the MBTI books I own. The title is To Live In The World As Ourselves by Sally V. Keil and I almost didn't buy it because the clunky title and the generic cover screamed 'self-published', but then I told myself that this was just snobbery on my part, and now I'm glad that I kicked Snob!Me's butt and bought it. I plan to use it for future character creations, and to maybe deepen some of my already existing characters. Now if I could only find something comparably good for the Enneagram types...