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Busy, Busy, Dreadfully Busy
Too Busy
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it. ~Henry David Thoreau
Fair enough. I did get a fair amount done this week.
However, since I had Monday off and shall continue to do so until next year, I didn’t have much time to really get caught up on job stuff.
As such, I’ll have to do double duty this weekend. I still have to write at least 2 episodes (preferably more) of Holly and Ivy, but I am currently 44.95% complete. This is at least halfway further than I typically am at this point in the cycle.
Don’t want to jinx anything by suggesting I’d get it done early, but I sure would like to.
Add to that any random errands that need to be run, cooking dinner and spending some 😵💫 zone-out 😵💫 time recovering from all of the above.
Luckily, since I listen to Christmas music while I write my Holiday Season Serial Romance episodes, I will have a little Christmas cheer to make the busy days go more festively.
Season’s 🍄 Smurfings
Christmas Special • The Smurfs’ Christmas • The Smurfs
Back in the days when Mom & Dad would go to the Plymouth Meeting Mall for square dancing, my sister and I would sometimes venture out on our own to pass the time cruising the stores.
Just outside the Church on the Mall was a mini-store with magic tricks. The salesmen would put on little shows to entice people to buy their merchandise. Believe me, it worked. I got a number of magic tricks from that little place.
Down the way, a bit farther, was a toy store with the most amazing display of Smurfs I’d ever seen.
Here and there, you’d see a store with a little shelf of the kooky blue characters but this toy store had a massive display of Smurfs right in the middle of everything. Smurfs of every kind. Mushroom houses. Play sets. Absolute Smurfmania.
I got a couple of these, as funds allowed. This was long before the cartoons came out. These were just a bizarre little curiosity in the toy store where I would while away the time. The toy store and the B. Dalton Bookseller were the spots I favored in that mall.
So, even after all these decades, I still have a spot in my 💙 for these little blue people and their silly antics.
Just The Middleman
I never know what I’m going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I’m just the middleman. ~Peter Max
The progress I’m making with this year’s story is easily attributed to letting my preferred mode of creating drive the process.
For a quick, stand-alone story of this sort, I can just turn on my internal Hallmark Channel and record what I’m seeing.
For bigger projects like The Sentinels or the Tales Of Olde Auringia, I really want to do some serious planning. I have tried pantsing these properties, but it often goes awry.
It seems I’m working at cross purposes. I really need to trust my watch-and-record process, but I need to marry that with a larger structural vision for the entire series.
It occurs to me I might need to start quilting, which would be writing in typical fashion to come up with parts of the overall story and then cutting and rearranging the bits and pieces. This might be the way for me to get a series put together.
As it turns out, I’ve been taking that approach with my programming for work lately. As much as I’d like to line them up and knock them down, I’ve got entirely too many projects outstanding to do it that way.
Time-slicing different assignments so that I can show progress to everybody waiting for me to get done is what’s working for me right now. It’s really frustrating to me to have to hop around like this, but it’s actually working the best in terms of ultimate results as well as maintaining some semblance of sanity.
Quilting? Who knew?
That’s all for now. I’m way too busy. I hope you’re relaxing and enjoying the holiday ambience since I cannot.