A Time For Everything

I don't really mind the work weeks that much, but I look forward to Saturdays and Sundays for the extra hour or two of writing time I get. :0)

This weekend will be focused on revisions and getting my book, To Linzer & to Cherish, as close to ready for submission as possible.

I'll also work on my goals list, since, as you can see I don't have those...but I've been thinking about them and working on the list and the action plans. Next week for sure.

Have a great weekend.

I'm very excited for tomorrow-- It's Saturday, obviously, but it means I'll have a good 4 to 5 hours of writing time to get my revisions done. I'm not sure I can get them all done Saturday, but I'm hopeful that between Saturday and Sunday, they'll be completed. *fingers crossed*

The question becomes: do I let it rest and then re-read it myself or find a beta reader for the final set of eyeballs....

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The office upgrades are coming along. The kitchen should be complete no later than next week, from what I hear. All the water-stained ceiling tiles have been replaced as well. Now we just need a fresh coat of paint and good dusting / vacuuming and my little corner of the office space will be as good as new.

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That's all I've got...

Hope you have a great weekend. Take care.

That is all...

Of course, it's spring in Texas and we do tend to get a lot of rain. But, man, with all the COVID-19 happening, sunshine would go a long way to keeping our spirits up here in North Texas. *sigh*

So update on the Chili Cheese Corn dog Casserole... It was okay. It was good. It was fine. But it wasn't great. 'Cause, here's the thing. Corn dogs are deep friend in their batter, right? And our cornbread batter was not deep friend, it was merely baked. And corn dog batter is usually a bit sweet, too, yeah?

Now the sweet can solved, but the deep friend, not so much, unless we use real corn dogs. Which I'm not opposed to. But here's the thing--I'd rather just have a corn dog with mustard and not all that chili and cheese. I guess the FitzGerald household doesn't have a new recipe to incorporate into the rotation. Shame. But, as you know, I try not to eat too much with high bad-for-you content these days, which corn dogs most assuredly have. So is it really a bad thing that the recipe didn't work out?

Logging food and being aware of calories and all the other bits and bites that the Fitbit keeps track has helped me actually drop a couple of pounds. Might all be water weight for the moment, but it's a start. I still have a few pounds to go to reach the target weight again, and I'm almost dreading it because that means my workouts have to become more targeted in order build the muscle. That also means my daily pretzel habit may have to go bye-bye. Will probably have to go bye-bye so I can replace the calories with more protein to help build my own muscles and reduce those carbs>sugars>body fats.

The garage project will continue this weekend with another car load of stuff to be transferred to our warehouse. I might also start some cleaning now that a stretch of (unfinished) wall will be revealed.

Have you got big, exciting plans for the weekend?

Hope it's a good one. Take care.

If there was ever a time to say Thank Goodness It's Friday it's now. As things continue to slow and shut down, I'm glad it's the weekend.

A handful of our clients have decided to work from home, but that doesn't affect us much. We're still showing up every day and taking care of the back end side of IT.

I spent some time project planning yesterday as I mentioned Wednesday I needed to do. Looking at the breakout makes me want to not do at least one of them... If you're so inclined to see what my project planning looks like, it's here. The verbiage (project / phase / task) is taken from our software at work and worked well for my purposes. Plus it's always nice when my two worlds can cross-pollinate.

Home life is back to normal. The last piece was finding my charger cable for my car, and now that's back in the car... I'll go grocery shopping early Sunday morning as per usual and hope that the shelves look closer to full than to empty. But we'll make do with whatever I find. The dog will get her first bath in probably 4 - 5 weeks, poor thing. I'll prep food for the week. Laundry will get caught up once and for all. I can hardly wait.

I might -- MIGHT -- start on that garage project.

I'm already working on the Holiday / Disability Anthology.

Aspects of the weight loss project will be put into place.

And now...more cruise pics!! These are just general pictures from time on the boat...





For the rest of the randomness, click here.

Have a great weekend!

And it's not that the week has been especially horrific (only one day was particularly stressful), but I'm meeting my dear friend N for lunch as long as the weather cooperates at least one the days. Visiting with N is always a cause for celebration and I can't wait to see her.


And also, my family will sleep in and I don't have to get ready for work, which means I'll have an extra couple of hours of peace and quiet to dig into the two projects I'm working on. I'm working on a synopsis for one and character building for the other...

So I've been back to routines and schedules for 4.5 days now and things are going pretty well. For the most part, no carbs other than my carb-light tortillas--although I must confess to a bowl of cereal on that super stressful day. I just needed something easy and comforting. I've gotten up on time every day, although not as early as once upon a time, and exercised daily in the mornings, and did yoga every evening--again accept for that one day where I just went to bed as soon as I could after dinner.

So I've made a good start at getting back on the wagons. Challenges lie ahead however. I'll be headed to a writers retreat on Thursday and everyone will be providing meals...I'll just to make sure I'm extra diligent about getting more than the usual number of steps in and making the healthiest choices I can.

Have a great weekend--

There's not much going on really, either at work or at home, but after the holiday last week and my travels I missed three days of work at busy juncture of the month and I spent most of the week getting all caught up. So whew.

I'm just ready to be home for a couple of days,futzing around with this, that, and the other, cleaning house, putting out whatever other Christmas decorations I can find.

Have a great weekend!

I'm not feeling quite this out of gas, but I can't deny I'm pretty run down. As I mentioned Wednesday, I've been feeling meh and I have a lot of stuff on my plate.

This weekend, I'll be able to make some progress on writers group things without having to stuff them in around the day job or be interrupted by the phone or pulled into a meeting as I find a groove on something.

And after a way-too-long passage of time, I'm having lunch with my dear friend N tomorrow. Can't wait to see you!!

Have a great weekend y'all!

By the time the Blues scored their second goal in the first period, I was pretty confident they were taking home the Cup. Now, even TWO minutes in hockey is a long time wherein anything can happen. My beloved Stars scored three goals in seventy-one second just this past February. But sometimes you can tell whether a come back is possible. And many times we've heard that the team who scores first generally wins the game. You get an insurance goal and, well...

The joy of the winning team doesn't hit me nearly as hard as the grief of the losing team. It's one thing if you get swept in four games. It's hard, sure. It's heartbreaking to a degree. But when you duke it out to a game seven, trading wins back and forth and then you lose. That's heartbreaking. To see grown men, kneeling on the ice, shoulders shaking as they cry... wow, pulls at the heartstrings even if you don't like the team.

And the losing team can't leave the ice until the handshake line which takes a few minutes to get to while the winners are jumping around hugging, yelling, celebrating.

~

Scrivener is the writing application I use and I've had issues with it off an on for months. Nothing serious, I just feel like there are little bugs cropping up here and there. I'm waiting for the new Windows version to be released, so there probably are a few bugs since they're not updating the version I have.

Anyway... my word count for my book--I switched from the book I've been complaining about to the other half-done book I mentioned a while back--was reported to be 38K-ish according to Scrivener's word count tabulator. I didn't think that was correct, but once I exported the thing into Word, I was very pleased to see I have indeed written that many words. After a read-through, it's missing a few scenes and things, but it's way more complete than I remembered, so YAY! I also have a book cover for it already, so I don't have to spend money on it at this point.

I've reached out my editor for a slot on her calendar in August, and between now and then it's going to be nose to the grindstone to get the book complete. Minus the holiday and Sonshine's visit of course.

~

And today is Friday, tomorrow is writers group, which I'm looking forward to as usual.

Have a GREAT weekend!!!

It's been a rocky week. A major clusterfuck happened in the business we own, and DH spent the better part of the week angry and frustrated because no one in the companies involved could figure how to fix what someone in one of the two companies screwed up. It fell on him to figure out how to fix it...meaning he had to get high enough in the customer service food chain to find someone who knew how the different systems worked together. I know he's glad for the weekend for sure. Except it's almost fireworks season again and he'll be preparing for that.


On my end, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit with Book 7. I keep writing and I'm churning out words, but I don't feel like I'm making progress. If I knew what the issue was I could probably solve it, you know? But I'm reaching the point where I'm wondering if it's time to move on to another project.

I hate to give up on my characters and for them to not get their happily ever after and for all those words to be for naught. (I'm at about 16K of a projected 35K.) Maybe I need a book/plot whisperer. So I plunked down $35 for some help. Kristen Lamb claims there's not a plot problem she can't solve, but what if it's an author problem and not a plot problem?? That one's a little harder to fix.

I meant to post Wednesday, but got busy with beginning-of-the-month tasks that needed to get done.

Wednesday's would-have-been topic? Office cleaning. I'd mentioned Monday that my 100 Things project seemed to be petering to a close, and it mostly is, but I got a wild hair on Tuesday while working from home to clean my home office. I'm talking about sorting through stuff, throwing stuff away, moving furniture and sweeping and dusting all surfaces. I stalled out at the bookshelf full of stuff in the corner. It was mostly full of paper and I undertook to go through it all.

And I did. I threw out a shit ton of paper and saved four story ideas that could be re-worked at some point. I went through all kinds of cross stitch stuff as well and only saved a handful of hand-created patterns that will go into my pattern software at some point.

I've also been going great guns in terms of my writers group. Last Friday, I mention that I was going to be president again and I've been going great guns in securing nominees for other positions, getting all the admin ducks in row, and just generally gearing up. It's going pretty well.

My dear friend N reminded me that a lot of writers give up writing time when they take on volunteer positions in their various volunteer organizations. That was definitely the first thought I had when asked to step up, but as I write so early in the morning before anyone else I might need to interact with is probably awake and functioning, so I'm not terribly worried, and I have time during the day job as well. But I will be vigilant about the writing time for sure.

Hope you have wonderful weekend!!

Happy Friday, y'all.

T-minus two days as of the writing of this. Well. All of Friday and most of Saturday. Sonshine arrives shortly after 4PM.

I'm lamenting the fiscal year of my writing group, because transitioning board members and planning new programs during the holidays is royal pain in the keister. I'm lucky because I don't have a lot going on in terms of kids and hubster, but most other people do, so yeah...

Writing has been pretty non-existent, sadly, but I'm going to start working on character building for the new series. I want to have a good grasp of what makes most, if not all, of my main characters tick as well as some of the regular secondary characters.

I've never been one to fill out long questionnaires about my characters. It seemed a waste. Are there things you should know? Of course there are. Important things, but personally I don't need to know everyone's favorite ice cream or who their first crush was or if they had a pet as a kid--unless it plays into the plot somehow. But a lot of time those things crop up during the writing. At least for me. Each writer has their own method.

I've collected close to a dozen character sheets. A lot of them have identical questions, so I think I'm going to cull through them and create my own with questions that resonate with me. Not that I will necessarily answer every question either. Characters are going to give up what answers they want to, what they think is important for me to know, at least on the first pass. I might have to revisit these sheets now and again as I continue to ponder the character and as they take shape and develop personalities.

I've setup my small Christmas tree from home here at the office for some Christmas cheer. It even has battery-operated lights. :0)

The Best Christmas Ever, first verse was twenty-three years ago when my beautiful boy was born a week before Christmas.

The Best Christmas Ever, second verse was four years ago when the picture above was taken and Sonshine was able to come for Christmas after he'd graduated from Navy boot camp.

Of course there have been good Christmases otherwise, but the best ones are always when all of my babies are home with me.

He'll even be home for his birthday. :0)

In other news, it's Friday--but you know that. I have so many things I've wanted to do all week and few of them were work related. So I'm really looking forward to the weekend and making some progress with various projects. I have a list and it's quite lengthy at the moment, so hopefully two days is enough.


Also, I have no idea what happened Wednesday. I could have sworn I posted something or at the very least written something but forgotten to post it. But nope.

Anyway, hope you have a wonderful weekend.

This is how I'm feeling about life right now...


Not that I drink, but it's the thought that counts.

It's writing group weekend, so things are looking up.

Hope you have a great weekend.

And, honestly, I don't have much to say.

Most of my writing posse is coming over tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to seeing them since I haven't seen most of them since September and won't see them again until January. Our writers group doesn't meet in November, so we're gathering on our own.

Here's hoping you have a lovely weekend...

Yeah...I wanted to post something interesting and thoughtful, but it just wasn't happening, so have some eye candy...









Have a great weekend!

It's rainy and cooler here than it's been and I feel like curling up with a good book and some hot tea and just reading the day away. Unfortunately, it's still the work day and I do have work to do.


Have a great weekend!

I hope your week has been a good one. Mine has been pretty productive. I have no complaints. That being said, I'm glad it's Friday. Tomorrow is writers group day and I'm looking forward to spending a day with my peeps.

On a completely unrelated topic, let's celebrate today being Friday by talking about HOCKEY! Specifically, the greatest hockey player in the world right now. The Pittsburgh Penguins own Sidney Crosby. Last night, Sid scored his 1000th career point. That's what they celebrate in hockey--points. Players earn points by scoring goals or by assisting others in scoring goals.

A couple of pics...


And that's it folks. Have a super weekend. See you Monday.

Yep, I'm definitely looking forward to this weekend. Partly because it's been a hell of a week and partly because I get to spend AAAALLLL day tomorrow with some of my favorite people in the whole wide world--my critique group. Right, we rarely critique anymore, but it's more like our little writer sisterhood. We gather monthly to talk and talk and talk and talk. We support one another in all things; family and jobs and personal issues as well as writing. And they are all such wonderful, beautiful women. I don't know what my life would be without them.

Yep, celebrating Friday today...tomorrow is writers group, so I'm excited about that as well. Let's just celebrate with pictures...