My World of Warcraft-inspired poem, “In Space No One Can Hear You QQ” has been published in Grievous Angel today. This poem, which is almost shorter than its title, was inspired by a conversation I had with my 2v2 partner and so it is dedicated to him. I hope you like it, David 🙂
I am so, so, so excited to announce that my poem, In Space No One Can Hear You QQ, will be included in a future issue of the Grievous Angel webzine. This poem came out of a discussion *cough* dare between myself and my 2v2 PvP partner from back in the day. I love it, and I can’t wait to share it with you all — especially those of you I played WoW with. Thank you for the motivation, David 🙂
My story, Waste Not, is now available for you to read for free on the Stupefying Stories ezine, Stupefying Stories Showcase. Waste Not is a fun bit of zombie flesh flash that even has an inside joke or two for anyone who has played World of Warcraft with me. Most importantly, perhaps, it makes me grin every time I read it. I hope you have the same experience 🙂
I love my raid team. Well, most of them. The thing is, the couple I don’t like? Well, they may actually be killing me.
Let me backup a little bit. I have high blood pressure. Like, pretty freaking high. I’m on medication for it, have a low-sodium diet and I’m working on losing weight and the numbers are coming down. I’m hoping eventually I’ll be able to cut down my dose of medication, but for now, things are, if not ideal, at least stable.
Lately though, I’d noticed that every once in a while I’d get dizzy for no reason. Like, I’d just be sitting on the sofa and suddenly, POOF, dizzy. That’s a pretty strong indication of a blood pressure drop (which may require an adjustment in my medication), but it seemed like everytime I checked my blood pressure it was still high. That seemed weird and ungood (totally a word) so I started tracking my blood pressure on an hourly basis over the course of the day. The results were enlightening.
My blood pressure is not bad for the most part. It falls into the “Prehypertension” category in this Mayo Clinic chart. However, something scary happened on Mondays and Wednesdays between 11 and 2. My blood pressure went up. Way, WAY up. The peek I measured it at was 155/98. That’s high. If you consider that I’m also medicated, that’s crazy-freaking-high.
Guess when my raid time is. Continue reading You’re Killing Me!
You know, I’m still not happy to be unemployed, but I am beginning to feel like my life is more under control than it has been. For the longest time I’ve been doing too much and trying desperately to try and figure out how to balance things and where to cut back. Now I’m getting things done and the other day I almost managed to do everything on my to-do list. I realise how pathetic that sounds, but it’s absolutely true. And it’s progress. Could be that I’ll go back to work sooner or later, but right now I’m truly enjoying feeling like I’m climbing out of the hole I’d plunged myself into.
We’ll have to wait and see if NaNoWriMo plunges me right back into the pit. It could happen. I have a basic premise for the story and one character and that’s it. Not exactly a strong platform to go into NaNo on, but it’s what I have so I’m going to work it. My plan is to embrace this as a chance to feel out the story and find out how to tell it. I don’t expect anything good but I’m not going to resort to any of the word-padding ideas so popular in November. We’ll see how it goes.
In other news, my poem After The Storm is up at Tales of the Zombie War. They have a comment option so you can tell me how much you hate it (Kidding, please don’t. I want you to like it. Like it, I say! :-p).
Finally, World of Warcraft has recently gone through a very disruptive patch. It’s been kinda crazy and overwhelming, in no small part because I have far too many characters with too many specs that I need to relearn how to play. Still, I’m muddling through. Right before the patch, however, I allowed my WoW nerdiness and my fiction writing to collide and snuck off to take a screenshot to share.
Please note, this screenshot is rather spoilerific if you’ve not read Shades of Green. Also, if you’ve not read Shades of Green you won’t likely find it very amusing, so click with caution.
I have been struggling lately. You may have noticed, it’s been a recurring theme for the past couple years and it just keeps getting worse. I have the attention span of a gnat nowadays. I look back at the things I used to accomplish in a day and that list has been getting smaller and smaller for the past 4 years or so. Unacceptable.
I have the attention span of a gnat.
This needs to change.
After a lot of consideration and discussions with friends who find themselves in similar positions as well as those who don’t, I have a theory. I think I have trained myself to be unfocused. This was obviously unintentional, but I think it’s what happened.
A few years ago when I was building websites and such for a living I had a livejournal and an ICQ account. I would check LJ once a day and keep ICQ up and running while I worked. That meant I could communicate with people if I needed or wanted to, but I wasn’t leaving the window or webpage I was on to do it. Fast forward to now and I have a LiveJournal, a Facebook account, a couple blogs and a twitter account. Discounting the blogs because they don’t fall into the same category — I have a lot more distractions. Firstly, Facebook and twitter update a lot more often than LJ. My twitter feed changes every couple minutes, that means I’m refreshing that page every couple minutes and in order to do that, I’m leaving the window I’m currently working in. Add to that the ability to get sidetracked following links or playing games on Facebook and really, it’s no wonder my brain is so fragmented and frazzled.
This hasn’t just affected my work, by the way. Look at my World of Warcraft account as another example. I play on two servers (one less than the other). On each of those servers I have 10 characters. 10. That’s the maximum. Why? Because I don’t seem to be able to focused on any one toon for very long.
The good news is I figure if I trained myself to be unfocused, unproductive and to have a short attention span, I can untrain myself too. (Is untrain a word?). Starting immediately during work hours I am only going to allow myself to check Facebook and Twitter once a day. That’s it. Just once. The same goes for Livejournal. During my off-hours I’ll ease up on myself a little bit. I will continue to check Twitter while I’m taking a long flight in WoW for example, but I need to force myself to focus when I should be working and maybe actually get something done now and then. The way things are right now is ridiculous.
Wish me luck, I might need it.
