Happy Birthday, darksylvia!! ♥ I tried sending you a text message today but I'm not sure if it went through. The number I found for you is a year old and I forgot to add a "1" to the beginning of it. I am phone illiterate, I swear. *headdesk*

Recording for Episode 4 of The Dead Robots' Society starts in about an hour, if Ryan can make it. I'm my usual mixture of nervous and excited. I thought that by now, after almost two months of being involved in this podcast, that I would be over my jitters but they never seem to quite go away. They certainly don't stop me from doing what I need/want to do, I just find it...kind of interesting. I do feel bad about how my nerves got the better of me when I hosted Ep 3, though. I've made a mental note to make sure it never happens again.

Today was relatively uninteresting. Lots of catching up on housework. By the time I was done collecting it, there was a pile of laundry the size of a small dragon in the basement. Ugh. But I bravely donned my Master Chef shirt +2, grabbed Dragon's Bane and managed to get some chores done. Woohoo. Sadly, tackling the filth-spouting beast that is this house left me rather fatigued, and there hasn't been enough time between quests for a nap. I'm hoping my pre-podcast nerves will give me enough energy to keep from falling asleep mid-sentence tonight.

I do have some good news, though. I'm writing again. Yes, finally, after weeks spent hiding in Baldur's Gate, I have finally emerged and am slowly but surely tackling my giant writing related To Do list. I've sent off String Shift to my mom for the time being, because I really need her advice on what to do with the ending. (Also see: I am in need of one) The rest of my First Readers get it when it's actually complete and I feel at least a small modicum of confidence about making it public. Right now I can barely stand the sight of the thing, so I'm working on other projects to keep myself distracted. Slowly but surely I'm dusting off my outline for TSW, and am marveling at how silly some of my ideas were. I got so wrapped up in all the interpersonal intrigues that I forgot to have an actual, y'know, plot. Doing some serious rethinking on that one. And while Holly Lisle's Character Creation Clinic has some really good, useful stuff in it...it's just too complicated for me. I made profiles for my characters using her templates and while I remember it being really interesting while I was writing it, reading it is another matter entirely. It's hard to find the parts that I really need and there are a lot of questions I just shouldn't have bothered to answer, or that were answered elsewhere. I remember being exhausted after I wrote each one, too, which is usually how I feel when I think of Holly Lisle. I can't imagine how tired I'd be if I was actually her. Yikes.

Tonight I've also been taking a look at my original idea for NaNoWriMo '06...that story I had with the aliens and rayguns and stuff in it. :) It's good, but again, some of my concepts are quite silly. I totally over thought the whole "how to stop the bad guys" thing. Maybe playing Baldur's Gate recently has given me new perspective on this, but I can think of several much simpler, much easier ways to stop a band of mercenaries in their tracks then what I was coming up with last year. Seriously. The knots I twisted myself into over that were just ludicrous.

Also, tonight is momentous for me because I am doing what I swore I'd never do again: I am outlining. Right now. I have three chapters done. No, really. It's happening. I'm outlining. Me, the "do everything on the fly" queen. And I'm forcing myself not to go into exhaustive detail. I want to. There's a little part of my brain that's throwing an absolute fit when I tell it I'm not going to write down which family member calls my protagonist, or something like that. It rebels. It doesn't like to leave these details unsaid, because so many details come to me as I'm writing this outline, and it wants to say them all. But I'm resisting, and so far, I'm winning. I'm not sure if I should be writing these details down somewhere else or not, but I'm making an effort not to because I want to leave myself room to create within my outline. I don't want this to be like writing the book once, then doing it again later. We'll see how far I get. Still not totally sure what my ending is. But I have a fairly good idea. Better than what I usually have, anyway. ("What I usually have" being defined as absolutely bupkiss)

Wow. I just realized I actually got the trash done before 10pm. Go me.

You know, it's really beginning to annoy me how few of my favorite podcasts have promos available for download on their websites. It's the easiest, most obvious way to advertise your podcast and ensure it's popularity, and yet so many of them totally skip out on it. I'm baffled. Not to mention it's making MY job as a podcaster harder, because we need promos to run during episodes The Dead Robots' Society and I'm coming up empty. Equally frustrating is the fact that some podcasts won't run our promos until we've been around for awhile. On the one hand I understand where they're coming from since pod-death is so prevalent these days, but on the other...not having any fans is the primary reason for pod-death. You'd be pretty hard pressed not to keep going if you had fans banging down your door every day demanding more, y'know? It's sort of like a self fulfilling prophecy, or one of those weird snake things that eats itself. I've always thought those were really cool. I know, I know, but it's true...

I did absolutely nothing useful today. There, I admit it. I got wrapped up in BG2 and just never left. I feel kind of bad about that, but I'm still stuck on String Shift. (Though cursing that little twit Ellesime out during that dream sequence was fun--I don't usually get many opportunities to swear loudly at my computer, it's very therapeutic) I know what I need to do--revamp my protagonist's character and put some of what I cut out back in and tweak a few major plot points and probably delete the last four chapters I've written--but the enormity of it all is scaring me off. I do have a few notes about the protagonist that I scribbled during the quieter parts of my game, but other than that I haven't touched it for a few days. My end of August deadline looms large in my mind, and while I've decided I'm OK with showing my First Readers an incomplete manuscript, it still gnaws at me. I know what I'm doing. I've done it ever since I was a kid. I'm hiding myself in a video game while I gather myself and recover from burn out, but the question now is which comes first: The end of August, or the end of the game? And when am I going to be able to face up to the fact that writing takes actual work?

It's too hot outside. Today it was up to 95 and the humidity was probably somewhere in the 40-50% range. It's been like that all week. Our plants are surviving, but barely. I used up a couple of basil plants tonight for pesto, and dad's tomato plants are walking a thin line between being OK and wilting to death. The scary thing about that is tomato plants LOVE the heat and the sun, but the weather we've been having for the past couple of months has been so oppressive that we have to watch them like hawks to make sure they don't die on us. On the bright side, my Japanese eggplants are doing splendidly, as is our second batch of cucumbers. They're HUGE and starting to bloom, so we'll probably be getting some lovely cukes from them soon. The cantaloupes are going nuts. Five fat little spheres of yumminess so far, with more on the way I'm sure. I probably need to take pictures. F-list, bug me until I do that. Our rose has bloomed four times since we got it, though I feel bad it's usually too hot outside to go take proper photos of it. Our other miscellaneous plants are doing well too, such as the catnip and sunflowers. Unfortunately our squash plants bit the dust a few weeks ago due to some kind of fungus that got into their stems and hollowed out the fruits, plus a few bunny attacks. So we didn't get much squash this year, but what we did get was very tasty and I look forward to next year. Maybe it'll be cooler. My kingdom for a 70 degree day with an actual BREEZE!

I want this so bad, I could explode.

This is also kickass.

Sorry for being absent for so long. I realized a few days ago that I've spent almost a year editing String Shift and I'm still not finished, and I'm pretty depressed about that. To cope, I've been drowning my sorrows in Baldur's Gate, for about four days straight if my Inbox is to be believed. Sigh. And tomorrow, I am 19.

Edit: Oh, and don't forget about this. =D