I reached the point in revisions where I really need to revise. I’m not entirely happy with what plays out at this point, but I’m not sure what to change. I like the ending, and I like a lot of what I have written, but it seems to be missing something, and I’m not sure what that something is. Maybe that means this is a good time to give myself a holiday to think about it. I have some brainstorming to do, and I usually get my best ideas when I’m not actively trying to have ideas.

I’ll be taking next week off, though I may do a year-end wrap-up post next Friday. I need to look back through my notes for my favorite things of the year. This year has felt very long, but then the end seemed to come quite quickly. I’ve already topped myself in writing time compared to last year, in spite of having a big gap in the middle of the year when I didn’t get much done. That gives me hope that next year will be even better.

But before then, there’s Christmas. I’m going to a get-together with friends Sunday night (I’m bringing dessert and need to decide what to make — there are a lot of new recipes I want to try, but at the same time, I really want some old, familiar things), then there are the two Christmas Eve services, and then I’m going to my parents’ house for Christmas day. I’m going to try not to work next week because I need a true holiday, but if an idea strikes me, I may not be able to help myself.

Now I need to make a trip to the library because I’ve got a book due today and a book I had on hold has come in. The rest of the day, I may do a little brainstorming, just to put the facts of the book in my brain for the subconscious to play with, and then it’s time to go into full Christmas mode.

So, a merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

I’m finding that the “get up and work before doing anything else” concept doesn’t work as well when I’m doing revisions. For writing a draft, that foggy morning brain state is wonderful for creativity. When I’m trying to be critical and analytical, I find myself just staring at the screen and dozing off. So maybe I should think of something to be drafting early in the morning while I’m doing revisions in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, I had a lovely realization when I was thinking about the holiday things I want to get around to doing: They don’t have to necessarily be done during the holiday season. The public things like festivals and displays are tied to time, but I can do the cozy evening in throughout the winter. I can bake things whenever I want. Cookies aren’t just for Christmas. There’s the Danish concept of hygge that’s all about coziness at home in the winter, and there’s a similar Norwegian concept of koselig that loosely translates to coziness, warmth, and contentment. It involves fires, candles, blankets, and, apparently, waffles. It’s their way of dealing with cold, snowy, dark winters. Here, where we don’t get dark early in the afternoon and don’t get snow, it’s more of an optional thing that can be interspersed with going outside. Then again, the Norwegians apparently get outside even with the cold and snow. Then it’s even more fun to come home to a roaring fire in the fireplace, candlelight, and hot cocoa and waffles.

So apparently it’s genetic. I’ve never been to Norway, but I have found my people.

I think I’m going to turn it into a month-long (heck, why not take it into February and make it two months) holiday season, making an effort to spend time reading with a mug of tea and some candles lit. Not that this is different from the way I normally spend my time, but I don’t always think to make it feel like an occasion or a special treat. It’s all about the mindset.

Meanwhile, today is sunny and relatively warm, but it’s so windy that I don’t think going outside would be a great idea. I’d get blown off my feet.

And in totally unrelated news, tonight is the special two-hour wrap-up movie of the TV series Timeless. I loved that show and the network was utterly clueless in how to deal with it. When it got the surprise renewal after the first season (after initially being cancelled), a lot of the feedback from fans was about how it was a series the whole family could watch together, and it was even educational because it highlighted forgotten people in history or people who didn’t really get the credit, so people then looked up these figures. So what did the network do? Schedule it in the latest prime-time slot, too late for kids to watch. At least it’s on early tonight.

And we have now reached the holiday panic portion of our year. Not that I have anything to panic about. My shopping is done and I don’t have that many more events. But I’ve just realized how little time I have before Christmas, how much of that time is at least somewhat scheduled, and how many thing I planned or hoped to do that I haven’t done. Every year I have this mental list of holiday activities, and I never seem to get around to all of them. We’re not talking super busy activities, just quiet time for reading or watching movies. I had books and movies on my list and have realized that there’s almost no time left for quiet evenings at home. I have a library book I haven’t yet finished and one I had on hold just came in, plus there were some of the Hallmark books on hoopla I wanted to read.

Meanwhile, I’ve got that book that I need to revise, but I keep getting sidetracked. At least yesterday’s sidetrack was somewhat work-related. I’d been thinking about going back to looking for some freelance work to monetize my spare time. I don’t want to get an actual job with any kind of regular schedule, but I used to pick up the occasional writing or editing project and it would be good to go back to doing that. It’s a nice way to diversify my income. I’ve come to the realization that I can manage about four hours of fiction writing a day before my brain runs out of steam, so having a way to switch gears and still make money would be nice. But getting out there and drumming up clients would take a lot of time and effort. I heard about an agency that manages employment for creative types — they recruit creative people for companies, and you work for the agency as an employee, so this income isn’t subject to self-employment taxes and they handle paying you so you don’t have to chase down invoices. I’ve been looking at their listings every so often to see what’s out there, and they had one that might as well have had my picture on it. But that meant I needed a resume, and it turns out that I didn’t have one on my current computer. I haven’t needed one in about twenty years.

So I had to create one. I thought I’d take the easy route and use one of the Word templates. Bad decision. Somehow, highlighting the template text and typing over it was not the easy way to do this. I’m not sure how, but adding a line of text that in no way filled the page added two pages to the document, and I couldn’t get rid of them. If I were just printing this, that would be fine. I’d just print the first page and ignore the rest. But it’s being sent electronically.

I ended up creating something from scratch using the formatting ideas from the template. That still took some tinkering. I’ve seen that joke going around about how moving something a quarter of an inch in Word pretty much brings about the destruction of society, and it’s almost too true to be funny.

So now I have an actual resume and I’ve registered with this agency. The lovely thing about all this is that I don’t actually need a job, so I won’t be devastated if I don’t get it. Picking up a few projects would be nice and would allow me to build my savings, but otherwise I can spend my time writing fiction. I can afford to be picky about the assignments I take — strictly on a project basis and off-site, nothing regular that requires commuting. I also now have strong motivation to work on these revisions because this assignment would start in January, and the book is due in January.

I made it through my craziest holiday weekend, including a non-stop Saturday on the kind of cold, rainy day that’s just made for staying home, cuddled under a blanket with hot tea and a book. The holiday stuff gets a little easier now. I just have a party tonight, a choir rehearsal Saturday, and two performances Sunday morning.

I may be missing cable a little when it comes to the TV Christmas movies because the ion ones are just so bad. The scripts are actually decent, but the production values are pretty terrible, which makes them more frustrating. Put these stories with the slightly higher budget from the cable networks, and we might have something. But there was one I watched last week that had terrible sound, like they’d filmed it on an iPhone, using the built-in microphone. The background noise and the dialogue were at the same volume. In some scenes, there was a weird echo effect that sounded like when someone’s microphone isn’t on during a TV newscast and you can kind of hear them through someone else’s microphone, but it’s tinny and a bit echoey, like it’s coming from a distance. In some scenes in a location with a wood floor, you could hear everyone clomping around — even when the characters in a scene weren’t walking, so it must have been the crew moving around. Even if your budget is the change you found in your sofa cushions, you can tell your crew to take their shoes off.

Then this weekend I watched one I’d recorded, and the acting was so bad and stilted that it wasn’t even at community theater levels. It was closer to “we’re studying Shakespeare and reading the plays out loud in class.” There have got to be plenty of people who can act without sounding like they’re reading cue cards. It made me wonder if they just cast local people when they filmed in a small town, or if maybe they funded this through Kickstarter and one of the reward levels was that you got cast in the movie, regardless of acting experience.

Fortunately, there are a few movies on Amazon and others on various other streaming sites, and I’m not watching that much TV, anyway. Last night, I listened to an early music program on the local classical radio station, and it was lovely.

Now, though, I’ve got a short story to revise, a book to revise, and a proposal to write, plus I have more singing this weekend, so I have music to practice.

I got sidetracked the last couple of days and sort of forgot to post. Wednesday morning, I got caught up in watching President Bush’s funeral. I saw him in person several times and actually met him once. When I was in journalism school and interning in radio news, I covered the state Republican convention when he was running for president and was there to cover his keynote speech. Then while he was president, he was the commencement speaker for my college graduation (it was cool having the president of the United States as the speaker, but the security was a bit of a hassle, as we had to get there and line up hours before the ceremony).

I met him after he was president. I was doing trade show media relations for Ericsson, and we were at a major industry event. The Ericsson US headquarters at the time was in Richardson, Texas, and it was technically Ericsson US being represented at the event, so everyone’s name badge listed Richardson as the location, including the people who came over from Stockholm. Because I have a Scandinavian last name, I always ran into some confusion at these events. My family’s from Norway, but according to the Swedes, my name is actually Swedish, and all the Swedes from Ericsson assumed I was one of them. Even the president of Ericsson thought I was one of his people from the Stockholm office.

Former President Bush was the keynote speaker for this event, and after his speech they were giving him a tour of the major booths in the expo, doing technology demonstrations for him. When he was walking up to our booth, we were all standing there, watching, and he spotted me, said, “A Texan!” and came over to shake my hand. We couldn’t figure out how he managed to pick out the actual Texan among a group of people with Swedish names in the Ericsson booth, when all of us had Texas as our location on our name badges. I hadn’t come close enough to him at those previous events for him to be able to recognize me, if he would have even remembered me. It was just some weird internal radar, I guess. At any rate, he was very nice and surprisingly large, and my hand totally disappeared into his.

I’d just put the funeral on for background noise, but ended up watching and totally forgot about what else I was supposed to be doing that morning.

Then yesterday, I had the guy coming out to give my heater its annual checkup in the afternoon, so I spent my morning doing some frantic tidying. I’d just had the message about my checkup being due, and I was surprised to be able to get an appointment the next day, but that meant I didn’t have that much time, and my housekeeping hadn’t quite recovered from two trips in November. But now I have my usual Saturday chores mostly done, so the house won’t fall apart after a busy Saturday when I wouldn’t have had time to do much cleaning.

And that’s why I totally forgot to write blog posts for a couple of days. Maybe I’ll do better next week.

I got to the 50,000 word National Novel Writing Month goal, but I still have a couple of scenes to write to finish the story, so that will be today’s fun. Then it’s on to other projects.

I’ve decided that I’ll survive not having access to all the made-for-cable Christmas movies. I still have access to plenty of seasonal programming, but it’s nice not to have something on every night that part of me feels obligated to watch. I did do a bit of a Christmas movie binge yesterday. There was an older one on one of the local stations, and then I watched a couple on ion. So I may have had my fix for the year, though there’s one on ion next Sunday that looks potentially spectacularly awful, in which they seem to be telling the Snow White story in a modern setting at Christmas. I’ve got a concert that night, but I think I’m going to have to DVR it.

This is probably when I should mention that I’ve written a Christmas story. It was originally a screenplay that I was targeting toward Freeform (ABC Family at the time I wrote it). I’d analyzed what was in their movies, and this had all the ingredients I thought would appeal to them. Then when I realized I wasn’t crazy about the idea of doing all the things I might have to do to sell it as a script, I rewrite it in prose form and released it as an e-book. It’s a short read, pretty much a one-sitting thing. It’s called Twice Upon a Christmas, and I guess you could call it a sweet contemporary paranormal romantic comedy. Look for it at the usual places you get e-books.

I had the germ of an idea for a new one hit me last night, but I have other things I need to work on first.

Yesterday got disrupted by having to deal with a grocery glitch. After lunch, while I waited for the kettle to boil to make some afternoon tea, I put away my groceries. The bill had been a bit higher than I’d expected, but I knew I was doing a massive re-stock and buying holiday cooking supplies, so I hadn’t argued at the store. But as I put the groceries away, I was trying to do an estimated running total, and I didn’t get anywhere near the right amount. So I looked at the receipt and saw that it wasn’t just my groceries on it. The first half was the previous person’s order, with mine added on. Then I noticed that the credit card digits showing on it had nothing to do with mine, and it was even a different kind of credit card. So, I ended up running back to the store to straighten it all out. I had to stand in line at customer service, and it baffled the clerk there, who called in a manager. Two managers eventually came over, and they were baffled. They had to call in their front-end supervisor. That involved a lot more waiting (they paged him several times). He groaned because apparently this has been coming up with their latest system upgrade. He copied my receipt so they could investigate further. Fortunately, the person ahead of me has a Kroger Plus account, so they might be able to get in touch with her. They added up my actual bill (nearly $100 less than it had been), and I paid that. I haven’t noticed any odd charges on my card, so it looks like it didn’t get charged at all the first time, either for my groceries or the next person’s.

And I was able to pick up something I realized I’d forgotten.

I think they were a little surprised that I came back to draw this to their attention when it actually worked in my favor, with someone else paying for my groceries. And unless this person pays close attention to her credit card account and notices that the amount is off, she might not notice this unless the store is able to do something to either contact her or void the transaction without having her card.

But I don’t know that I could have lived with myself taking advantage of something like that.

Anyway, I guess that’s a lesson to question when something seems that off and to keep an eye on your credit card statements. I’d have saved myself a trip if I’d said, “Whoa, how did I buy that much? That doesn’t seem right,” right there at the register.

But that was more than an hour out of my afternoon. Still, I’ve got an easy run toward completing the 50,000 word National Novel Writing Month goal. I may or may not get to the end of the story today.

It’s not even lunchtime yet, and so far today I’ve written 1,000 words and done my major pre-Christmas shopping expedition. I’ve bought most of my Christmas gifts and did the big grocery run, so I should be set for everything but produce, dairy, and specific ingredients to make certain things until after Christmas. The cupboard had been looking pretty bare. I didn’t even have the key ingredients I needed to make anything out of leftover turkey (bad planning on my part — I should have stocked up on that stuff before Thanksgiving).

I have two days before holiday madness really kicks in, and I actually should start some of the cooking tomorrow. Then I have two things to go to Saturday. I’m probably going to put up my decorations on Sunday. There’s something I want to go to on Monday. The neighborhood tree lighting is Tuesday night. Next Friday is baking day. Next weekend is my official Holiday Crazy Weekend — On Saturday, I’ve got a choir rehearsal in the morning, a luncheon, then a meeting in the afternoon. Sunday morning my children’s choir sings in the early service and I’m singing in a concert that night. Whew! Then there’s a party Monday night, but it’s a spa night, and I may need it by then. I have more choir stuff the following weekend. So I guess it’s good that I got a lot of errands out of the way today.

Once I get the crazy done, I’m looking forward to some quiet. I need to find some appropriate seasonal reading material since not having cable means I’m missing out on the frenzy of Christmas movies. I get the ones on the ION network, and there are a few streaming on Amazon, but I’m not getting all the Hallmark, Lifetime, and Freeform movies. I think it’ll be nice reading instead, with some music playing, a mug of cocoa, and a cozy blanket around me. If you’ve read a good book that’s kind of like the TV Christmas movies — a bit romantic (but more romantic comedy, less on the heavy-duty, sexy romance) with great holiday atmosphere, I’d love some recommendations.

And now for lunch, then more work.

I’m in the home stretch of this draft of the book, and barring a major disaster, I should easily hit the word count I was aiming for. I might even get to the end of the story. I’m quite proud of myself for having made my target word count yesterday, in spite of being out all afternoon.

I had a bit of a flashback to my commuting days, since I was driving home in rush-hour traffic, and I had to stop by the grocery store on my way home, since I needed milk for breakfast today. I even drove part of a stretch of road I used to take when I commuted, though I was going in the opposite direction from the way I used to come home. It made me so glad I don’t have to do that on a daily basis anymore. I can go to the store on weekdays during the day when it’s not so crowded, and I can usually avoid rush-hour traffic. I don’t get on the road at that time of day if I can help it.

I’m so appreciative this morning to be working at home, currently still in my pajamas, bundled under the electric blanket on my bed. I’ll move to the office later, but the mornings are chilly, and it’s nice to luxuriate for a little while.

I swear, I’ll have more interesting things to say next week when I get this draft done and can think about something else, for a change.

I write this today from my desk in my office. You have no idea what a monumental achievement that is. I spent much of Saturday filing the things that had piled up on my desk, then managed to empty one of the “to be filed” boxes in my office. It’s still a work in progress and there’s a lot more to do, but now it’s not entirely unpleasant to work in here, so I thought I’d give it a try today. Yesterday was so cold that I allowed myself another day curled up on the bed under the electric blanket, but I have some stuff to print today, which meant hauling the laptop upstairs anyway. I’m hoping that moving around and changing my sitting position will mean less back/shoulder/neck pain. Too long in any one position is bad, but moving my working location throughout the day may help.

The trick to working in my office will be to stay focused on the work instead of doing all the stuff I want to deal with in the office. Today, I have no time for getting sidetracked since I have to go this afternoon to speak to a college class. I’ve already done half my writing quota for the day and need to do the rest before lunch.

But if I can do this much before lunch, that opens up a world of possibilities …