Worst week ever!

I have got to say that was the worst week ever.  I've been just worn out every single night.  Too tired to write, too tired to read, too tired to blog; I was even too tired to go to bed.

The worst part is I don't even have a physical job.  I'd feel less lame if I dug ditches or fixed cars or something.  I have a job where I sit and think all day, and that just absolutely wears me out sometimes.  Worse yet is the past week or two everything that can go wrong absolutely has.  I've been working for about 14 days straight, and it just wore me out.

Yes, I know people do this all the time and never complain.  What can I say?  I'm a whiner.  Always have been.

My plan is to start writing on Switch again this weekend (since tomorrow is full of obligations) and get back up on the horse of blogging and writing and whatnot.  The end is near, it should be over by now, and hopefully I can get back to a semblance of normalcy.

So Tired...

It's 7:45 and I'm totally worn out.  Beat.  Exhausted.  Sorry for the continued lack of anything, but I got nothing else to give.  I'm just completely worn out and beat. The only reason I haven't gone to bed yet is that nobody else in the house has, and I don't want to look lame...

Swamped!

No posting lately because I'm totally swamped at work.  Completely underwater.  Haven't written or blogged or really done anything that's not work-related for a couple of days, and today and tomorrow don't promise to be any better.

DIet Results

My starvation diet for Switch is bearing results.  I've cut it by about 10%, I think without sacrificing any of the story arc.  I found that some scenes were really repeated, or they were essentially versions of other scenes.  I didn't really need to hammer it home that finely, so I cut the one that felt tacked-on. 

I'm a little concerned that the story won't flow when I get it all done, as I'd used some exposition to break up some action, but it should work.  I'm happy to have tightened it up, at any rate.  There's more to cut, too.  I think if I go back to the front end I could probably do some work in the first five or ten chapters to cut those down.

My Self-Healing Hot Tub

Where we live, it's bitter cold most of the year.  A month and a half ago, though, we had a day that was almost warm enough not to freeze to death outside, and my wife suddenly says to me "when are you going to get the hot tub cleaned up and back in service?"

Like a dutiful husband, I understood exactly what she meant: "it's time for you to clean up the hot tub and put it back in service."  Which is what I did, exactly two weeks and 28 reminders later that it was "hot tub season" according to her.

Unfortunately, the jets didn't work.  She was extremely bummed not to be able to use the hot tub, and I was bummed that she wouldn't be running around in a bikini, which is pretty much my only interest in the hot tub.  That was about two weeks ago.

Tonight, for reasons unknown to me, a cosmic force compelled me to go treat the water today.  I turned on the jets out of habit, and they came on!  Suddenly the jets work!  The hot tub is alive!

That means that rewriting is done for the evening.  It's time to go hot tubbing.  Because all work and no play makes Colin a very dull boy.

Update:  I don't know where she found that frogman suit that she wore, but needless to say, I was not a fan.  Perhaps next time...

Just where I thought!

I always figured that the last quarter of Switch was ripe for reduction.  Now that I'm in the back half, I find that I was correct.  I just rewrote a fifteen-page chapter, and ended up cutting it to six pages.  Took out a minor character, an unimportant sub-plot, another plot point I didn't really do anything with, and tightened it up to flow much better.  Unfortunately, it's a stub chapter now and is bizarrely shorter than the others.

So I can either combine it with a later (or earlier) chapter, or I can leave it alone, or I can chop up some of the other chapters.  Frankly, I wonder if chopping up other chapters isn't the answer, since I always wonder where to do chapter breaks.

I always do it by feel - if it feels like a break, then I do.  Some chapters will cover multiple days, while others just one continuous scene.  I always wonder if I have a good feel for it or not.

Writing is exhausting

For me it is, at least.  I have a day job, and it's no cakewalk, but it's not too bad.  It's not physical, either, but rather mostly mental.  I'm capable of dealing with it, and then coming home and dealing with my family, and then going to bed.  No big deal.

When I throw writing in there, though, I start going to bed exhausted.  The constant mental focus on what word goes where, and what each character says and how they say it, and the on-point mentality needed to examine every turn of phrase and every punctuation point starts to wear me out. 

Last night I was totally wiped out and slept like a log, even snoring enough that it disturbed my poor, long-suffering wife. 

I guess I could down a whole bunch of energy drinks, but then the characters would start racing around and acting like hyper two-year-olds.