#335 - Failure

After our visitors left last night, I stayed up until just after two writing this blog.

I only managed to stay up the extra hour because I knew I was going to sleep in today. And I did just that, not waking up until about eleven when Robyn got up to meet a friend. They had plans to go to the park to talk a walk and have a chat.

I woke and watched some of my favourite YouTubers and was gutted to see a guy who built a cabin with his father was losing everything in a land sale. The grandfather owned the land, and the grandson was saving to one day buy the land when it was divided and sold in parcels. The grandson, who built the cabin was outbid and lost the land.

The sad part is that he has over one million subscribers, I bet he could have raised the money if he had said something sooner. I would be so upset if this happened to me. Maybe in the next video he might explain why he chose to remain silent.

I watched a few other videos, one about a guy in the Texas desert who is trying to transform the land into a desert forest. He has a new mentor who has offered to help but only if he follows his advice. And that started with finding the highest point on the land and getting an acre of it laser level. The mentor has successfully transformed plenty of other desert areas into green spaces, so it seems like he knows what he is talking about.

The leveled space will be able to collect rainwater and disperse it out to the other areas, and it gives you a place to create a vibrant plant center. It’s like the hub of a wheel.

So, this guy is spending days flattening a large area of his ranch to create this plateau. I enjoy seeming all the various strategies to keep water on the ranch and increase the bio matter in the soil. At least this guy isn’t going to lose his land anytime soon!

I got out of bed and made myself a three-egg mushroom and cheese omelette. I was trying to reduce the amount of bread I eat and if I make my eggs over easy, I will have it with toast. An omelette doesn’t make me want toast, but I still enjoy it.

It’s filled with plenty of protein and I added in some chopped tomatoes from the garden to add a little fibre and other nutrients into the mix. I made a cup of green tea and chaga to go with it because I think green tea has some magical weight loss and health properties. And I happen to like green tea. Chaga mushroom is another super food and good for you and I happened to have some mixed tea bags in the cupboard I bought in Haliburton from a local seller.

I’m trying to reduce my sugar intake and eat within an eight-to-nine-hour window, like between noon and nine pm for example to get sixteen hours of fasting everyday. I need to increase my energy and want to stop feeling tired all the time. I think food is one of the best ways to do this.

Robyn returned just after I finished my omelette and had plans to leave again to take the kiddo out to buy a new monitor so he can edit film for his class. He only had his laptop screen to work from and that can be a bit limiting.

I started cutting the lawn as they left then sat down of the front porch to play a game of chess to keep my streak going to cool off a bit.

I spent a few futile minutes trying one last time to get the Skull Candy earphones to work without any luck. Amazon has a delivery service scheduled to pick them up tomorrow at some point in the day. I’ll have to wait until September or October to get the replacements I purchased. It looked like they did a big sale on them, and they will have to be shipped from China I imagine. But it since they were on sale it only cost me another ten dollars to get a brand-new set. After wasting hours trying to get them to work yesterday, it’s completely worth the money.

I made a promise to myself that I would head down to the writing cave by four pm to start on my mentor assignment, giving me plenty of time on Sunday to do more if the story needed it. Robyn came home from shopping and asked if we had time to watch a show and that was at three forty-five. Most shows are under an hour these days, so I said yes looking forward to a little cuddle time with my lady. We had an episode of Silo to watch, and it was a good one. I’ve read all the books, so I knew what was going to happen. The show did it a little bit differently than the books, but it still came as an ‘Oh Shit!’ moment when it happened.

I’m looking forward to the next season sometime next year.

The show may have gone a bit longer than usual. I wasn’t expecting the season finale, but the clock read four twenty-five. I missed my start window by twenty-five minutes, but it was okay as the start of a story for me can take a bit. I didn’t have an idea I was ready to pursue yet and that would mean an hour of two of playing word games and thinking about scenarios that might interest me.

I made some lists; set up the file I would write in and reviewed the email from my mentor. One of the issues with my last effort, and there were a few, was that I didn’t really use the seven-point plot outline. It’s a useful tool to look at story with after the fact and see if anything is missing. I made the mistake of having my character “Walk to the Plot,” meaning I should have started the story at a different point. The story was resolved by a secondary character instead of one of the main characters. Some of this I think I realized as I was writing the story, at least on a subconscious level.

So I watched one of her classes about writing short stories and reviewed the seven-point plot outline to have it freshly loaded into my grey matter. And on some level, I understood that I was procrastinating. The course videos are just over an hour long but watching them made me feel better about writing the next story.

I even dug out the old chapbook that my mentor’s company published. It was by one of her mentors. Algi Budrys, a well-known science fiction writer and teacher. I read a small portion of it as review, but I need to knuckle down and pick a character and a setting and see what comes out.

Around the time I made that decision, Robyn called me from upstairs to say she was leaving for her second job, but the dinner she had in the oven wasn’t done and could I make sure to take it out of the oven in time.

I went upstairs and the timer still had about six minutes left. I watched the rest of the videos while dinner finished cooking and then made myself a plate and finished the rest of the course. Normally, I would have waited for Robyn to return, but I didn’t want to eat after eight pm as that was the cut off time I was aiming for. No food after eight pm through to until noon the next day.

I’ll fill my belly with chaga-green tea if I get the munchies later on.

The kiddos seem to be hosting friends again this weekend. Kiddo #1 has one of her besties over and they are making a healthy dinner for themselves. Both Robyn and I like that the kids’ friends feel comfortable coming over to our place. Sometimes it can be a great disturbance, but our place is a safe zone for everyone, and I think they appreciate it. Not our kids, but the friends. I doubt our kids know how good they’ve got it. I certainly didn’t when I was younger.

After dinner, I sat out on the back deck. Someone had a fire or barbeque going and they were using the nicest smelling wood or charcoal. It was like sitting at a smokehouse restaurant and all the food was just served. Better than the smell of a campfire.

It was delicious smoke!

I thought getting some words down on this blog might be the kickstart I needed to get writing my next story. I think getting some words written for the quota helps my state of mind because I’ve already achieved one thing. Writing the opening can take me hours and I might only produce five to seven hundred words. On a day when you need thirty-nine hundred words, that’s just way too slow of a pace.

It’s also nice to sit out in the backyard and enjoy some fresh air as a break from the basement writing cave.

But with the kiddo bringing a friend home things are about to get really noisy. The two of them are making batches of healthy meals and watching the Airbender animated movie directly above my head at full volume. I could have really used the noise cancelling over-the-ear headphones right about now.

With the sun set and the temperatures cooling outside I took a minute to do a little gardening. I have a magnolia tree that needs trimmed twice a year or it starts to impede the neighbour’s property line. It spent twenty minutes tidying and snipping pleased that I hadn’t done it during the hottest part of the day. Even still, I got a sweat going. It doesn’t take much these days to make that happen.

The noise above me is getting too distracting, luckily, I have my noise cancelling earbuds to save the day. I don’t thing the are as effective as the over-the-ear models, but I haven’t really had a chance to give them a side-by-side test. But you go with what you’ve got.

Its not eight thirty in the evening. I started this assignment at four thirty, and I have absolutely nothing done. I need to be better that this.

Time to pick something and just go with it.

I’ll come back later and let you know how things went.

Well things went terrible to the point of me giving up for the night. I had planned to do an all nightery on Saturday and revise on Sunday, but with no ideas coming forward that interested my the entire endovour felt like a complete waste of time.

I ended the evening watching two episodes of Westies with Robyn and then went to bed feeling defeated and exhausted. I lay awake for an hour or two trying to get an idea or situation that would get me excited. The closest I got was a girl looking into a mirror which starts to ripple like stone thrown into a pond. Then her reflection starts to move on its own and speaks to her.

But that wasn’t enough to get me to the laptop. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper and went to bed.

It really wasn’t the way I had envisioned things going.

But I can’t let it get me down too much or I’ll get nothing written at all tomorrow. I have to have faith that the story will present itself to me. Apparently hard deadlines do the trick.

But that’s all I have for now.

Until tomorrow.