Happy New...wait...when was that?

I'm around, but have been lazy recently. I guess not "lazy" but just not blogging. I've been planning things and sending out poetry submissions to clear out every piece I have that is finished but sitting around on my computer still. (And I have a new laptop because my old one finally lost its mind) Clearing out some of that poetry makes way for finishing some short fiction. And continuing work on my NaNoWriMo novel. I wrote over 50k on that story in November, so yay! But I need to add about 25k to finish it out.

In December I was trying to finish a different novel, but didn't. I decided to split the story between two characters. The main narrator is left in the dark a lot, and I figured getting her "I'm new to this and don't know what's going on" narrative too often would get annoying. So I'm giving the other part of the story to the character who has the most power and knowledge, but throws away some parts of what is going on because it doesn't fit with what she thinks is useful. She's a fighter, no time for whimsy. Take no prisoners. Ever.

Other than writing, I have some art projects I've been working on. More about those some other time.

I'm attempting to take some edX courses. Poetry in America: Whitman, and Intro to the Music Business start this month. Also starting in January, Coursera has Roman Architecture and Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences. I should know enough about Roman Architecture between all the Art History, Ancient History and Classics courses I've taken, but wanted a refresher on locations, engineering and terms.
I think the most interesting course will probably be Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. That one starts in early February. In late February there's another intriguing course offered through edX called Library Advocacy Unshushed. Once those courses start I'll probably have some comments on them.

So, there's an update. I hope to get back to regular posting in the near future.

One last thing--Steampunk World: A multicultural Steampunk fiction anthology has a couple days left in its Kickstarter campaign, check it out.

Insomnia and NaNoWriMo

Hi! I wanted to be really organized, and wanted to blog about NaNoWriMo a lot, like on a daily basis, but that hasn't happened. But it might now.

Insomnia happened. Of course I'd be hit with the worst round of insomnia that I've ever faced. You'd think that not being able to sleep when I have a lot of projects that I want to finish would be good, but it's not. Well, the first couple days awake aren't too bad. But not being able to sleep, after day three, means not being able to think or do much of anything other than obsess about not being able to sleep or be unbearably angry about still being awake. It doesn't do much for productivity.

I've been holding my own against NaNoWriMo (a little behind, but I should be able to finish catching up today) and regular life-related stuff despite the insomnia other than the fact that I've been completely unpleasant to be around, but I think I've broken the insomnia. I slept five hours last night.

This is a breakthrough because I've had two nights of 5-6 hours of solid sleep in the past few days. Before that I had been sleeping 12-16 hours on Friday to Saturday, and then about 10 hours spread out during the week in half-hour to 2-hour long segments.

This morning when I woke up at a normal time, after sleeping for a rather normal length of time, I wanted to get up and exercise. I'm not used to having this extra energy at all. I'm especially not used to feeling focused... weird. I had been trying to push through the insomnia, and act like it didn't impact me that much, but it did. I see that now.

So, I'm ready to get back on track. And even though I'm a bit over 30k into NaNoWriMo, it's very disjointed, so I'm going to skim over what I've got and start filling in the missing parts. I have to do that or else finishing this novel is going to be much more difficult. Onward to 35k! And to 50k beyond that!