The Lazies had me for a while, but I’m back (Lockdown progress report for April 26, 2020)

Total words: ~1,600 (I closed Scrivener before double-checking the number)
Manuscript total: ~36,000

Whoops, sorry I haven’t blogged in a bit, readers. It was a combination of the lazies… and actually being kind of busy again.

We’ve been holding Zoom meetings with our seniors every weekday, and let me tell you, Zoom wears me out. I don’t know why, but I think two hours of school on Zoom is equivalent to about four hours live. And the staff meetings! OMG the endless Zoom staff meetings! I got to the point where I was very naughty during our staff meetings, turning my camera off while I applied for jobs, worked on USC projects, or exercised.

Anyway, besides all that, here’s what I’ve been up to in my two-week absence from blogging:

The Lazies:

I am not a huge gamer. I will go months upon months without touching a single computer game or iOS game. But, having gotten bored with The Wire, and not feeling particularly inspired to watch anything else on the boob tube right now (I am still watching Motherland even though it’s really not that good — I stick around for the f/f romance, I’m not ashamed to admit it), I turned to see what kind of trouble I could get into on Steam (cloud computer game platform, if you don’t know it).

I ended up staying up past my bedtime for a few nights with an old-school dungeon crawl game called Legend of Grimrock that I got on sale for $4, and currently I’m playing Shadow Tactics, which I got on sale for $10.

But what’s really bad is that my roommate, who pretty much does nothing but play video games all day, gave me full access to his Steam library of about 100+ games.

Uh-oh. I’ve been enabled.

But wait, there’s more!

I also started reading (aka listening), at long last, Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, after having it recommended to me by one of my closest writer friends, Jo. Jo’s a fantastic writer (check her out on Amazon at that link I put in), so her book recommendations are usually very reliable. Nevertheless, at first I didn’t like Red Rising, because it was a little bit too much “Hunger Games set on Mars.” But before I knew it, I was sucked right into it, and I already listened to the entire first book and am onto the second.

(Also, it always annoyed me that in subsequent Hunger Games books, Katniss kept going back to the arena. It was like a joke told too many times to still be funny. Red Rising does not make the same mistake, which makes it already superior, in my eyes.)

The way I see it, Pierce Brown’s writing is helping me exercise, because I struggle to sit still and listen to a book, so I walk while I listen, and because I’m so hooked on the books, I’m walking 90, 120 minutes at a time. Which explains how I listened to the first book in just two or three days.

I’m going to be an Olympic speed walker by the time this is all over (and yes, that is an ACTUAL OLYMPIC SPORT — see below).

Alas, what will I do when I finish book 2??! I have to wait until May 19th before I get another audiobook credit!

Well, I guess that’s what W’s Steam library is there for. Or maybe I will actually READ a book instead of listening to one… my friend KW gave me one I still haven’t read… LOL…

The Busies:

But I don’t feel that guilty for all my book-listening and game-playing, for once, because I’ve also been busy and productive. I’ve been working on my final grad school project, which is going to be an animated short film on best practices for creating equity in project-based learning.

I don’t know why I thought doing my final project in stop-motion animation would be a good idea. Every 20 seconds of film takes me about 20 minutes to set up, and I’ve completed four minutes so far, which means…

Oh, to hell with the math. I was an English major. I have a right not to multiply or complete word problems. And I don’t even really want to know how many hours my final 10-15 minute project is going to take.

I’ve also been working out — besides my daily 3-4 mile walk, I re-discovered an app called 7 Minute Workout, which gives a nice HIIT workout in precisely seven minutes. I figure two of those per day plus my long walk will pretty much do fine until the YMCA and my boxing gym re-opens.

And then there’s student-teaching via Zoom, which I already explained above, and, of course, I’ve been writing.

I can hardly believe how consistent I’ve been as I work on Empress of Dorsa. Turns out that writing 1,000 words per day has become a pretty easy habit to maintain, given the current state of things. Once I finish graduate school, and

(MY LAST CLASS IS THIS COMING FRIDAY!!!!!)

(pardon me for shouting, I’m just excited)

student-teaching, I’m going to up my game to 2,000 words per day. Plus I will have some surprises in store for you — excerpts, world-building information, possible micro-fiction, more maps, etc.

Besides writing, the only other thing I will need to be doing is looking for a full-time teaching job.

Anyone have any high school principal friends living in San Diego??

If so, send ’em my way.

Who knows what kind of job market I’m about to enter into… between Mitch McConnell telling states they should just go ahead and declare bankruptcy, and so much unemployment we are all going to be headed towards Depression-era soup kitchens soon… I have no idea if or when schools will even be thinking about hiring.

I’ll just tell my future bosses that I’ve already mastered the art of Zoom multitasking — listening during staff meetings while I use the 7 Minute Workout app off-camera. Seems like an essential COVID-19 survival skill to me. 😀