Day 11: Room Changes

Today, I spent most of my time in my bedroom. Unfortunately, my laptop was in the kitchen, so you can bet I wasn't writing. Instead, I was rearranging my room for the first time since I moved up there in January 2012.

My bed has been moved so that I'm looking at the skylight, which freed up a lot of space elsewhere. I lost floor space, but I don't really use my floor for anything other than an Unofficial Dumping Ground. So that's not going to happen as much or as easily anymore. There's also talk of getting a new bookshelf in there, so that'll solve the problem of space.

Fun, right?

Well, yes and no. I'm glad the room is being changed around. I'm glad to be having more space. I just wish we hadn't been in the middle of a heat wave when I had to do it. (It was do it myself or attempt to do it with my mum trying to help; my room was barely big enough in terms of head space for me to have done it. I could not have rotated the bed with her also there, and it wouldn't have made actually moving furniture any easier. So, I waited until she was out of the house to do it, and she got to go out in the sun when she got home instead of baking in the attic. I stayed there to continue cleaning and moving things that weren't my bed.)

Aside from the heat, there was also the problem of not writing. As I'm sure you might have guessed, that's not fun for someone who's behind on his word count.

End result: I need to write five and half thousand words tomorrow to stick to my 2K-per-day (as an average) rule. First thing in the morning, I'm making space on my desk. Second thing, I'm moving my laptop upstairs. Then I'll be setting myself targets for every half hour until I've reached my target.

Considering I can write pretty quickly, I think I might be able to get this done before dinner time (unless dinner time is lunch time, in which case, later than that.) After that, I'm one massive step into The Blood of Leap. However, even at this stage in the book, I can see I'm going to have some length-trouble again. I can also foresee a remedy for that, which doesn't involve adding a chunk to the end of the book. This is actually utilizing something already in the plan, not something I missed.

I'm actually kind of excited about that, because it's a way to introduce something more fully that I'd wanted to write about for a long time. So that's fun. I think I actually thought about it while cleaning my room.

Anyway, that's happened. I like when these books surprise me. The plans for The Hounds of Hell and The Blood of Leap have been written for a long time, so I haven't really had a chance to consider them up until recently. I didn't think about what was missing or if there was enough detail. I wrote the plans, and then I intended to write the books. That was around...May? (I'm just going to go check an email...) Nope, not May. March. I wrote the plan in March.

So, I'm getting surprised quite a bit. It's kind of a "Why didn't I do this?" kind of feeling. Which is where I'm going back to the bedroom, at that little tangent, to something else I wondered why I didn't do before: start saving coins in my jar again.

You might recall (unless you're new here - hello!) that last September, I was saving for a tablet. I was putting money in a jar every week, pouring every coin I had in my wallet inside. I had a goal.

For some reason, even though I've been quote-unquote saving for a camera, I haven't actually been saving. My bank account has gone down frequently. I've spent money because I had it (though that's not to say I've had a lot.) But I wasn't saving anything, and I wasn't getting any closer to my camera. So, I put about €19 in there today in coins that I had laying around.

Take that savings jar. Take it and like it.

Now, it'll take a while to save the money I need for a camera like that, so obviously I'm going to have to start budgeting my money properly again. (Yuck.) But it's a case of putting €20 aside every week. Given the fact that most of my friends work so we rarely get to meet up, it's actually fairly easy to not spend money, if I just gave that a shot every once in a while.

The most I ever spend on comic books in a week is €20. That might seem like a lot, but that's when everything seems to come out all at the same time. I also go to the cinema, and if I stopped buying sweets (okay, chocolate) not only would I be doing my health some good, I'd save a few euro per week. It would only cost me €10 per visit (and that's also a chance to see friends, so yay for a social life!) In terms of books... not to sound like my mum, but I have enough of them to last me a while.

Okay, even I can't believe I won't buy books. But let's look at it this way: three books I've wanted for a long time are on their way to my house because I had money on an O2 card and wanted to clear it off so I would no longer be under any hold by it. And I have the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to read. And Game of Thrones. (Just the first book in that series...but also the fourth paperback... long story.) But I have a lot of books I want to read, and as near as I can tell, there isn't much coming out soon that I want to read. (Okay, so Darren Shan's Zom-B series has a new book every few months... shut up. And Roddy Doyle is releasing The Guts and that has Jimmy Rabbitte Jnr in it and I want to read it and shut up... I'm talking to myself here.)

Even still, I'm not exactly rolling in the money. But I do have some put aside to finally sort out the Things I need to clear my taxation with the IRS and finally start receiving money from Amazon. And there's actually money there. Though, and this is the real kick in the teeth, it'll take a while for me to get it. The IRS will take about 8 weeks to process my forms. Effectively two months. Amazon can take up to 60 days to send me a payment. Another two months. By that calculation, I'll have the first royalty check in time for Christmas presents. While that's not putting me any closer to owning a camera now, it's finally clearing me up to earn money from my books. Even if it takes a while to get to me.

This started with room changes and barely spoke about the book... um...

Okay, so NaNoWriMo is fun, and all that, but I can really understand how life starts getting in the way of it, even when you don't seem to have much to do. From the outside looking in, I have five days off per week and no other commitments. And yet, I've been finding it difficult to actually get to my laptop to write. (Incidentally, once I actually get to my laptop, I've been quicker this month at actually getting to work than I have been for the last eleven months, so that hasn't been a problem.) I just happen to have a lot going on in life that I don't talk about online, but it takes up a lot of time in my day. The room change is part of that.

I've been cleaning it for a while now, sorting through notes, finding things I thought I'd lost forever (like, thrown out completely) and generally getting stuck doing it for hours, because there's a lot of stuff that needs going through from the past four years. A lot of stuff was just moved up to the attic without me looking at first when I moved up there, and I haven't paid this much attention to all that sort of stuff since. Yes, in a year and a half I haven't done a clear-out of stuff. That's because I've mostly considered the stuff that's been thrown out recently to be important for college. (As it happens, a lot of it wasn't. It met the recycling bin. It was magical.)

This has gone on too long, hasn't it? Anyway, the short version of this is: I didn't write nearly as much as I wanted to today, so I get to pay for it tomorrow.

Changes

Well, I'm back. I reckon I'll be back until about Christmas time, at which point Social Oopmh, my auto-tweet companion, will be taking over my Twitter. It's not that I don't love you guys, I'll just have an awful lot of work to do around then. More on that in the future.

Okay, so here I am, anyway.My holiday is over from the moment I post this, though I'll tell you now for free that I won't be on Twitter or blogging tomorrow, because it'll be a very busy day. I'll be in the college helping Ferris revise for a poetry exam. Or procrastinate. It's up to him, really. Then I'll be off to Westmeath for Giddimon's birthday bash, staying overnight. I know. Westmeath. Ferris warned I might not come back. We'll see. I have Photographic Memory to post on Tuesday when I eventually get back home. And a lot of reviews. Seriously, changes are coming to this blog.

I'd hoped to implement them before I left, but it wasn't until a few days in that I got the ideas. If you're here enough you might notice them straight away. I'll make them more apparent as they actually happen. Basically I'm making this thing a little less about one specific subject, and more about the specific subjects I most enjoy.

On the writing front, I got no more editing done. It's been an emotional couple of weeks. Not all the time, but some of the time. I started a new book, as I have a habit of doing, and I'm posting it up on Facebook. So far no one has said anything good, bad or indifferent about it, so I'm assuming it's gone unnoticed. If you're a friend on Facebook, look in the notes section. Oh, and I discovered a whole second half to Love is a Remarkably Destructive Bitch, my novella with the less-than-subtle title. I won't tell you how the second half came about, but I only really figured out all the details this morning, and immediately told Ferris that I had an ending to it.

What else... oh, I've started to play my ukulele. I can play a few chords, and I'm getting the hang of strumming. Still rubbish, but everyone but Bill Bailey's character in Black Books is terrible at an instrument when they start. The important thing is I'm trying and I'm loving it.

Hmm... I had a list of things I was going to do. Didn't do my little day trip. Might say I chickened out of it, I guess. Long story that I won't be telling anyone. It's was all in my head, anyway. Didn't do any work on the submission that I mentioned... not that there's much to do but read over my own stuff. Um... yeah, there's some more stuff done regarding music. Not as much as I hoped to get done, because of the aforementioned "emotional couple of weeks" but a few. A start. Didn't do as much reading as I wanted to, but I have a few more reviews to post up. Actually, a lot of reviews to post up, if I write them for all the books I read for Story Time at work... Sleeping habits are alright. The real test will be to see if I can stay asleep over then next couple of weeks, now that my brother has gone on holiday (actual holiday... lucky bugger). Photo book didn't happen, and the discussions with friends have been limited to entirely textual things. No bother. I have three and a half hours to annoy Ferris with every thought that escapes my lips tomorrow.

So, I think that's it. Um, a big thank you to Rebecca Woodhead for her lovely concern, despite the fact that I was a royal pain in the ass. I do hope her book publication is coming along well. Thanks also to all those that kept thinking of me enough to mention me in tweets, and to everyone who's been looking at the blog over the past couple of weeks. And a thanks to anyone who actually buys anything through the links in the reviews. That one kind of goes on forever. Thanks to my friends who kept me sane all through the summer - I have four weeks to go as of tomorrow before I'm back in college! Special mention to Ferris Bueller, Miley Cyrus and Hyper McHen, because they're pretty much very awesome individuals and time spent with them is always fun. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to post a couple of reviews tonight!