Onward and Upward...Again

Well when the stress won't go away, there's only one thing to really do - persevere. And that means (as the blog title says) going onward and upward.

So what have I been up to lately? Well I'll spare you the personal stuff because it's personal and really it's nothing to bore my blog readers about ;) But I have managed to accomplish a few great things. First and most importantly I've completed the gutting of my room. Finally. I couldn't believe how much room I managed to discover by tossing out the crap that was just cluttering up spaces. I also have a small collection of stuff I'm planning on selling. It's too good quality to toss out or give away, but I have no desire to keep it either. It's mostly some of my Lord of the Rings memorabilia back when I was a fanatical fan. Oh I still love it, but a lot of the stuff I can do without now :) So if anyone on my followers list is interested let me know. I'll show you what I've got and we can discuss payments and such. I'm willing to go a little lower for blog followers. So now it's just a matter of packing up the unwanted clothes and tossing out the recycling which is nothing really. There's a non-profit group in my area for cerebral palsy that periodically goes around neighbourhoods picking up donated clothing which is where all the clothes will be going. No sense letting it go to waste, and I like supporting a cause when I can. I'm a huge supporter of that. I know some people have certain causes or charities they prefer, I'm just more of a help-where-I-can-when-I-can type. Every little bit does help.

Dalila update: progressing well. Training has been kind of interrupted, but she sleeps from 11pm-11:30pm to 6am! You have no idea how excited that makes me! And she walks on the leash when I ask her to. I let her sort of run off most of the energy she has in the morning, usually a couple laps around our buildings (takes about 30min) then I shorten the leash and make her walk beside me. She's got the hang of it though. And I also taught her how to walk up and down the stairs, although going down takes longer. It's new, she's still getting used to that one. But she's just getting too big to carry around now, so no choice. Additional exercise though, which I wouldn't do if she couldn't handle it.

Dragon King has finally started progressing. I managed to close Chapter 3 which came out a lot better than the previous attempts. It's always getting down that attraction that gets me. Building it over time is easy to show, but I wanted the attraction between Celios and Amaya to be purposefully sudden. Because dragons are fantasy creatures I didn't want it to be that typical gradual build, I wanted it to be a different dynamic and experience. I think a lot of us have that fantasy of being swept up in a sudden romance, especially one that's not just physical attraction or a fling. And hey, this is fantasy so why not :) It's nice to move along though, and I started plotting its sequel already too. I couldn't help it, this story just doesn't want to end revealing Amaya's talent and how it affects Celios' dilemma. I could try and cram it all into one story I suppose, but I'd be overshooting the average wordcount for fantasy stories. Or trying to put too much story into too little a space. Two books works better. I wish I knew what it is with me and dualogies lately, this makes 3 stories that are too big for 1 book but not enough story to go past 2.

Also on the subject of writing I've finally managed to bring some sort of organization to the many story ideas I seem to manage to accumulate. They're divided into two groups; story summaries which actually have a plot, and story ideas which are just concepts. Helps me to remember them without having to worry about keeping them all in my head :) Concepts eventually become summaries, and there's some fun ones I'd like to eventually work with. So far I'm up to 24 story summaries and 17 story concepts. Well at least I have plenty to work with, I won't have to worry about running out of stories anytime soon!

Now to end, wordcount updates on the right are current as of today. I'm going to sort of attempt to reach 500k by August 1st. Sort of as in I'm going to give it my best shot, but with my current pace we'll see. I should set a nice reward as incentive...