![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
1) Just got the contract for my next book from the fine folks at Arsenal Pulp Press. Working title, unless I change it in the next month, is Families Album. Look for it in your better bookstores (if there are any actual bookstores left) in September 2013.
2) I have embarked on yet another in an infinite lifetime string of self-improvement projects in order to help me write more and feel better and so on. This one involves an app (as all self-improvement projects must in this decade by order of Steve Jobs) called Goal Streaks. It's just the appification of the Seinfeld "don't break the chain" thing, but it provides me with daily ticky-boxes on several axes, and it's very flexible. Maybe this will be the system that succeeds where all others have failed in helping me build better habits. Maybe the act of attempting to Build Better Habits is actually the part of the process I need. Who knows. Regardless, I have started with a very modest pair of goals, and we'll see how long this lasts.
3) The other goal, in addition to getting some &%$#@! writing done every day somehow, for the love of webfooted friends in the forest, is to work my way through the Muller System exercises. It's a series of low-impact core strength exercises and flexibility routines designed to be done once a day for about fifteen minutes - Muller encourages that you throw open the windows and stand in front of them, taking the light and air, as you exercise in your loincloth first thing in the morning - but I am opting to skip this part. If anyone in Internetland would like to Muller with me, make yourself known and we can be throwbacks together.
3a) This Muller-ing became possible because I hurt my knee at a show (one of these modern chase-around-after-your-character things, very enjoyable) and my doctor, she of many good ideas, prescribed for me Arthrotec twice a day for a couple of weeks. That went beautifully, and I eventually tapered myself down to one a day which was good, and then I ran out and stopped taking them and was suddenly back to waking up in pain and misery every morning (a bodily condition in which I would have killed you with a rusty grapefruit spoon if you had suggested I do even gentle calisthenics in the morning, loincloth or no). I went back to the doctor and asked for the good stuff back please, and now I spring out of bed and start doing hip circles while breathing deeply.
4) It's the holiday season. Usually around this date I can kind of get a temperature on what my holiday-season experience might be like, based on how aggravated I am already about Holiday Season shenanigans: namely, being invited to Christmas activities which are being billed as Holiday Activities. Listen, have a Christmas event. Have twenty-four of them. I might well come and share a few with you. But don't insult my intelligence, my religion, and my family by inviting me to things like a Holiday Tree Decorating Party, as though any other winter holiday other than Christmas has any truck whatsoever with a tree, as though by substituting "Holiday" for "Christmas" it's magically an inclusive winter-holiday event.
4a) It's like when lesbian and gay orgs change their names or mission statements to LGBT, but make no changes whatsoever to their policies or activities.
4b) There's no such thing as a Chanukah Bush. Don't even start with me.
4c) See? This is what I mean about my emotional temperature re: The Holiday Season.
5) I think I have just wrangled a Atlantic Canada tour into place. Acadia University, Memorial University, University of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton University and St. Francis Xavier University. I've never been to PEI, and I have longed to go to Newfoundland for some years now, so I'm pretty keen on this turn of affairs. Even if it is happening in February.
5a) I'm sure everything will be fine, though, right? Right?
2) I have embarked on yet another in an infinite lifetime string of self-improvement projects in order to help me write more and feel better and so on. This one involves an app (as all self-improvement projects must in this decade by order of Steve Jobs) called Goal Streaks. It's just the appification of the Seinfeld "don't break the chain" thing, but it provides me with daily ticky-boxes on several axes, and it's very flexible. Maybe this will be the system that succeeds where all others have failed in helping me build better habits. Maybe the act of attempting to Build Better Habits is actually the part of the process I need. Who knows. Regardless, I have started with a very modest pair of goals, and we'll see how long this lasts.
3) The other goal, in addition to getting some &%$#@! writing done every day somehow, for the love of webfooted friends in the forest, is to work my way through the Muller System exercises. It's a series of low-impact core strength exercises and flexibility routines designed to be done once a day for about fifteen minutes - Muller encourages that you throw open the windows and stand in front of them, taking the light and air, as you exercise in your loincloth first thing in the morning - but I am opting to skip this part. If anyone in Internetland would like to Muller with me, make yourself known and we can be throwbacks together.
3a) This Muller-ing became possible because I hurt my knee at a show (one of these modern chase-around-after-your-character things, very enjoyable) and my doctor, she of many good ideas, prescribed for me Arthrotec twice a day for a couple of weeks. That went beautifully, and I eventually tapered myself down to one a day which was good, and then I ran out and stopped taking them and was suddenly back to waking up in pain and misery every morning (a bodily condition in which I would have killed you with a rusty grapefruit spoon if you had suggested I do even gentle calisthenics in the morning, loincloth or no). I went back to the doctor and asked for the good stuff back please, and now I spring out of bed and start doing hip circles while breathing deeply.
4) It's the holiday season. Usually around this date I can kind of get a temperature on what my holiday-season experience might be like, based on how aggravated I am already about Holiday Season shenanigans: namely, being invited to Christmas activities which are being billed as Holiday Activities. Listen, have a Christmas event. Have twenty-four of them. I might well come and share a few with you. But don't insult my intelligence, my religion, and my family by inviting me to things like a Holiday Tree Decorating Party, as though any other winter holiday other than Christmas has any truck whatsoever with a tree, as though by substituting "Holiday" for "Christmas" it's magically an inclusive winter-holiday event.
4a) It's like when lesbian and gay orgs change their names or mission statements to LGBT, but make no changes whatsoever to their policies or activities.
4b) There's no such thing as a Chanukah Bush. Don't even start with me.
4c) See? This is what I mean about my emotional temperature re: The Holiday Season.
5) I think I have just wrangled a Atlantic Canada tour into place. Acadia University, Memorial University, University of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton University and St. Francis Xavier University. I've never been to PEI, and I have longed to go to Newfoundland for some years now, so I'm pretty keen on this turn of affairs. Even if it is happening in February.
5a) I'm sure everything will be fine, though, right? Right?
