And now for something completely different...

I've been following Susannah Conway's blog for about two months now (and just read her book This I Know, which was fantastic by the way!) and saw her past posts on something she invented called the August Break. Giving it some quick thought, and wanting to do something different with the blog (even if it's for a little while), I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and give this a go.

Since I do not have a Flickr or Instagram account (and have no intentions of getting either of them), I'm going to post my contributions on here. I may add a few words here or there, but otherwise, it may be short of words but not of visuals!

Quick note: if huge things happen, I will take a brief pause from the August Break to share the news of whatever it is.

If you want to join this party, click the link I posted above and sign up!

Awww, here it goes!*

*if you get this, let's become friends. We'll have great things to share and adventures to embark on.

Skynet Writes My Books: What I Use to Make Words on the Computer

As you know, I do a ton of my writing on the computer. This accounts for about 75% of all the writing I do in a day. 15% is journaling and 10% is in notebooks count for the physical handwriting portion. Okay, enough with numbers, I ain't no Math major, but my dad is sorta... he has a Bachelor's in Engineering. It counts! >:-(

The big thing I use is Scrivener*, the word processor that some writers adore to pieces (like me!)... and some writers hate with a passion. I forgot who, but a writer I follow on Twitter talked about his dislike for it. Hey, no hard feelings, writer friend. You work with what works for ya!

Ahem, either way, Scrivener is my main tool. I love the notecard feature, how each chapter/scene/whatever you wanna call it is organized like that. A giant corkboard! It's aesthetically pleasing. You can customize the colors of the pins, the labels you stamp on the cards (I have custom ones like "Incomplete" and "Kill it with Fire"), and folders upon folders for random-ass crap like character files and pics (I use a lot of stock photos to help me visualize them), pictures with a few descriptive paragraphs on certain locations (like real places or even fictional towns, like the one in Spiders), and a special folder of parts I've written but haven't found their places in the story yet.

[I talked about how I won a 50% coupon from winning NaNoWriMo in 2011. That's the "easy" way to get some savings off of the software if you already know you want it OMG. But there are free trials, so best to give it a test run before you throw money at it. But if you already want it for sure, the best way to save money is to do NaNoWriMo this year and write 50,000 words. You get the satisfaction of doing something great and fun, and you can get some awesome software on the cheap(er)!]

While I like writing on Scrivener's word processor portion, I love the sound of manual typewriters, so I often use Writer: the Internet Typewriter. Holy Moses, whoever created this, you are a saint unto humanity and should have a church built in your honor. You can customize it to make the sounds of a manual or electric typewriter, font size and style, even the background and text colors! I use white text against a blue background as a throwback to my early days messing around with WordPerfect for DOS on my grandfather's Tandy computer.

But converting text from the Internet Typewriter to Scrivener can cause some headache-making issues with formatting, so I open up Microsoft Word to fix the spacing, paragraph indents (more so on Scrivener), change straight quotes and apostrophes to smart ones, and of course check for spelling and grammar. I used to do a ton of my writing on Word, but I've all but abandoned it for my creative projects. I still use it for other things like making lists and job-hunting related work (e.g. resumes and cover letters).

I do all my writing on my laptop with an external keyboard that is solar-powered (not cheap, but it was awesome. Oddest impulse purchase I ever made, for sure!). I used to write a lot on my bed and using only the keyboard built into the laptop, but the screen hinge cracked earlier this year and I can barely move it around, let alone close it. That, besides the Vista software I still have (I know, I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me...) are the reasons I'm looking into getting a new laptop very soon. I've had this thing for over five years. That's above average for me. I usually replace things within two-three years. That's what working part-time and paying important bills will do to ya: make use of what you got. Until it breaks. See: my car, which is not only used but also turned 10 years old this year and is a model that doesn't even exist anymore.

So, writing peeps, what do you use to create words on computer screens? Do you go all out and have folders upon folders of writing with character files and pics of random buildings, or do you prefer the simpler WordPad just to get the damn thing down? Let me know in the comments!

*I use the Windows version, which is not as fully-stocked with awesomeness as the Mac version, but frequent updates are fixing this!

A Good Run of Bad Luck

Okay, I had some things go down since I last wrote on here. Allow me to present it in bullet list form, since I'm lazy and it also will work better for this. Sounds good? Alrighty then, let's go!

• The only good thing that happened last week was the screening of Stop Making Sense. The crowd was awesome, singing along and cheering. It was like "I found my people!" And I don't even live in Austin. ;_; (About three people complimented my shirt!)
• The job search wasn't going very well. Had a so-so interview the day after the Stop Making Sense screening. I also had a video interview with one bank, a teller skills assessment test with another. Got a "nope" email after the video interview and barely passed the test (I was two points away from the minimum) and have to wait two months to retake it. 
• Atop all this, my mood was really off for some reason. I had trouble pinning it down, but I feared the worst: is depression coming to visit again?
• Saturday night, I finally realized the cause of my "off" mood: I was fighting off a nasty cold. So I spent my two days off (yesterday and today) to recover from it. Coughing so hard I pulled a muscle on my left side, so it hurt to stand until today. 
• With my two days off, I watched archived livestreams by Ray of Achievement Hunter, played Plants vs. Zombies (shut up, this game's ridiculously fun), and did some light reading. Along with eating a ton of fruit popsicles (which helped my throat when it was getting real sore from the coughing). 

But now, there is an extra set of good news: I got another interview with a local credit union for a part-time teller job, so there's that! And also, I haven't heard back from the interview from Tuesday, so there's a slight chance of that being a yes. But we'll have to see...

I also have made a huge leap in recovering from the cold. I am not about to run a 5K or anything like that, but it is a big difference. I'm keeping a sharp eye on it so it doesn't turn into bronchitis or something equally ugly. 

Haven't done any serious reading or writing since I fell ill, but I hope to begin that again once I start regaining my strength. 

That's about what was going on with me these days. Hope things are better for y'all. If not, I hope they do get better, at least, a little more than it was before. <3 div="">

The Tools of the Frustrated Lady Writer

In my free time (when I should be doing other things, like writing, etc.) I have been browsing various notebook and journaling websites and Tumblrs. After a while, I began to think about the tools I use for my IRL writing, so I'm gonna share with y'all my favorite pens, notebooks and journals, inks, and other random-ass things that I use to create words not on a computer!

And just as quickly...

The interview that I had yesterday, the high I was riding from doing a good job... crashed and burned when, only several hours after the interview, I got an email saying "nope, you ain't getting nothing from us *trollface*"

Hey, Ray, my main man, can ya sum up my feelings for me in one funny .gif?

Thanks, I knew I could count on ya.

P.S.: But seriously peeps, I knew I goofed on some parts, which likely cost me the final offer. I now know what to do when the next interview happens. But also, the last person that interviewed me was a tough nut to crack.

TWO JOB INTERVIEWS OMG (and other exciting things that happened)

That's right, my sweet little marshmallow chicks, I secured two job interviews! I had a surprise phone one this morning and I did so well, they want to meet me on Friday for a final interview!

Then, the one I had scheduled about a week ago also went well, so I have a final interview with them next week on the day after Stop Making Sense (yeah, I got a ticket to the Austin screening and I am SO GOING. I'll be the brunette wearing this shirt and reading whatever I found in the Half Price Books in town).

I should note that these two jobs are full-time, benefits-having, call center/customer service positions. You would think I would be bothered by this, but not really. I'm ready to try something different and put myself in a new work environment. I may start entry-level, but how else can I get a better feel of the place than start from the beginning? No sense in being thrown half-way up.

Man, near-victory tastes so good, like blood orange candies.

Atop that, I've been making excellent progress on my current novel project. Over 11K written just in the last twelve days!

43830 / 100000 words. 44% done!

And there is still so much more left to write. Well, good thing I have today and tomorrow off from work. It's going to be a writing/reading/listening to music/Orphan Black watching bonanza!

I also secured tickets to several upcoming concerts: Little Dragon next month, Twin Shadow in late October, and Broken Bells in early October.

So wow, talk about a reversal of fortune, huh? So much good stuff is happening. I'm so... wait, lemme have Ray tell you himself:

Hope you lovely readers out there are doing well in whatever you are doing. If not, I hope things get better for ya and that you cherish even the tiniest of good things. That's what kept me going when I was first recovering from depression. You gotta find the little things to keep you going. It's hard, but it will be worth it.

I believe in me and (everyone else) too, tiny cactus!

See ya next time!

That great moment...

when one serial killer character I wrote (from Spiders) used a previous serial killer character's MO before writing the spiritual prequel (current project) and it turns out... it works out with no continuity issues. Because I TOTALLY WANTED THAT TO HAPPEN ANYWAY.

You don't even know how much I love this .gif.

What I Would Take 2.0

A while back, over a year ago to be exact, I did my first attempt at The Burning House (where I photographed what I would take in the event of a forthcoming catastrophe). Since time has passed, favorite things have changed. There were things I rather save than others, so some switching around was done. Now I feel that I have a better idea. Or at least, the most current one.