THOUGHTS, RAMBLINGS, WHATEVS
Wow. I think this week is probably going to be the week you guys get to watch me throw in the towel. At least temporarily. Until my life gets a little less hectic, that is.
So, updates. Well, things are pretty much a hot ass mess at the moment, and the world has got its teeth in my ass. Here are two linked things that have been going on. One of them is old news, but I haven’t shared it with you yet. A writer’s nightmare. And the other is related… a writer’s WORST nightmare.
So #1: I discovered LAST month that someone plagiarized my work and was selling it online!!!! Like, seriously? WTF. What an immoral P.O.S. I tracked the fool down, and Amazon removed the plagiarized work, but I still felt seriously violated. I’ll go into this experience with an entirely separate blog post, because I have some words of wisdom (in case you ever experience this yourself). But that’s one stupid thing that happened, lol.
I sat on this because I was literally in the midst of a situation that not only was coming from outside of my domain, but was also sucking my soul from my body. I just couldn’t focus on that, and the plagiarism, and moving my entire life from NY to AZ all at once. So once everything calms down, I’ll be able to get my thoughts together, process, and then explain the situation.
FYI, this is sort of what happens when your life is a constant whirlwind, and you don’t have much time to focus on yourself. Major personal shit sometimes slides by in the interest of taking care of other / others’ major shit. 😛
So that’s #1. Issue #2: My dead laptop situation? It was worse than I thought. Apparently, there’s mold damage due to some water getting into the laptop shell.
Like seriously. MOLD?! AAAAHHHH!!!! Gross and also weird as all fuck.
So, no, it wasn’t the chargers at all. It was just pure old fashioned fuck-Colby-in-the-rear time. Lol. And now, I have three chargers, all of which presumably work, but I just have no laptop to test them on. My laptop will completely NOT turn on. Not even with the battery out and connected directly to power.
Most significantly, though, my data is trapped inside, and I have no clue as to the state of it.
So now we’re staging a full breach rescue of my hard drive from the evil clutches of the mold invaders. I pray it all works out! That hard drive has my entire life on it, including all of my stories, novels, ideas, my project slate, everything. Especially that little book I’ve been talking about that’s supposed to come out this year… yeah, The Iron Maiden. That one. I just pray that Microcenter can work its magic and salvage my hard drive, or I am truly lost this year.
The most maddening and embarrassing part of this whole deal is that, yes, I DO have Google Drive and an external hard drive. I just haven’t had time to back them up since, oh, I don’t know… January? February? :-/
Let this be a lesson readers:
Always make time for you and for doing the things that are most important to you.
I didn’t treat the fragility of my stories and creative life with the respect they deserved, and now I’m paying the price for it. Literally and figuratively.
My stories, writing, project slate… those are my babies, though. I just hope this ends up being a close call rather than a wake for what is now lost! I ALSO hope I can release The Iron Maiden in a timely fashion, which has now been delayed, like, indefinitely. No laptop + no hard drive = NO BOOKS. (At least not for a while. I’m still a writer, after all.) It sucks to have potentially lost those 40,000 or so words I’ve written for The Iron Maiden this year, but as my mom said, “Don’t worry, you still know your story, and you still know your words. All you have to do is just re-write them!”
SO TRUE.
Knowledge is a crazy lil thing… once it’s created, it can’t really be destroyed. This is the basis of another sci-fi trilogy I’d conceptualized (which is on my project slate, now floating in the magical ether, LOL), and of course, this situation gives me tons of ideas for it!!
There is beauty and method in the madness y’all. You just have to stay positive and look for it.
Anyways, um, leaving on Wednesday morning at 4:00 AM with the little one in tow. It will be a crazy day and a crazy rest of the week. But even in the past chaos and the chaos that lies before me, I was still able to get some stuff done. Check it out:
LAST WEEK’S HAUL
What I wrote: Even in the whirlwind of crazy, I managed to squeeze out 2234 words for The Iron Maiden… a little pathetic (by my personal standards), but still a miracle considering everything that’s been going on! Step-by-step, I will finish this book! I also wrote a bit for some other books in the series that will be coming out this year, like “Blood & Ink” and “Chase the Devil”, but the word count was “negligible”. A couple hundred words. Still happy, though!
What I edited: Um… my soul? Yeah, nothing got edited this week, except my perception of reality as life crashed down around my ears, LOL.
What I read / watched / listened to: I actually finished a book this week: Six Moon Summer by S.M. Reine. I LOVED it, and I wrote a review on it here. I hit the 33% mark on The Barefoot Executive and made no progress on Police Procedure & Investigation, but that’s ok. Slow and steady wins the race!
What I researched / developed: Surprisingly, I developed two major projects this week. #1: I actually wrote an outline for another course I eventually want to launch at The Bohemian Badass, called “How to Write a Badass Multiple POV Novel”. Not the greatest title for a course, lol! But I’m working on it.
#2: Created another IP and creative franchise! In my head, there have been a series of stand-alone novels, all thrillers, that I’ve been trying to create series for, but it just wasn’t panning out. The thrillers, to me, felt independent and standalone, but perhaps linked. So I was trying to really think about links that would bring them together, and I’m leaning towards 1 of 2 options:
- Person-based theme / archetype-based theme: my thrillers are all about average Joes or average Janes who maybe have one quirk or specialty, and they get thrown into extraordinary, high-octane circumstances that require all of their wits to survive and conquer.
- Location-based theme: where all the thrillers are located in a specific city or location, but somehow everyone has a piece of that city’s madness in their lives…
THAT’S IT!!!! OMG, I JUST CAME UP WITH MY THRILLER THEME!!!!
The Doe City Thrillers
Like, we always refer to randos, nameless / faceless folks, and average Joes that we don’t know as “Does”, right? Like John Does or Jane Does.
Well, what if there is just an average city, with average folk, living quiet average lives… and then on occasion one of these “Does” gets dragged into some crazy, high-octane shit that changes them?!
I think by the end of each novel, I’m going to have each character finally leave Doe City, as it is symbolic of their changed persona. It is also the obvious end of their character arc.
OMG, and now there are even more ideas are coming forth from this!!!!!
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, creative and Akashic ethers!!
And yes, Reader, you just witnessed writer magic at work. Yes, this was all in real time, too, LOL!
What I learned: I did no personal creative uni this week. Things were just too cray, plus I didn’t have a laptop. Instead, I apparently enrolled in The School of Hard Knocks, lol. So yeah, some interesting lessons learned this week, courtesy of Professor Punch-You-In-The-Soul.
THIS WEEK’S HUSTLE
What I’m writing: I think I’m taking a break this week, honestly. I’ll attempt to work on The Iron Maiden from my temp laptop, but that probably won’t come until Friday or so, when I’m in my apartment and settled.
What I’m editing: My LIFE… trying to get settled in this new city.
What I’m reading / watching / listening to: My usual podcasts and books on my iPad will feature more heavily in my life than ever before, as they will probably be my sole sources of recreation until my life gets settled. I started reading SM Reine’s work (jn order), and I’m thinking I might start reading the second book in the Seasons of the Moon series, “All Hallows Moon”. I still have the Police Procedural book to get through as well as the remaining 66% of The Barefoot Executive. So lots of stuff to enjoy this summer… though how much of that will get done this week is debatable, lol.
What I’m learning: Yyeaahh… school is also probably not going to happen this week, LOL! Though I’m open to it if I have time. I miss my learning, but this is a temporary hiatus.
OMG. So SUCH a whirlwind, but plenty of hard lessons learned. Have you ever had a week like this? With pure chaos and emotional torture? How did YOU pull through it? Did it make you more creative or just totally disenchanted? Drop your thoughts and comments below!
Writing on, rocking on, and forever journeying towards creative badassery,
<3 Colby
