Anne N. Mouse: Blog

Or making excuses... I've sat down many days and not passed one keystroke on any writing what-so-ever. I've discussed here my tendency not to write plans which has gotten more than one of the stories I have in progress to a point where I simply can see no way forward. This tendency I'm sure is why my stories tend to have such weak endings. That is because I don't start with at least a destination in mind.
Thus in writing as with any other endeavor the lack of a plan is really the starting and ending point that destroys all hope of accomplishment. Still I have not ever, never ever... learned the slightest thing about plans, or making them.
NO WONDER YOU ARE A FAILURE AT LIFE ANNE! Go drown your sorrows in a bottle of rum, or more likely maddog 20/20...
At least if you kill enough brain cells you can blame that rather than laziness for being the problem in your life.
What drives this rant? Kenn Gannon's blog and the article that he recommends that I have book marked for all the good it will do. After all if you have no clue about how to begin to write a plan, you are pretty much not ever going to get anywhere except spinning your wheels in the same used up patch of ugly!

For Redding Ca it is down right miserable. For other places I imagine you'd think we were experiencing moderately unpleasant weather. Not sure what the temp was today, just know that while working in the rain and wind my hands got to the point where I could no longer feel my fingers, at which point I said, 'No mas!'
Got back to my apartment and have wet gear hanging everywhere, wet gloves near the heat source for the apartment and am generally feeling miserable. My left leg (knee and hip mostly) is feeling about 4 on the scale of pain, but then most days it feels about a 2. Dull deep aches especially around the knee and sometimes in the thigh muscle, that is when my sciatica isn't acting up and making it feel like someone laid a branding iron from my hip to my knee on the outside of my leg. Of course the doc says it is my imagination. I just wish I could send him (or her) depending... a sample of the pain when it is bad. I don't quite lose the use of it, but it can be just short of causing me to lose my lunch if it gets really going. I imagine to sleep tonight I'll use 3 aspirin. I know I know... they're supposed to be bad for you. But then again so is so much pain one can't sleep!

While loading downed branches in a chipper today, I thought I saw a piece of rope (major hazard!) wound up in the branch and trailing back 40 or more feet. I dropped the branch to investigate and found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicodendron_diversilobum Yes indeed ye olde burning oak emulating an ivy plant. No less dangerous to have going into a chipper, but still I hemmed and hawed for a while since it had actually set roots in the bark of the live oak limb that I wanted to shred. Finally I got on the far side of the branch from said trailing vine and very carefully watched my feet and fed it to the chipper. But the presence of ye olde burning oak meant a cold shower tonight when I arrived at home. Not pleasant considering the high temp today was something like 55 degrees Fahrenheit. BRRR all day, then because I was working in a short sleeved T-shirt I sort of look like I might have been cutting today… :(

If I could find people willing to pay $5 US per 1000 words read, I think I could make a fair living at proofreading. And frankly, after pricing proofreading service at scribendi I would say that even my preferred price of $10.00 per thousand words is pretty much underselling the market. Then again no one here (or not many) are producing professional works that are earning them a living either so I do understand that if I sell said service here I may have to price the service differently than it would be for other writing efforts. Still I have to agree with scribendi (www.scribendi.com) if you really want your work to look good, a proofreader is indispensable and the price, except for long tomes (I wouldn't be reading any such work just now...) is not really that high... Okay at $10.00 per thousand words a 65,000 word book would run $650. Like I said, for most of what I've read here I'd half that price. But again it would mean that more people would have to avail themselves of the service. Right now I'm going to be looking into paypal again. The main issue is that if I use a payment processor they require to know my actual physical address (One supposes this is so the infernal recovery scourge can find you) which makes me paranoid beyond measure. I just don't trust them not to let such info out to places other than the infernal rectal scourge. ...

Well I went to work today, it is only temporary… The reason I'm able to work this week is this https://weather.com/news/news/2019-02-11-winter-storm-nadia-pacific-northwest-snow
On Valentine's day I woke up to 10 inches of snow in my yard! Now to understand how unusual this is, just around the corner from where I live is a giant grapefruit tree that almost always bares fruit. Or in other words, Redding Ca is pretty close to a semi-tropical climate. Basically the amount of snow that came down here means that there are trees down all over town. And I'm going out and dragging anything less than 6" in diameter to a chipper that was running practically as hard as it could run today…