My new routine

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes very eloquently on the damning situation of being trapped between doing neither what you SHOULD do nor what you WANT to do and therefore wasting your life in a rut of doing nothing. As is so often the case, Jack manages to explicate the matter very clearly for me, as lately I find myself in this situation quite a bit.

As I mentioned recently, I have been having a real problem with focus these days. When it comes to doing work, particularly for school, I've been encountering an amazing amount of difficulty buckling down to a task and getting anything substantial done. Long periods of time that I mean to use for work often just drift into space-out time where nothing meaningful is accomplished. Because I feel guilty for not getting my work done, I feel like it's unjustified for me to spend that time doing something I'd actually like to do instead, so I end up losing all that time to pretty much doing nothing. I'm not sure what's the cause of it-- tiredness, frustration, something else entirely? --but I hate what it's doing to me. It's a point of pride that I've never missed a deadline in my life, but I never used to be a procrastinator, and I'm pretty sure all that rushing at the last minute is pushing down the quality of my work.

So I am going to put myself on a new schedule. I am a creature of habit in the extreme, so when I get into a habit I tend to stick with it pretty closely. My work hours did in fact get pushed back by one hour, so I'd better make the best of it. Now is as good a time as any  to build a new routine.

I'm going to keep getting up at seven like I have been. And I'm going to get a workout in as soon as I get up. At least a half hour of activity. That will give me enough time to get cleaned up before work. It will also get the workout thing out of the way early, so I won't have it hanging over me for the rest of the day.

I will bring lunch with me to work. That way I won't go crazy with hunger or fill up on junk. I'll either prepare this the night before or leave enough time to stop at the grocery store before work. This will also eliminate the need to figure this out after work, which will delay eating further and keep me from moving into the next thing.

I will spend two or three hours of every afternoon working on homework. I will mark this time on my schedule so that my calendar reminds me. If I work for a relatively short period like that every day of the week, I will not have to focus for too long at a stretch and the frequency will keep the work getting done.

I will also schedule time to make dinner more often. My being so busy and unfocused on top of it has kept me from doing this. Consequently I'm not eating very well, nor have I enjoyed one of my favorite hobbies in a pretty long time. Making an effort to shop for groceries for the week instead of randomly when I need something (a longstanding bad habit of mine) will help this, I imagine. I think I will take some time one day out of the week to plan meals and buy supplies will make me much more efficient in this.

Well. That's going to be a pretty big shift from the haphazard, rushing way I've been carrying on lately. But it's really not working for me, I miss my more organized, focused life. So I think I need a radical shift to knock me out of this rut.

If Screwtape drags my ass to hell, it sure isn't going to be for wasting my life on TV Tropes.

What I'm working on right now

In an effort to refocus myself on the projects that are important to me, I thought I'd give a rundown of, if not ALL the projects I have in the works, the ones that currently in the forefront of my mind.

The Tailor of Riddling Way, in two forms. There is of course the original audio drama form, but lately I have been working more on the film version that I am making for my Screenwriting grad school class. The story is translating pretty nicely, even working better in some ways because I can show in a visual medium rather than tell everything, and my teacher has given me both positive feedback and very useful constructive criticism. I haven't been posting my film script pieces here because they're not completely different from the audio drama stuff I've already showed you, but when I finish it I think I will post it here in its entirety. It's kind of cool to think that by the end of the next month I will have finished an entire screenplay, even if only the first draft.

I'm also working on my fantasy novel idea, Fallen. I've had this idea since senior year of high school to tell the story of a demon found and raised by a Catholic organization to fight on their side against the forces of hell while struggling to cope with what seems to be the inherent evil in his nature. I've been working on scenes here and there to submit to my Science Fiction and Fantasy study. What I've done has been posted here if you'd care to read it.

Those are the major ones I need to focus on. But there's some other stuff that I've been thinking about lately too.

I would like the first full-length play I write to be Mrs. Hawking. This piece is set in the Victorian era and about a sort of female Sherlock Holmes whose withdrawal from the world and growing distrust for humanity seems to be getting in the way of her good work until she is forced by her well-meaning nephew to take on a young lady housekeeper, Mary Stone, who turns out to be the companion she's been lacking. I love mysteries, I love that period setting, and I love the dynamic between the embittered middle-aged lady and the young woman whose perseverance through her hard luck begins to draw Mrs. Hawking out of her shell. And perhaps it's naughty of me to cast already, but it helps that I am totally imagining crearespero as Mrs. Hawking and nennivian as Mary. <3 There are a couple of scenes from this piece posted here.

There's also my short humorous larp idea, Break a Leg. My fourth (FOURTH!) metatheatrical piece to date, this humorous two-hour larp will have eight players as members of a dysfunctional theater troupe whose leading lady has been found suddenly dead two hours before the curtain is supposed to go up. I have already bid it for SLAW in November and Intercon in March, but I am planning on finishing it way before then. It's small enough that I could probably get several runs in beforehand. It will involve an interactive environment and sides for in-game performance opportunities... which I will have to write. :-)

Those are the majors ones. There's other things I plan on working on eventually, and though they are not currently at my mind's forefront, sometimes I noodle on them as well. Imperium, my Ancient Roman larp. Sundan, my Shakespearean-style epic tragedy about a man who destroys himself and everyone around him when the woman he loves marries another man. And a possible project for the next semester of school that is percolating in the dark recesses of my mind...

But these are the ones you can expect to see more of in the near future.