Thursday, June 18, 2009

Week 19 Update: Losing ground

Fuck!

Fucking fuckity fuck fucks!

I had such high hopes for week 19, especially since week 18 was such a pisser of a back slide. Yet here it is, Thursday night and it's the first time I have made it to the gym all week.

Granted Monday I was still recovering from a steak/beer/adrenaline fueled weekend and sleep deprivation.

Tuesday I wanted to spend time with the wife and daughter because they had been at the beach since Friday.

Yesterday I just plain punked out because I didn't feel like busting my muscle fibers for a few hours then coming home to the backup report AND two hours of work so I just spent my time sitting at my desk and watching the daily show on hulu while I wittled away at 20+ servers.

But today, despite it being hellacious and grandiose in its grotesquery, I managed to haul out my resolve, shake loose the moth balls and suffer mightily in the pursuit of fitness. That sentiment rings a little hollow considering the abysmal quality of my diet over the past few days. Luckily I still have a 13000 MC buffer which still gives me about 24 days before I start falling behind the average.

It's amazing how I find myself in the same situation yet again, not even 10% of the way through the project, and how gods damned easy it is to fall behind and not be able to catch up. Pathetic sounding as it may be that's sort of a recurring them in my life since graduating college. Years pass with little to show for them and as galling as it is I still find it nearly impossible to counter 'just getting by' with meaningful events and useful activity like writing.

However I have hauled out some notebooks and started working earnestly on the sci-fi epic yet again. I try to make sure I write at least SOMETHING every day and when creativity fails I transcribe/edit what I have written previously.

It's amazing how after 7 years of intermittent work and nearly constant thought about this piece of literary history I intend to compose some parts are pristine and glorious as I wrote them so long ago. Others have to be picked apart for choice phrases or ideas and largely immolated to make room for better and bigger ideas.

Structure is still a massive problem since about half the story is written in present tense and the other half was conceived as a past tense endeavor. No matter how hard I try it seems like I always default to intermingling the two and its hell to catch and repair as I go.

At any rate, progress continues but not tonight.

Tonight I am Beta-reading a short story for one Peter Watts. I wish I could share the details but alas I cannot.

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