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oh, is it 2017?
I see I’ve managed to get ten days into the new year without posting. In my defense, I’ve been writing, which is a nice change of pace. In fact, I seem to have been taken by an Attack Book, so I’m going to run with it to the end and see how that goes.
We’ve finished watching season 3 of Miss Fisher, and were horrified to find that it was only 8 episodes long! Which we found out when the 8th episode ended and Netflix flipped to “what would you like to watch next”. We shrieked in horror and have been flailing about ever since.
What a wonderful show. I want to cut my hair into a bob and do a million pushups so I have arms like hers and wear fabulous clothes. I don’t necessarily need to solve murders, but flirting outrageously with Nathan Page sounds pretty good. What a great show. What great costumes. *flails* :)
Other than that, I’ve read a couple books so far this year, which is off to a good start. I haven’t started doing anything amazingly fitness-oriented, like losing the 10 pounds I’ve regained or even, y’know, some pushups. I seem to have no willpower when it comes to sweets, and I know the answer to a lack of willpower is “do not put temptation in your grasp” but I keep doing it anyway.
I haven’t started doing more art, or coloring, or studying a language. I haven’t begun listening to more music (and you’d think that one would be easy). There are, to quote a certain modestly popular musical of the day, a million things I haven’t done.
But just you wait.
Just you wait.
:)
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2016 so far
Apparently my resolution is to sleep through 2016. Of the as-of-this-moment 41 hours available in 2016, I have slept, napped, or rested through 23 of them. The somewhat alarming thing is that I feel I could quite probably go back to sleep.
It is just barely possible I’ve surpassed my ability to cope.
We’ve dismantled the Christmas tree, which is quite an accomplishment. I even managed to more or less clean the kitchen. I’m…attempting…to make some headway on cleaning the office; half an hour’s effort yesterday took it from this:
to this:
which is an improvement, but not really much of one. Anyway, after that I had to, y’know, actually do some writing, which at least I *did*. And now I should do the same–the writing part, that is–on the logic that if I get that done quickly I can always do a bit more tidying later, whereas if I tidy now (at almost 5pm) I probably won’t scrape together enough enthusiasm to write later…
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re-learning photography
I’ve said before that there’s an alternate universe pretty close to this one where I’m a professional photographer instead of writer. Back in the day I was good enough to get a scholarship for photography, but I only pursued it half-heartedly, and after a while digital cameras started doing all the work for me and I forgot what I’d learned. I do manual photography as a kind of crap shoot (ahahah) anymore, without any real sense of how the light or depth of field is going to work.
I can afford to do that with digital cameras, since I’m not burning film, but it’s always kind of bothered me. I’ve made a couple more half-hearted attempts to re-learn the basic mechanics–a photo class here and there, mostly–but not to any particular avail, and I’ve long since gotten rid of the photography basics books I had in high school and college.
But it did kind of occur to me a little while ago that I tend to learn best from reading, and after faffing around a bit I picked up a basic photography book and have been poking at it.
It’s embarrassing, what I’ve forgotten, and how easy it is to remember. Low f-stops create depth of field and high f-stops flatten it, high ISO is good for stopping action and indoor photography, shutter speed–okay, shutter speed I could always remember, that’s pretty easy. :) But I am *terribly* out of practice working the three together, much less having an innate sense of what any given lighting scenario might require to create good pictures.
I don’t know that I’m up for doing a weekly photo challenge/theme/thing, because the last thing I need is Another Thing I Must Do Or Feel Like A Failure to stuff into my copious free time. But I might just kind of work my way through this book and see what I’m learning and doing and post some pictures as I go along, I donno. But I do have some hopes of improving my skills again, because it’s aggravating knowing I’m so much less good than I could be with even a little effort.
My favourite and most successful shot of the experimental pictures taken today, with no doctoring applied to it. It’s not an especially well-framed shot, what with a picture sticking out of the top of his head and a bannister in his neck, but those do at least illustrate the depth of field that I was trying to achieve. :)
More of today’s ISO & depth of field efforts behind the cut, with thanks to a surprisingly patient model. :)
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Everybody’s doing it :)
I guess if everybody else jumped off a bridge I…would totally not because I’m terrified of heights and bridges in particular give me the heebie jeebies so I’d be the one like lying on my belly in the middle of the bridge hyperventilating. Unless there were like zombies or something equally horrible on the bridge that would make jumping a more likely survival scenario than staying, although the statistics on surviving a jump off a high bridge aren’t good so I don’t know, maybe it’d be zombies after all.
…did I get off track there? Yes. Derailed before I even began. Oh dear.
In a couple of hours it’s going to be the year my generation definitively regarded as The Future: 2015 is the year Doc Brown took Marty McFly Back to the Future to. We lack flying cars and hoverboards, but Doc, like everybody else, failed to anticipate the Internet, so we at least got a unique future. (We have also not been blown up by Skynet yet, although presumably with the upcoming reboot our chances to be blown up will also be reset.)
My 2014 is ending with having had an epiphany about how completely and totally I’d screwed up the epic fantasy proposal I wrote, and staring in abject despair at the prospect of rewriting it entirely from scratch. It will, however, be much better. If I can ever find time to write it.
I have no particular feelings on the year that has gone past. I cannot, it seems, remember much of it. Not enough sleep, too much stress, a reasonable if never large enough amount of writing; a great kid, a lovely and loving family, a lot of good friends. I finished the Walker Papers series, which put a pretty big cap on a full decade (and more) of my life, and STONE’S THROE, my pulp fiction novel, went out to the Kickstarter backers just a few days ago. (It’ll be generally available in a couple of months.) The REDEEMER Kickstarter went–let’s face it–unexpectedly well, and I like to think I’ll be well-poised to take advantage of all the fanboys and girls hungry for post-WW2 urban fantasy in the wake of Agent Carter‘s premiere soon.
I have an impossible number of resolutions for 2015, which is par for the course, nevermind that in my entire life I’ve only ever kept one resolution, which was made six or so years ago, and which was to floss more. I also have an impossible amount of writing to do (it was looking okay up until the total rewrite on the epic came up), and I do not know where I’m going to find enough hours in the day. I shall have to do my best.
May the best of 2014 be equal to the worst of 2015. #lifts a glass
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2014 Thinks To Do
Okay, so big plans for 2014 include:
– rewatching the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton Beauty and the Beast as part of a year-long thing with Stephen Aryan and Liz de Jager. We might even have a weekly Discussion Blog about that week’s show. Anybody who wants to can join in!
– (re)reading all the Guy Gavriel Kay novels, of which there are now 12, one a month in publication order, again with weekly discussion. We’ll be starting with THE SUMMER TREE in January, with a goal of reading 4 chapters a week. The first discussion post will be here on January 7!
– perhaps (re)reading the Barbara Hambly Benjamin January series, of which I now have all the books (in hardback no less! squee!) and which are among some of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t know if I’ll start this in January, but I think I’ll do it.
– working my way through the To Be Read Shelf, with the goal of reducing it by about 70% before buying any new books.
Of course, I have no idea when I’ll write, with all that stuff to read and watch… :)
