Tag: day job

I Don’t Always Write Blog Posts . . .

~ petefordwriter ~ Leave a comment

. . . BUT when I do, I try to make them interesting, and mention at least a little about what’s been going on since the last post. However, I’ve noticed that recently—according to my WordPress stats—I’ve gained more than a handful of new followers. If you’re one of the new followers then Welcome, gentle reader. For the new readers I’m going to put a little more background than usual into this post. And don’t forget to explore the other pages through the link tabs at the top. In particular, take a look at the Social page and consider following me on Twitter, too.

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The Day Job

BY profession I’m a Java web application developer. A few months ago the company I work for had a little bit of an unintentional downsizing, by which I mean that several of our other developers, by coincidence, all gave notice at about the same time—and as a result of that, my workload more than doubled as those other guys’ project work was dumped in my lap. So for several weeks I was working late nights and weekends, catching up with all the outstanding bug fixes.

Several weeks on, just about all of those bugs have been fixed, and so I’m back to regular maintenance on all those various applications. Which means I’m back to normal hours without the late nights and weekends. I’m even getting time in some of my lunch breaks to manage a little bit of writing.

Now that all the urgent work is done, I’ve also been spending some time evaluating some new software—web application frameworks, to be specific—to see what the next generation of our software should be using. For what it’s worth, we evaluated JSF (JavaServer Faces) and found it wanting; next up, I’m writing a small application using Apache Wicket to see how that goes, and so far it looks promising—at least, it gets away from JSPs (JavaServer Pages), which can only be a good thing.

Moving House

WE bought a new house, and we’ve been moving a few things in and getting the place ready to take the bigger furniture. Right now there’s not much we can do until some of the flooring has been replaced—but that’s just a few days away, now, and then we can get ourselves properly into the new place. And I can’t wait.

What I’m Writing

NOT that I should need to say, because it’s plastered all over this site, but I wrote Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, a steampunk action adventure story that was published last year. Now I’m working on a sequel, which—with a little luck—should have a first draft complete by the end of August (at least, that’s the target I’ve set myself). The timeline, which is a scene-by-scene version of the story from beginning to end, is complete; that gives me a plan to work to. The first few scenes have been written, but progress has been slow. The good news is, the pace is picking up and I expect to get back to full momentum on that within a week or two, especially when the house move is behind us.

What I’m Reading

RIGHT now I’m reading Kingdom City by Ben Ireland. I’m only a couple of chapters in, so far.

What I’m Smoking

IF you’ve read back a few posts, you’ll have seen the post about how I’ve been switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes. On that, just a quick update: it’s going very well. Thanks to the e-cig as a way to stave off the craving I was down to about three “real” cigs a day. Then came another milestone: I haven’t smoked even one “real” cigarette in the last three days. Very pleased with that.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted

LAST word: I play some computer games as relaxation. I used to play World of Warcraft a lot (although I haven’t played in months now), and I’m also a big fan of the Half-Life games and their close cousins, the Portal series. Recently I found out about a game called Sir, You Are Being Hunted, which is variously described as steampunk and tweedpunk (is that a new word?). It’s a survival-stealth game, which under normal circumstances would have put me off because I’m not a fan of that genre (I tried playing Thief once, and detested it), but I’m finding Sir to be more than a little bit addictive. I mean, killer robots wearing country tweeds and smoking pipes. What’s not to like?

Until next time . . .

Things Are Coming Along A Bit

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The House Comes Along A Bit

I spent most of today organising some storage in the basement of the new place, putting together some shelves I bought a few days ago. Good shelves, too—we bought one a year or so ago so we knew what we were getting. They’re metal, and each shelf can hold up to three hundred and fifty pounds. The only problem is that each shelf is basically made of wire, so to finish up I bought some quarter-inch sanded plywood to lay on top. That was all finished up just a little while ago, so now we have five racks ready to take stuff from the basement in the old place. Tomorrow I begin moving things over.

In other house news, we bought some used furniture from a charity thrift store: a big hutch, an armoire, a chest of drawers, a dresser, a small cabinet and a two-seater sofa that was in such great shape that it was just too good to let pass. Most of the stuff is in the garage and once the flooring is in place on the ground floor we can move it into position.

The Writing Comes Along A Bit

NOT as much as I hoped it would, but I managed a couple of hundred words on Gunn & Bohemia II—the most I’ve managed in the last few weeks, what with everything else going on. Going forward the plan is to reserve some writing time every day, even if it’s only half an hour. Some progress is much better than no progress at all; no progress makes me twitchy and irritable, and being able write even just a few dozen words makes a big difference.

I also got a little bit of news from my publisher. A few weeks ago I sent them the first few thousand words from The Artemisia Chronicle, which is a full-length novel I wrote a while back and put to one side, to see if they might be interested. Well, it took a while because they’ve been really busy getting Terra Mechanica and then Tomorrow Wendell (a novel by RM Ridley) out of the door, but I got an email the other day saying they were interested. Next step on that is for me to fill in a submission form, which (with all the house and day job business going on) I haven’t had time to get to. Soon, though.

Vaping Update

SINCE the post about vaping a few weeks ago I’ve been continuing on with using the Vuse, with good results; I still get the urge to burn a real cigarette, especially when I’m feeling a bit stressed, but I’m averaging something like three real ones a day. Some days I’ll smoke four, and a couple of days I managed to get through with only two. And I’m very happy to report that last week I went one whole day without a single cigarette. I feel really good about that.

Friction

~ petefordwriter ~ 2 Comments

Why is it that we writers have problems explaining to others that we’re trying to write? Why is it that other people just don’t understand? I think I might have an answer. Take a look at this:

Priorities

On the left, we have a list of important things around us in daily life—for example, Day Job, Food, Coffee, and (of course) Writing. And they’re arranged here in the order many writers would agree with. The most important things are at  the top, so Writing is just below the Day Job (marginally more important because it pays for the stuff you need to write—computer and software, or a typewriter, or pens and paper, or parchment and quills; they all cost cash), and dealing with a burning house is more important than that—if only because a burned-out house means you have to write in your local Starbucks, which might not be too comfortable (their appalling choice of ambient music being a real concentration killer, and all that).

So-called “Normal” people, of course, have their priorities all screwed up, as can be seen from the line on the right. To them, Food is more important than Coffee, for example. But the real problem for us is that Writing is way, way down on their list of priorities. Yes, this means that to non-writers, Food is more important than Writing. Hard to believe, I know, but then these Normal People are a weird bunch. (Note that the Day Job is at a slightly lower priority for the Normal Person; that’s because your Day Job is not as important to them as their Day Job.)

As we writers know, Normal People think we have the same priorities they do (strange, but apparently true). And this is where we get a problem. The bigger the difference between a Writer’s priority for something, and a Normal Person’s priority for that same thing, the more Friction there is. And as you can see from the diagram, there is a big difference in the priorities for Writing. We writers put it up high, where it belongs. Normal People put it lower than scrubbing out a trash can.

And this is why Normal People just don’t get us. You’re writing, and other people can see you’re writing. You’re doing real work, and it takes focus, and getting into and staying in The Zone means no distractions. But a Normal Person looks at you and sees someone messing about, not doing anything vital. And there are trash cans that need scrubbing. Cue the Friction.

Worries I Can’t Mention

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I didn’t get around to writing a post last weekend, because something happened the Thursday before that really had my wife and I worried, and kept us worried right through the weekend and into the early part of last week. And while I know you’re dying to know what that was, I can’t say. Not yet. Expect a post dedicated to that story sometime in the future. All will be revealed.

For now, though, I am able to report that things on the day-job front have settled down significantly in the last week. The Inherited Project From Hell is up and running in a production environment, and should soon be completely live (if you’re into river boating in the north-western states, you might even brush up against it indirectly). The other projects seem to be well under control.

What of writing work? Well, GB2 has had little progress made (last week’s worries meant I wasn’t able to focus on writing work at all—I spent much of the time playing computer games to take my mind off things). The plan is to get a couple of hours in on that over this weekend. The Voyage of Valerie McGrath has cleared line editing and gone to final approval. And the Top Secret Writing Project has had nothing done to it at all.

And so the plans for today: get some tea, and spend a little while on the GB2 timeline. Time to get to it. Until next time . . .

Feeling Better, Thanks

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I’m just about over the worst cold I can remember having in quite a while. Normally I don’t get sick—or to be more accurate, I don’t get knocked flat by the symptoms as badly as most people do—but this one has been a doozy. It hit me Thursday, got worse Friday (which was also my and Kate’s wedding anniversary, so my plans to go out for a nice dinner went sideways), then pretty much laid me out Saturday—I spent most of the day in bed. Does a cold cause fever? I didn’t think so, but my temperature hit 102°F at one point; maybe it wasn’t just a cold.

This morning I’m feeling a lot better. A little shivery, and occasional dizzy spells if I stand up too quick, and I feel tired despite sleeping well—but no more sneezy, drippy stuff. A few people on Twitter sent me some get-well wishes, and I appreciate it; thank you to all.

One more rest day and I should be fine. And that’s good, because tomorrow I’m going to need my strength. The inherited project from hell, even though it now appears to be working adequately, still needs more work. But enough of that for now; I don’t want to even think about it today.

What I do want to think about, and actually make some progress on, is project codename GB2, the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. My content editor sent through some more comment markups on the timeline, but thanks to the day-job overload and then the bout of illness I haven’t had a chance to take more than a little look. In a little bit I’m going to get busy reviewing those. And so without further ado, it’s time to grab a coffee and get geared up. Until next time . . .

Downtime

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. . . and about time, too. The last few weeks have been far too busy, and to be honest I can use a break. We lost another developer last week—one who’d taken on one of the projects I’d worked on for a while—which means I got that project back on my plate. Lucky for me, it only has about four problems that need fixing, and three of those should be pretty easy to deal with. The bigger, more messy project (the one I mentioned in the previous post) seems to be coming together at last, in that it looks like the worst of the mess is cleaned up, and the thing seems to be working a lot more reliably.

Which means I’ve had a bit more time to work on writing projects, and I haven’t been quite so whacked by the time I get home that I haven’t had the energy to do something useful. And that’s meant that, at last, I was able to finish a major editing pass on The Voyage of Valerie McGrath this week (even though it took far longer than it should have). No bad thing, considering the deadline for content editing is less than a week away. (Stop press: email from editor telling me it’s gone off to line editing. Phew!)

The plan for this coming week, then: top priority, deal with any more editing on McGrath that comes back from my line editor as and when. Next priority, back to working on the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. My editor on that one came back with a herd of comments on the timeline, so I’ll be addressing those first, and I expect that to take all of this week at the very least.

And from experience, I’ll refrain from making any plans beyond that. Plans have a habit of getting changed or thrown out completely, in many cases before they’ve even been set in motion properly. Sometimes it’s better to just take it one day at a time.

Half Day? Not So’s You’d Notice…

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The day job has been driving me pretty batty the last few weeks. Among other things I’ve been putting in some long hours to fix problems left behind by people who’ve left. To be more precise, most of the problems were left by just one guy, who left a project in such a messed up state that the only real way to fix it would be to throw it in the trash and start over. Unfortunately that isn’t an option. I’m stuck with patching the thing up with the software equivalent of duct tape. Right now it’s clunking along like a wagon with square wheels, and every day another problem shows up needing fixing.

Three or four weeks ago I put in about twelve extra hours, so I’d planned on taking the following Thursday afternoon and all day Friday off. It never happened; the problems just kept coming, and I had no choice but to continue working on them. This week was much the same—I’ve worked an extra four hours, so I’d planned on working this morning then having an easy afternoon (or rather, spending a few hours editing The Voyage of Valerie McGrath). I should have known better. It ended up being an eleven hour day (thanks to which I’ve missed another release party for one of the other Xchyler authors, damn it), and somehow I also got myself signed up to put in some more hours over the weekend. I must be nuts.

What’s really crazy about the whole situation is that I’ve been working on a design for this whole thing that would solve all the problems. It’s modular, it’s clean, it’s efficient and would be easy to maintain—and I could probably develop the entire thing, end-to-end, in no more than three or four weeks. So far, keeping this steaming pile clunking along has taken more than that, and there’s no end in sight. Please, dear employer, if you’re reading this, consider letting me build the thing so we can dump the current train-wreck in the garbage where it belongs.

I should get into some editing now, but it’s 8:30pm and I’ve had enough. My brain is fried. I need tea, and to watch a movie (Sherlock Holmes, with Downey and Law, methinks) then get some well-deserved sleep. Tomorrow, on with short-story editing.

I’m looking forward to a day when I can write a blog post about writing, and editing, and story lines, instead of day job concerns that are dogging my every waking moment. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. This can’t go on much longer . . .

Quick Status

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All Writing work has been really slow the last week or so. I’ve been so heavily loaded at the day job that I haven’t had any time in lunch breaks (or any other kind of breaks) to make progress, and the evenings have been a wipe, too—either I’ve been too late getting home to have any time for writing, or too tired, or more likely both.

So things are pretty much where they stood a week ago. I made one small dent in the editing of The Voyage Of Valerie McGrath, and haven’t been able to touch it since. It’s frustrating.

So, it’s back to that, right now. Until next time . . .

It Is What It Is

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My regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Brentford) will know that last week at work, I was finishing up some major bug fixing. Well, things didn’t go quite as easily as I’d hoped. As things worked out, more problems were found, and it all ended up with me working through Friday (which was supposed to be a day off). I’d like to be able to say that everything works now—but that would probably be the kiss of death. I’m not making any such assumptions. Tomorrow is Presidents’ Day (aka George Washington’s birthday) which is a government holiday, so I do at least get one well-earned extra day before I have to get back to it. Tuesday, then, I’ll have a better idea of where things stand.

What of things on the writing front?

GB2

As I mentioned a while back, work on the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia has been put to one side for a little while. I made some notes about a couple of ideas for how to wrap things up at the end, and that’s about it. I’ll be getting back to that after doing what needs to be done on . . .

The Voyage of Valerie McGrath

This is the short story for Xchyler Publishing’s Around The World In 80 Days anthology, which will be out in the spring. (By the way, that was just the name and theme of the anthology contest itself; the real title hasn’t been decided yet.) I got notes back from my editor on a few points needing some work, and I’ll be getting into that shortly (when I’ve finished this post and got some coffee in front of me).

Last but not least . . .

The Top Secret Writing Project

Or rather, it was a secret, but no longer. In 2012 I finished the first draft of a novel, and it’s been sitting in the shadows since then. A couple of weeks ago I decided I’d really like to knock it into publishable shape and get it submitted, so I dusted it off ready to get started into it. This is going to be very much a background task—the first priority right now is Valerie McGrath, then GB2 will be the focus. Reading it back through, though, there’s some pretty good stuff in there. The ending is flat and needs work, and there are quite a few scenes in there that will need to be rewritten, but on the whole it’s a good start. I’ll be working on this when I have spare minutes and there’s nothing pressing on the higher-priority jobs.

And so . . . time for that coffee I mentioned, and then I’ll be editing Valerie McGrath. Until next time . . .

Bad, Bad Week

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I just got through one of the heaviest work weeks I can remember in quite some time. One of our developers is leaving, so his projects are being transitioned over to other people, and I’m one of the lucky ones. But as it turned out, this guy’s work is, to put it mildly, appallingly bad. Having worked on this project for more than six months, the thing still wasn’t working—and it was supposed to have been rolled out to production the week before last.

So I was drafted in to try to get it into shape. And after four very tough days, including late night finishes, we’re almost there. One last bug to be nailed (which will probably be dealt with Monday morning) and it can go for final testing.

All of which has meant that there’s been no time for anything else. Work on GB2 has got no further than it was this time last week. The Voyage of Valerie McGrath (the short story that’s going into Xchyler Publishing’s Around The World In 80 Days anthology) is still to be edited (but I’ve had no word from my editor on that, so there’s little I could have done anyway). I’ve had no time even to relax with a bit of gaming.

Today, then, is going to be all about relaxation. I want to spend an hour working on the GB2 timeline (I have some ideas to get that ending sorted out), and I think I could do worse than have a read through McGrath to spot any mistakes I missed earlier. And I do want to have a little game time. (World of Warcraft? Diablo III? Not sure yet.)

And so, it’s time to get moving on that. Tea, then get on with it. Until next time, gentle reader . . .