I'm back on anti-depressants for a little while it seems. And I was doing so well, heh. I guess managing this on my own for nearly five years is somewhat of a win. Hopefully I won't need the drugs for more than a couple months. Maybe just something to get me through the holidays, I don't know.

Anyway, between gearing up for NaShoWriMo and various other work related to my "dayjob", I've been fairly busy. Muddling along.

I don't normally post reviews or whatever, but I've been watching ABCs "Eastwick" and holy crap. I won't say the show is good, per se, though it has some truly awesome moments so far, but Darryl Van Horne, the villain, is amazing.

You know why he's amazing? Because he's the devil. And not just any devil. He's Milton's Lucifer. Seriously. Watch it and you'll see what I mean. He's brilliantly written.

So yeah, I'm hooked (Mattchu is even watching... and not just cause I've gotten him addicted to CM and it is on afterward).

This is long, so it's going behind a cut. Apparently the BBC released a list of 100 books they think are important and predicted most people would have read 6 or less. I found the list repetitive and by no means *my* list of books that I think everyone should have read (but maybe hasn't).

So, I made my own. It's a meme, so copy it if you want and put an X or bold the books you've read, then add up your totals. Pass it on (if you want).

This is ( Nobu's List of Books that Everyone Should Read. )

One rough draft of a possibly terrible second novel: Done. Finished. Over with.

It has no title, it's about 10k words too short, but fuck it. There's a reason editing was invented. For now, I'm DONE!

That's all.

Mattchu and I have been married now for 2 years. Which means we've been together for almost 4. Crazy. Actually, not really. Being married is a lot like dating, as far as I can tell.

I'm glad we're finally living together with our own place though. As much as having roommates can be... exciting? Amusing? Something like that, anyway, I'm glad to have our own space. And to have a kitty finally.

Not really doing anything special for the actual day. Apparently Mattchu got me a present, which while very sweet makes me feel bad, cause I'd thought we'd already done the presents thing when we got the fire opals in Alaska and so hadn't really planned anything beyond dinner + later adult activities. Oops. I'll have to think of something to surprise him with later. I've got a few ideas.

So yeah, two years. Feels like 20 years. And I'm hopeful that we've got at least 60 more to go.

Happy anniversary to us.

Novel is nearly done (I'll be ranting about it once I'm finished over on my writing journal...).
Critiques are in, harp isn't tuned yet. Insomnia eats my life.

Went out to dinner tonight to celebrate our 2nd anniversary. Technically the 30th is the day, but that's a Wednesday this year, which doesn't work well at all, so we celebrated early. Found an excellent Moroccan restaurant right here within walking distance. It was super good, with awesome service. Walking distance, did I mention that? Superdangerous.

In other news I've noticed an uptick in my drinking lately. I think that's got to stop. As fun as it is to get a little tipsy (and easy, man my tolerance is nil these days), it's not helping the depression even a little. While I haven't quite sunk back to the level of drinking alone in the middle of the night, I probably shouldn't wait until that point to put a stop to it. So back to sobriety for me.

It's 1am, guess that means it is time for more banging head into novel. Right now I'm struggling with verisimilitude and she's a tricky bitch.

7 chapters left on the novel. I should be done in 3-4 days.

Also to do this week:
Go to the gym
Tune my harp (and play!). I want to start practicing a half hour every weekday. There's no reason I can't do this other than laziness.
Beat the boss in Dragonquest 8. (After I finish the novel, obviously).
Do the critique for the new group I joined (it has real published authors tm!)

Things to do in October:
Catch up on my reading.
Sleep.
Figure out Halloween plans.
Decide about going to Orycon.
Write 2 novellas.

I'm not even 30, and it's come to this. Word's most boring human. That's me. Yep. Being a writer is totally glam folks. Really. Seriously.

It's time to kill this stupid novel. By finishing it.

This is the week of doom!

See you all on the flip side...

our cat managed to play until one of her front pads got so rug-burned it started to bleed. She doesn't seem to care (not limping or anything) so we didn't notice until we saw the blood drops all over the carpet. We might have seen them sooner, but the large red carpet sheds red bits, so it's hard to distinguish fuzz from blood droplets. We cleaned it and put a non-stick pad on with vet-wrap, but we're going to have to be more vigilant in the future about her playing habits. She will literally play until she's laying on her side open-mouthed and panting. Silly kitty. I still feel like a bad kitty parent though, sigh.

In other news, I'm in death slog mode this week. Part of me thinks if I push it I can finish the novel by this time next week. We'll see how insane I get. I know I CAN write 12-14k words in a day, but that doesn't mean I want to. However, doing that for five days would definitely finish this up. Hell, 8 to 10k a day for five days would finish this damn novel. I'll see how far I get. I'm going to make an insane push this week and then see where I'm at.

I'm also ramping up the exercise and diet plan this week. Despite brownies tonight I've been doing pretty well and I think that now I've had three weeks of regular gym workouts I'm reading to step up the intensity.

Here's going for broke!

Haven't been updating here much. For one, facebook and it's stupid instant gratification has eaten my brains. For another, I'm not sure where my thoughts are at lately. I'm in the weird zone where everything external in my life is going really well, but I feel like a giant mess on the inside.

It's as though the more orderly I make my life around me, the more of a storm brews inside. This phenomenon could be the Nobu chaos balance or something. Gotta have issues, baby. On the good side, I'm working on the novel again, going to the gym pretty regularly, eating better, and have a kitty (soon a spayed kitty!).

The bad side is that all the goals I'm working towards right now (pretty much getting back into my size 5's and getting published) are longer term goals with slow builds. I can't lose 70 lbs in a week or two, nor can I write a decent novel in a week either (or even 2. Maybe not even 200, but that's another issue). The progress is invisible from this close. Part of me wants to give up on both goals. Quit trying to write for publication and just write to get the stories out of my head. Quit trying to get to a size where I feel comfortable in my own skin and just toss all my old clothes and suck it up that I'll always be "a big girl". Buy big girl clothes and go get a "real" job (ok, a Mcjob, if we're being realistic).

It's the gap that's killing me. That nebulous void between where I am and where I want to be. I know what I want, I know the basics of getting myself there, I've even taken a few of the first little steps on the path. It's that dark area, the map unexplored still covered by the fog of war. That area I can't fathom, that place between the me and the ideal. I think this is why I clean things when I'm stressed out or depressed. I can see the goal (dirty thing into clean thing) and get there in a short enough time that by the time I'm done I have a tangible success (clean thing!).

I know the process. Writing: write. Rewrite. Send out. Repeat. Eventually, the published thing will happen if I write the best stories I can and work at improving what I fail at. With my body it's simple too, in some ways even more simple because it relies on no one but myself. Eat less. Work out more. Repeat until happy.

But it all takes time. Both goals rely on getting through the murky zone. There are no secrets, no shortcuts. Both goals take unbelievable courage, at least where my brains are concerned. It's not scrubbing something for an hour and then you're done. It's scrubbing something for 9000 hours without knowing if you'll have to scrub for 9000 more after that or if it could be the 9001st hour in which you'll finish.

Meh. I don't know what the point of this was. I won't just give up, I'm not sure I have it in me (besides, I have spreadsheets man, spreadsheets! I have to keep up with those damn spreadsheets.) I guess I'm just noting the weird discrepancy between how I think/feel and how things look to me on the surface.

And, of course, it always comes back to fear. Gotta get better at this whole "be where you are" thing. Yep. Stupid as it sounds, I'm afraid of being thin and afraid of getting published. With those things come other issues, other expectations. Fear: it's what's for dinner...

Got home last tuesday with the plague. Otherwise known as the flu, though thankfully not the swine variety. It's been nearly a week and I'm almost feeling normal, though still utterly exhausted.

Somehow, despite all that, I managed to get a cat. She's an 18 month old half bengal and now that she's done spazzing around breaking things and hiding behind the toilet, she's definitely a lap kitty (in my lap right now, in fact). I have to give Mattchu all the credit since he found the cat and set up everything, thank god. I'm not the most organized me (or coherent me) when I have the plague. But a kitty makes it all better.

Now, to get my apartment back in order and fully unpacked. Tomorrow. When I'll have energy, I hope.

So much to do...

Home now. Forever. Also... sick. Sore throat, cough, dizziness. Thank you, Worldcon. Thanks so much :P

It was fun, over all.

Now, to mix tea with cold medication. weee.

Most of our stuff is at the new place now. And I'm hella sore. My ankles especially. Meep.

Now to put together shelves and run a lot of errands.

I have less than a week to get stuff unpacked and put away. Nothing like time pressure, eh? I want to organize my books back into proper sections and by author so I can find things, but I'm not sure I have the time to do that. It requires taking all of the books out of the boxes and laying them out in piles on the floor so I can sort by author and genre (genre categories: poetry/drama, fiction, history, philosophy, religion, language). (This grouping structure usually leaves amusing side-effects like the Book of Mormon ending up next to the Witches' Bible).

Okies. Home Depot for shelves, then Fry's for vacuum cleaner and cables, then home for working on stuffs.

Too sore to live.

Quickie cause I haven't updated in a while:

Packing is stalled, but I've got very little left to go. I'll get the last boxes done this week, probably.

Moving is about to commence. But first, painting! I'm going a little design crazy, but meh, I never leave the house, so it better look damn good.

Writing is meh. Sleeping is overrated. Body is sick but still refuses to sleep. Same old story, I guess.

That's all. Can it be Friday please?

Wow, LJ has private messages n stuff. Weird.

Watched Virtuality tonight. Now I'm hating on Fox network even more. That show might have been awesome. A science fiction show where the science actually makes reasonable sense (virtual reality doesn't kill you, the spaceship design pays more than lipservice to what we theorize about long term space travel designs, stuff like that). Sucks ass that they decided to air the pilot without picking up the show. Grr.

Watched Knocked Up again too. That movie was just as funny the second time around. Also, makes me glad I don't have a totally dysfunctional relationship (he still loves me even after we spent like two freakin hours playing hall tetris with the treadmill... seriously, at one point I thought we'd recreated the Dirk Gently couch problem).

In the sadness news, I'm trying not to be depressed that I'm not at Clarion West. Trying really hard. I sort of stumbled across some clarion blogs (stupid writers posting comments who I then totally click the blog links from etc... they made me do it!). Damn but it sounds awesome. Meh. I'm going to hold my own mini clarion of... me. Alone in my room rolling dice in the dark. Well, writing science fiction in the dark. I don't know. It's really hard sometimes to push back the constant drone of my inner critic who never stops muttering that I'll never be good enough. Maybe I won't. You can't ever be sure, right? Next year. Next year I'm going to apply to both Clarions and Odyssey. Hedge my bets. And maybe I'll get to meet E. Bear at Worldcon. If I'm not hiding in a corner too shy to speak to anyone because hey, at this point I'm just another non-selling wannabe groupie fangirl. Somehow I doubt that whining "but I'm getting really *nice* rejection letters" is going to cut it.

All right. It's time for my every other night of sleep.

So you know, life as usual. I seem to be sleeping every other day. Not entirely sure how my body decided on this schedule, but whatever. I'll work on it.

I have packed up 8 boxes of books, three boxes of random stuff, and posted a bunch of things for sale. If I sell everything I've listed at close to listing price I should make enough that we can start car shopping in September, but knock on wood. So far I've had a few bites on the lower-priced items. Of course, the highest priced item is my harp, which I'm only testing the waters on selling. I'm completely unwilling to budge on the price of it since I'm emotionally attached even if I barely play it. But it alone is worth half the price of a hybrid car, so seeing if I can sell it for that (since I don't play much anyway) could make it worth it. I'm not holding my breath. Everything else HAS to get sold though because there's no room for them. I also plan to list the older shelves once I've got them cleared off, plus possibly the futon and queen bed provided we get confirmation of abandonment from our ex-roomate on those items (since technically he owns the bed and futon frame).
(so yeah, if anyone needs (or knows someone who needs) a nice treadmill, a washer/dryer, some older bookshelves, a huge dining room table w/6 chairs, a futon couch, or a queen size bed... let me know!)

I think I have the paint colors for the apartment more or less picked out. I'll get paint samples on the day before we get our keys so we can paint some swatches and see how it looks in reality. Two weeks! Our plan to spend the first weekend painting and then move the second weekend. I'm super excited. I want to throw a house-warming party, but that won't be until Aug (probably late Aug) since we're pretty much moving and then leaving the state for the next 3 weeks (I'll be gone more or less all of that, anyway.)

We were approved for the apartment, so now I just have to pack a billion books, sell some shelves and a table and a bed and a couch, and we're good!

Now, to pick paint colors... to go with my 7'7 round red rug of doom...

It's finally done!

If you have love for me, either buy one here: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=2311972 (downloadable even!)
or see me in person, I have about 25 copies for sale and then I can sign it for you.

And if you truly love me, review it! In about 8 weeks it will be on amazon.com as well, I'll post the link then.

Downtown Pdx?
pros: it's hip, mattchu could walk to work and walk home for lunch, easy distance to everything I could ever want to buy or need (ie Powell's)
cons: it's damned expensive, apartments are tiny, would have to cut down to 1 car for sure sooner than later, and it means no one would ever visit us due to parking issues.

Wilsonville?
pros: it's cheap for a 2 bedroom (save for hybrid car and awesome travel), walking/biking distance to best friends, I can stand on Fox and Elfie's lawn playing sad songs until I get game, I can potentially have all the horse-back riding action I want.
cons: 30-60 min commute to work for Mattchu each way. Outside of the area of pdx we both love so much.

So where to move?

Haven't been able to sleep very well for nearly a week now. Grr. Argh.

Term is nearly over and then I'll be free of grad school and it will be time to crack down on the novels.

I'm also going to start rock climbing again as soon as school's out, which will be... painful and probably really embarrassing. However, if I wait until I think I'm thin enough to do it, I'll be waiting a very long time. I want arm muscle again, damnit. So screw it, I'll just go humiliate myself.

The eat less crap diet is working more or less, though I got a bit derailed last weekend. I've been eating 4-6 small meals a day for the last few days and that seems to work really well since if I get hungry I just eat another snack basically. I'll have to modify that plan for social situations, but I think I can stick with it for a while.

I've decided too that once my arms look nice again I'm going to get my sleeve tattoo on the right arm as a reward. It'll likely be a few months at the least, but it's something to look forward to.

We've decided we're moving in August, so that gives us time to save up, sell crap we don't need, and shop around for the stuff we do need (ok, want... a flatscreen tv is hardly a need..., though I think a couch or giant pillows are kinda a need since we won't have any living room furniture after I sell the loveseat). I'm trying to reduce our stuff down to the bare essentials since the house always feels super cluttered to me and I'm sick of it. I already cleaned out one closet. One more to tackle and then I can make a run to the good will donation place and get rid of the random clothing and junk I keep finding. Hopefully by the time we move I can also throw out some more clothes since my smaller stuff should start fitting by then (it had better, damnit. So tired of living in this body the way it is...).

Oh, and I dyed my hair copper.

That's all I got.