News from the trenches...

[selenay]

In news that will shock nobody, last week was actually worse than the previous week. Still trying to process that one. There was a point on Thursday where I ended up begging someone to leave me alone for five minutes so I could eat a sandwich.

This point was 3.15pm on Thursday. I'd been given a last minute, two hour meeting over lunch and even though I got back to my desk at 2.15pm, nobody could seem to leave me alone long enough for me to stuff a sandwich in my gob.

And then I worked for what was supposed to be a couple of hours yesterday, and turned out to be a nine hour marathon. This week is going to be so long.

Please let it be an easier week.

The only positive to yesterday was that I got a lot of writing done during the gaps while nothing happened and we couldn't do anything.

My biggest writing day ever.

4.6k words.

Um.

Most of a chapter of Zombie Circus, plus finishing a short story I was writing as prep for my NaNo novel. The short story ended up a lot longer than planned* (it was 3.2k of those words) and it taught me a few things I didn't know before about two characters. So, that's a yay :-D

Tonight I'm going out with some local writing friends for some pre-NaNo plotting. I'm starting to think that I'm more of a plantser this year, rather than a pure pantser. I've done a lot of prep. Most of it in the form of short stories to figure out my characters and some background details. I know the beginning and end of my novel, but the middle will be an interesting discovery thing. Which is why I'm not completely pantsing, but not completely plotting, either.

All my local friends are strict plotters. Going to a plotting party with them will be interesting :-) It'll also make up for the fact that I can't make their kick-off party, which is on Sunday (when I'm busy) instead of Saturday (when I'm not busy). Argh. And here I thought that NaNo starting on a Saturday would let me get to the party!

So, that is the state of me on this bright and sunny Monday morning. Let's all hope for an easy week where I get to do interesting stuff like sleep and keep up with teevees, instead of the pattern of the last two weeks. Okay?

* I know, you're all so shocked that I ended up writing more than planned on something. Heh.

Comments

[emmzzi]

I am sorry work is sucking. Plotting party sounds ace!

[selenay]

Plotting party was great! I actually talked about my plot out loud, with other people. I never do that. Hell, I rarely even talk about my plots on Twitter or DW. So it was a new experience, and I got some positive feedback of the "I'd read that!" variety :-)

I also got to hear what everyone else is working on, and it all sounds awesome. Kind of intimidating, because there are some very smart books happening filled with themes and deep'n'meaningful stuff, but still great to hear about. We're all writing things with a fantastical line to them, which does make it easier to chatter and try to break down issues and so forth. Nobody is going to just dismiss anyone's stories because they're genre, you know?

[fyrdrakken]

Sounds distressingly like the week I had last week, where there was a dire combo of people being out sick and the workload being up. I took advantage of the opportunity to rack up some overtime, but I didn't enjoy not having the time or energy to come home and do as much knitting in front of the TV (or catching up on sleep) as I had planned.

[selenay]

Banking all the overtime has been lovely, but the sheer level of exhaustion has been awful. It's been intense, stressful kinds of work, too, which makes it even worse. The weekend of the deployment, we were working for nine and a half hours straight debugging and figuring out fixes for stuff. That kind of thing kills the brain.

So far, this week has been a bit kinder. It's not wonderful, but it's an improvement on the last two weeks and I have hopes that I'll get an entire weekend of not working.

[fyrdrakken]

I've just been putting in requests for some nights off to use up the bulk of my paid time off for the year -- the night before Thanksgiving and a couple of three-day stretches in December, with a few days left to roll over into next year or to use for covering a bad-weather day or padding out my time card if we have the same thing we had last year where right around Xmas so many offices and clinics were closed the workload was way down and we weren't making the full eight hours each shift. Having time off to look forward to does a lot to ease my stress levels.