A Quick Update

Looking over the blog, it appears that I haven't posted anything for an entire week. That's terrible.

I have a pretty good explanation, though:

1. Last weekend, I received word that my part of Florida had the power restored, so I made plans to return home. 
2. Monday, the person I thought I was going to get to visit on the way home had to beg off on account of sick kids, so that changed my schedule and meant that I was probably leaving too late in the day to make it home in one trip. 
3. Fortunately, a lovely friend in Columbia, SC offered his guest room to me and I spent the night. So that's why there was no Monday post. 
4. Damn near the rest of Tuesday was spent driving, and by the time I arrive home I was flat-out brain-fried and only wanted to rest. So, no Tuesday post. 
5. Wednesday was spent unpacking. No, really. It seems to take me twice as long to unpack as it does to pack, because putting things where they belong (ordering them) takes a lot longer than putting them into suitcases (a mild form of disordering them) -- fighting entropy always takes effort. Plus I had to wash dirty clothes, remove the wrinkles from clean clothes that got mashed in the suitcase, etc. 
6. Thursday was a headache in the morning and then recording the podcast in the afternoon, so I did actually accomplish something visible that day... you just don't get to see the fruit of that effort until tonight, when the podcast drops. Then my internet went out until morning. 
7. Friday was just an utter cluster of everything that could go wrong actually going wrong. Most notable was when my keyboard stopped working for no apparent reason, and trying to get it fixed took up most of my time. Then I had to go shopping for a new one, and I didn't find one I liked, so I ended up ordering a new one on Amazon. 
8. Yesterday was Salem Saturday. 

And the sad irony of the situation is that next week I will have to start packing all over again, because Friday-Sunday is the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Dallas. I'm so freaking tired of travelling, y'all, and I'm going to do it again on Thursday.

Plus I have to finish my speech.

And I've been invited to model for a Concealed Carry Fashion Show at GRPC, which is 50% flattering and 50% terrifying.

So basically... I'm fine, my family is fine, my dogs are fine, my house is fine, but I'm probably going to be an Amazing Stress Bitch this next week, so please don't hold it against me if you don't hear back from me until October 2.

And many thanks for being my readers despite my flakiness. Much love to you all!

December is Upon Us

It's Dec 1st and I'm already sick of Christmas.

I realize no one wants to hear my complaining, so I'll keep this short by saying that this is the time of year that's hardest on me, due to a combination of stress and Thou shalt have Christmas Spirit or Else from my family and generally not having enough time to myself or quiet in which to think. So of my readers I ask the following:

1. Please be understanding as I try to get through what is, for me, an overstimulated high-pressure hell. 
2. Please be patient with me when I vent or otherwise write things you don't want to read.
3. Please don't think I've given up on the blog if I just disappear for days at a time. Next February is Lurking Rhythmically's 10-year anniversary, and I'm not going to miss that for anything. 

Thank you all for your continued readership. I'm going to try like mad to bring you quality nerdy content, but some days that may not be possible. 

Busy Me

This is shaping up to be a crazy week.

Yesterday I discovered I didn't have an article for Blue Collar Prepping, and so I ended up issuing a Skill Challenge (read the article for more details if you haven't already), the writing of which took more time than expected. Between that and my usual duties of the day, I was unable to write my scheduled Monday Gunday post. My apologies.

It looks like I might be missing today's Tuesday Traveller as well; I received a last-minute "Hey, I'm in Orlando, want to grab lunch?" from a Facebook friend (who I suspect of being Bizarro Salem, by the by) and I don't want to pass up that opportunity. I'm not sure what time I'll be back or what kind of dent it will put in my schedule.

So in conclusion, everything is fine; life has just gotten in the way of blogging. Hopefully I'll be back on track soon.

WNW: The Gunfighter

Sorry I've missed the last few days.  Suffice it to say that a combination of getting in late, the rigors of unpacking, and the general drama of my parents being in close proximity at home when they really should have divorced 20 years ago has made things tenuous here.

Enjoy this video as I try to keep the situation here from devolving into something similar.

Packing for a Blogmeet

Yep, I'm about to go on another vacation.  This has been a busy year, though -- no sooner did mom get her spinal pain sorted out with an epidural than my father fell off a step stool and broke his hip.  That was about the last part of May, and since then mom and I have been cleaning out his room (basically non-stop) so he can navigate it with his walker.

So I'm about to get out of here, and I deserve the break. Especially since there's going to be friction around the house as Mr. Crankypants has to adjust to live with less mobility. I've leaving on Wednesday, he comes home on Thursday -- I couldn't have timed it better if I'd planned it that way.

However, I will not be attended Oddball's Second Annual Bidet Shoot this year.* Instead, I will be attending a gathering of the Inner Circle of a certain political blog at [LOCATION REDACTED].

Which is basically a longwinded way of saying "I'm leaving on Wednesday, so no blogging from me tomorrow. Von and Salem will update as usual, and I will have an automated SHTFriday post over at Blue Collar Prepping."

See y'all next week!


* This isn't because I no longer love Oddball.  It is because both blogmeets are over the same weekend in different states, and when I went to NRAAM in April I saw everyone who will be attending the Bidet Shoot. Therefore, I decided to go with meeting folks I haven't met before.

Migraines

I had one yesterday and I was in miserable pain for 8, 9 hours.

I'm working on one today as well.

If this keeps up I will need guest writers.

If you can write half-decently, can post once a week, and have an interest that is both geeky and congruent with the sensibilities of this blog, email me a sample of your writing. Perhaps you, too, can be part of the Erin Palette Media Empire.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to lie down in a cool, dark room and try not to throw up.

A quick update

Both my schedule and content have been pretty erratic lately, and I apologize for that. Flaky artist is flaky, and so forth, so I figured I'd at least give you guys a heads-up on that status of my many projects.

• Yesterday I posted the 1st scene of Chapter 4 of Curse/Or. I'm trying to get an early start on my own version of NaNoMo here; my plan is to have all of chapter 4 finished by the end of November. It's just barely possible I can pull this off. Wish me luck!
• A Week of Champions Online will continue, even though I got a bit sidetracked recently. My plan was to have posted the Curse/Or thing on Friday, and then finished the CO review this weekend, but that was derailed due to 1) the first scene nearly doubling in size as I wrote it, and 2) the sudden onset of some kind of 36-hour bug that made me utterly useless Sat-Sun and is still playing merry hell with my energy levels. I'd like to finish the series this week, but I make no promises.
• Pellatarrum is currently on hiatus because I have difficulty stretching my brain in multiple directions at once. As is, I can either write Curse/Or or I can write Pellatarrum; I can't do both at the same time. What I plan to do here is alternate between the two projects so I can maintain interest in both without burning out on either. I'm sorry if this means you have to wait a month or so for the next installment of your favorite segment. I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

Thanks for sticking with me so far! November looks like it's gonna be a doozy. Have fun, stay tuned, and poke me with a stick if I start to slack off.

<_< >_> <_<

Oh shit, I have a blog.

Um... okay. Sorry about that, gang. And preemptive sorries to my Twitter crowd, as well. The past few weeks have been...

Ok, first there was the time change, which fucked me up good and proper. Then my birthday was on the 11th, and there was more or less a week-long debauch as various friends took me out to dinner and/or Watchmen and/or mini golf and/or drinking, and then for a while my allergies proceeded to mug me in a dark alley and kick me to the curb.

And next thing I knew, it was St. Patrick's Day, and... well....

Let's just say I've had a 2-week hangover, shall we? Yes.

HOWEVER! I have some great news. Well, great for me, and good for those of you who play City of Heroes, and probably pretty indifferent to the rest of y'all.

Issue 14 hit open Beta this Tuesday. This is important because i14 is called Architect, and features a highly robust edito for creating custom missions which you can then publish for public consumption. If you are so inclined, you can even create custom enemies within this custom mission for people to fight.

So you guys can probably figure out what I've been doing since Tuesday.

Arc #7147, aka "Plastic Pistol Peril", is up for testing on the Test Server. I think I've got the wrinkles all ironed out and when i14 goes live, it should be damn near perfect (and hopefully with a much lower arc number.) So if you're so inclined, head on over to Test Server and give it a try.

Because Pohsyb did. (For those who don't play CoH or read the forums, he's a Developer.) He read it. And he liked it.

And he gave it five fucking stars!!!

A quote:

"I liked how you used the game lore, the all-friendly mission was neat, they sure love donuts... even the police drones."

So yes. It's official. I rawk. \m/ ^_^ \m/

And I must give a big "THANK YOU" shout-out to my homie Troy Hickman, who plugged me so nicely on the CoH forums (unf unf unf) and without whom I wouldn't have gotten noticed like this.

Mondays suck

I don't mean a pull a Garfield on you folks, but Mondays just suck ass for me on some unquantifiable level -- which is why I'm writing this on a Tuesday.

I say unquantifiable because I really can't determine a reason why they should suck so much. It's not that I have to get up early, battle rush-hour traffic, and rejoin the workforce after two days off, because, as a semi-unemployed writer, every day is basically Thursday for me.

(Why Thursday? Because it occupies that nebulous place in space-time that is immediately after the halfway point, but an infinity before the end. It's the weekday version of the last 20 minutes of school, in which time ceases to exist as a measurable quantity and becomes a subjectively infinite purgatory.)

I mean, I determine what day it is by recalling what I watched on television the night before, so don't think I'm living some glorious slacker existence of unending summer when it's really that dreary span of time which lingers between dinner and whatever's on TV at 8 pm.

So with that established, Monday should be just another Thursday evening, right? Except it's not. 99% of the time, I wake up Monday morning feeling like ass microwaved on a stale waffle. It's kind of like being hungover, except with no nausea and shaking. Sometimes I have a headache, but sometimes not. I could understand all this if I had spent the weekend in debauchery, but since the dissolution of my real life social circle (long story) all I do Saturday is write, putz around online, and sometimes see a movie. Sunday afternoon, I do laundry, then watch three hours of television in the evening.

It's not exactly kicking, is it? And yet, come Monday morning, I feel like I spent 8 hours dancing on a stripper pole and giving blowjobs while wired on meth. Sometimes I wonder if I'm Tyler Durden, and my alter-ego has a better sex life than I do. If so, I wish she'd leave me some notes and maybe some scandalous photographs as keepsakes.

Anyway, the entire upshot of this is to tell you why I sometimes don't write on Mondays. It's not that I love my readers any less, it's that I'm fucking exhausted from what I can only assume is a secret life of mayhem perpetrated by my second personality.

I am trying to get better, though. Some of you have hopefully noticed an increase in writing lately. This is all part of a little something I like to call Operation: Stop Being Such A Whiny Bitch And Just Write Already Goddammit and is the first step in my personal Year of the Phoenix. The first rule of O:SBSAWBAJWAG is that I will write something every weekday. If I miss a Monday because I'm feeling shitty, then I will write something that Saturday.

The second step, of course, is to actually punish myself when I break this promise. Which, knowing me, will be pretty soon. The third step is actually pretty ambitious and boils down to writing X number of words per day. This is to condition me to get used to writing on what is hopefully a professional schedule.

The fourth step, which I may never reach, is "Make daily progress on your novel at the same rate that webcomics do." Step five is the fantastical "Finish writing that damn thing and get it published."

This is my life, and it's ending one minute at a time. And I'll be damned if I die on a Thursday, between dinner and Survivor.

Why I didn't post yesterday

I wasn't feeling well. I won't go into specifics, but I'll let JD and Turk explain it for me:

I have been eaten by a Grue

Well, not really eaten by a Grue, but perhaps the next best thing: I've been playing X-COM:UFO Defense (thanks a ton, Shamus!) and I really have no idea where Monday went. Did Monday even happen this week? It must have, because in between alien raids I watched Chuck and Heroes.

Good times.

Hang on, I think I hear an alien that needs blasting....

I live!

No, seriously.

Going through a bit of a rough patch right now, though. The middle of the month is traditionally bad for me, and between that and the weather and my allergies & sinuses, I simply haven't felt like doing more than slouching about the house in my house and feeling yucky.

The good news is that I finished my project for QMx, and my editor likes it, so that's always good. As soon as I get the go-ahead I'll post something about it.

Take care, Lurkers, and keep reading. I'll snap out of this any day now... I hope...

Executive Summary Monday

Chuck: Still funny.

Heroes: Much better now that Peter is back.

Journeyman: Beginning to grow on me.

Witch Children Story: Much longer than expected.

Will be done: When it's done.

Palette: adopting Rikti speech pattern.

Sign of: brains going soft.

Will be back: tomorrow.

Stay: tuned.