Winters in Alberta, rating on fun-meter: absolute zero.

I hate winter.

But in all honesty, in Canada, no one likes winter. And those that actually like winter only like it because of the snow and how pretty it looks, but no one likes the way snow looks in the city because it's all dirty and been walked all over and sprayed with road debris. So no one in Canadian cities like winters.

Unless they live in BC. Because winters there don't count.

I live in central Alberta. Winters here are mother nature's attempt to see just how miserable a place can get. First the snow happens, and then it melts a bit, just to give the ground this slippery, crunchy, lumpy, slip-on-it-and-your-legs-will-probably-break footing. Then it snows again and you're walking across this snow-covered, half-slush surface with a slippery under layer. Then it snows again and you're like alright, good, now I can walk without DYING.

But you also have to wade through knee-high powder, the bottom of which is a crunchy/uneven bed so it's a constant struggle and the OPPOSITE OF FUN. If you look up the antonym of fun, it's "walkingthroughAlbertasnowdrifts."

Then there's the wind. There's always wind in the winter. And it makes it that much colder. And then on top of the cold and the wind you have days where you never see the sun because it's only light out for maybe 7 hours a day or so. 10am-5pm, ish, is a mid-winter daylight schedule. You get some sort of half-light from like 8-10am and 5-7pm but it's grey and gross and miserable and cloudy anyways, so it doesn't count.

So basically going outside is a compilation of trying your best not to slip and fall, trying your best not to blink because if you too much or too hard do your eyelashes will freeze together, trying to find a compromise between covering your face with a scarf and having a cold, wet piece of cloth against your mouth or having no scarf and having your face ripped off by frost bite, navigating through miserable half-light or darkness, and probably not warm even a little bit. Also, when you first step outside, the air is so cold that it chokes you for the first few breaths if you aren't careful; you have to take a very slow breath so the air has a chance to warm up/your lungs can slowly adjust, or breathe through a scarf or your hand.

What part of this sounds like fun? Seriously.

Oh, and I almost forgot one of my least favorite parts. Before you CAN go outside, you have to put on boots (annoying for a person who has spent the summer in flip flops and fall/spring in slip-on shoes), a big freaking coat (and if you're a wuss like me, a sweater first), gloves, a scarf, a hat, probably pull up a hood, and if you're going to be outside for a LONG TIME you'll want some warm pants over that too.

So basically whenever you want to pop across the street for a coffee,  it takes 5 minutes of prep before you can even go outside.

Then before you touch anything/do anything you have to take your gloves off because who can do ANYTHING well with gloves on?!

People who have vehicles have to take a stake with a plastic blade on the end of it and hack at their windows to get the ice and snow and frost off of them before sitting in their disgustingly cold boxes of sadness and woe and quake uncontrollably, praying for their car to heat up faster, because it's been 10 minutes and you can still see your breath.

And while we're on the subject of cars, people in Edmonton and its surrounding cities SUCK AT DRIVING in the summer. You add ice and snow and wind and gross to that and you have a million HUGE, high-powered, high-speed WEAPONS flying around everywhere. If you're IN another car, your life is at risk. If you're outside of a building and outside of a car, may God help you.

The only colors in winter are grey, white, and brown. And in the intermittent not-cloudy days, the blue sky is not a nice blue. It's the coldest-looking blue you can imagine.

But you think, hey, if it's nice and sunny out at least it will be a bit warmer?

NOPE.

Clouds act as insulators. The cloudless days are the coldest of the season. That, and no heat is absorbed by the earth because it's covered in ice, so it just reflects back. AND guaranteed if there's no clouds, it's because it's windy-as-all-hell and they've all been blown away so it's minus freeze-your-ass-off with a minus holy-crap-I'm-going-to-die wind chill.

So it's like "LOL I'm sunny out but SCREW YOU."

There is nothing fun, beautiful, or happy about Alberta winters. And the next one is fast-approaching.

Luckily, this is the first year that I will not be in school during the winter, and because I work from home I MIGHT be okay. I might even get to see the sun on a regular basis!

I still hate winter, though.

Coffeeshop writing session, take 3.

Alright, so I guess my 5 readers all know that the last attempt at coffeeshop writing went horridly. I didn't get any work done and it was a huge mass of bad luck and bad experiences. So this  time I am back up in the first shop that I attempted this in, and it's going well. I've actually gotten quite a big chunk written and things are going good so far. It helps that it is very much writing weather outside; it's cold and rainy and windy and the kind of weather even rainy day enthusiasts hate.

I had to meet with an author earlier and discuss a series of new character sketches because he's changed his mind about the book he's writing. Which is good money, I guess, for me, but bad luck for him because now he has five useless designs. I don't understand why people would pay me so much money to do this stuff if they're not sure about it, it just doesn't make sense.

I guess they've got real jobs on the side and have money to spare.

So now I am waiting on a friend I am supposed to meet here for a coffee. I went to high school with him and we spent a lot of time together before I moved out and took off to a different city for University. However, he's now moving out of the country so we're doing a quick coffee before he leaves.

Then I have two more customer meetings before I start up on another realism design for another customer and then that will take me to bed time. But between the customer and the friend I have 3 hours so I thought I'd stick around and write. Turns out it was totally productive.

BUT GUESS WHAT. Tomorrow, my life gets momentarily exciting!

My all-time music hero (that isn't a drummer) Paul Brandt is doing a show in Edmonton tomorrow... for free! And it's quite unexpected. I happened to see the announcement over Twitter (side note, follow me @artineverysense) and so it's come as a complete surprise. I'm reeling. I've never seen him live before and the thought of witnessing that much musical awesomeness on a live stage is enough to make my head spin. I won't be sleeping tonight.

OR FOR THIS WEEK BECAUSE GUESS WHAT AGAIN.

I. GET. TO. SEE. ERIC. LAMAZE. LIVE.

I'm going to die of excitement overload. Seriously. My head is pounding because I'm so excited.

For those of you who missed my Olympic spaz-out week (lucky you if you did), Eric Lamaze is my hero of everything horse. I stayed up all night every night for a week just to watch this guy ride live on TV, and now I'm spending money I probably can't afford to to pay for gas so my friend will drive me down to Calgary to see him in at Spruce Meadows next Sunday, where they will be doing a Hickstead tribute in the morning.

Amazing. I will probably cry.

So I'm not sleeping this week. I have enough excited energy to last me years. It's not going to be pretty.

My ex-boyfriend/still-good-friend/horse trainer/Grand Prix competitor keeps bugging me about he's already met the guy/competed alongside him a few years back. He will never let me live it down.

Though I wouldn't get the same opportunity anyways because I don't showjump at Grand Prix level anyways. Pfft.

Anyways, that's my life right now. I have 20 minutes to finish up my writing session before my friend gets here. Ciao.

... side-note, I asked a guy to momentarily watch my possessions about an hour ago so I could run to the bathroom and he's been awkwardly glancing in my direction ever since. Every time I look up he's watching me and then he smiles and gives a wave.

I think he's flirting with me but I'm socially inept and thus have no idea. Sometimes I really really curse my social anxiety. He's pretty good-looking. Grrr.

Makes up for the fact that I got asked out by a 40yo man via napkin yesterday. I should post pictures of it. Holy. Yes. I will when I get home.

ANYWAYS. WRITING TIME.

An actually useful character outline.

Two helpful posts in one day? You know what that means; I have writer's block. And I'm too pantsless to go for a walk right now.

Here's an outline that I use for my characters that I actually find useful. I find a lot of "character profile forms" out there on the webbernets give you the MOST useless facts about your character. You spend three hours filling out fields that don't even apply to your story such as "favorite color." It's very rare that that's useful to the story. Also, why do you need to enter the sex of the character? If you don't know that offhand, you probably aren't writing very well. So here's what I think are the most important things to know about your own character.


Appearance

Hair:
Eyes:
Height: short/average/tall
Visible marks/scars:
Tattoos/piercings:
Brief clothing description:

Personal

Full name:
Family (seen on a regular basis):
Significant other:
Job:
Favorite hobby:

Story

Goal:
Why (one sentence): 
Goal accomplished?:
Lessons learned:
Marital status change:
Job change:
Location change:



What else do you need to know? You can add it in yourself. Here's an example of mine (with important info redacted):

Appearance

Hair: Black
Eyes: Grey
Height: short/average/(tall)
Visible marks/scars: N/A
Tattoos/piercings: Ribcage tattoo, black-colored hawk
Brief clothing description: Standard issue military uniform.

Personal

Full name: Charles [middle name] [last name]
Family (seen on a regular basis): Sister ([name])
Significant other: Anita [last name]
Job: Soldier
Favorite hobby:  Carving

Story

Goal: You don't get to know my story. But it would be like "to win against _______."
Why (one sentence): "Because they're trying to kill him." (example)
Goal accomplished?: Yes
Lessons learned: "meaningful lesson taught to my MC. Example. Learning to work with others. Yes. It can be that simple."
Marital status change: Yes. (relationship - married)
Job change: No
Location change: Yes ([city name redacted] - [city #2 name redacted])


Boom. Nice solid structure to follow.

Why I think character designs are important to your writing.

If I showed you these two pictures, what do you think you could a write better creative prose on?

Okay. Let's be honest here.You can make up some BS abstract minimalism higher-than-thou crap about how the one of NOTHING expresses more about your soul or something, but you would REALLY just be doing it to try really hard to prove me wrong. It's not what you actually think.

Of course you can write more on the first one. Even if you were just doing the most simple thing prose does - describing it.

Picture #1 you can talk about setting, subject, action... textures, you can guess sounds and imagine others in the picture. In fact, it's hard not to. You can talk about time of day, time in history, location, etc, and it's pretty easy to come up with a hundred different scenarios that lead to this image. Okay. Maybe not a hundred. But you get the point.

Picture #2 you can talk about... how maybe there was a ghost and... stuff. You have to stare it for a while to try and figure out and come up with images in your head without anything visual to go on. There's nothing more than your memory to refer back to for consistent details and such.

So basically the point I'm trying to make is that character designs are stupid amounts of helpful to creating believable, CONSISTENT characters. They give you a face to write for, and they actually help you sympathize with your characters better which makes your writing more emotionally appealing. The same effect is explained here by our friend Jeff from Community:




Gives you some emotional attachment so that when something good or bad happens to them, it flows through you and you can write more realistically.

Of course you can always use yourself as your MC but that doesn't usually end well. Like whatsherface who wrote Twilight. The MC looks exactly like the author and it turned into her wild crazy fantasy land where everything was empty and childish and waaaay too over-excited over-fantasized and started a freaking CULT.



 So personally I think it helps you keep better track of what's going on in your character and gives them some solidity and consistency. Of course not everyone needs this, but I think it can make a world of difference.

Details-wise, it's easier to look back on this:



Instead of this: 




Which is supposed to be a comparison to characters in a drawing or design vs in your head. By the way. 

I've done some mental acrobats to the point where this is okay.

I'm lying in bed right now. It's a little awkward to type with your laptop on your belly, but whatever.

It's currently 9:30am, which is a little later than I usually sleep in, I'm struggling to get up, and it is FREAKING COLD IN THIS ROOM. I went to bed and it was super hot and then as the night wore on I slowly layered another three blankets on top of myself, and I'm still wrapped up in them and I don't want to move, but I have to get some stuff done today. So I've justified updating my blog so I can wake myself up and simultaneously get the courage to battle the cold.

Here's why I think blogging instead of getting up right now is okay.

Blogging is supposed to help me, not only get my thoughts out of my head and make way for important things, but also get the creative wheels turning. Every writer should blog because the more you blog, the more you write. And the more you write, the better you write.

And the more the tendons in your wrists hate you.

So I've convinced myself it's going to give me a mental jump start to the day. really I'm just taking the time to enjoy the warm. I do have to send out a few business e-mails this morning too... hmmmmm...

But I also need breakfast. Grrr. Okay. I'm getting up now.

EDIT: NOPE. SENDING E-MAILS. 

First-hand experience for the sake of a novel.

A lot of serious authors do it. A lot of other serious authors watch us do it and view us in league with idiots. But some people truly believe (and I, among them) that experiencing what your characters are experiencing firsthand helps you be more convincing and thorough in your writing.

Some authors go to some scary extremes. I would never go down the line of self-harm like some more hardcore writers do, but I've gone through some great lengths to recreate some scenarios to help me think better and put myself in my MC's position.

Example. Once I asked my swordfighting class (oh yeah, I took sword fighting lessons for six years...) to help me recreate some fight scenarios so I could record them and write from the results. Once I had a friend a dozen times quicker than me to chase me down in a field and tackle me to the ground so I could feel the impact and how it happened. I've gone running through thunder storms, sliding down wet hills barefoot, swimming across lakes, and once laid in a bed all day without moving with my limbs "bandaged up" to figure out what being horridly injured would feel like for a day. I've put weights on belts and strapped on a heavy backpack and gone hiking through a city's river valley for a few hours, and gone for midnight walks in the country by my family's lakeside cabin all in the name of proper feeling.

So I tried to do some tonight and I regret it. Thoroughly. Sometimes you have to be smart, and tonight I was very not smart.

I've gone running this time of night all summer, in the same general area that I was in tonight, completely without incident. So I figured, what's a walk in the park in the middle of the night? I get nervous in the city in the dark, as any woman should, but for whatever reason it doesn't bother me when I'm running because I'm always near busy roads and I'm going faster than other people. Tonight I armed myself with a pocket knife strapped to my arm (seriously), dressed in the same clothing my MC might (or very near to it), and headed out for a night in the park. A little armed with overconfidence, extensive combat and martial arts training, and the ability to practically sprint the distance from the park to my house, I was pretty okay until I got into the middle of the park and noticed a man.

I'd seen him upon entering the park, and he'd been going in the other direction. Now he was walking in my direction. So I turned course and headed for the middle of a field, on a small hill where a group of three trees were. When I got there, I stood behind the trees so he couldn't see me in the dark (I was dressed in all black and they were evergreens, so their branches touched the ground) and watched him through the branches. He stopped and was staring in the direction I'd gone in. After a few moments, he walked straight for me.

I was swearing at myself and kicking myself for being an idiot. One man isn't a huge threat to me, but who knows if he had friends or weapons or what.

So I looped around behind the hill and cut across the field again, keeping an ear out for him as I went back to the main path and headed for the road. He went to where I'd been waiting, stayed there for a moment, then followed me out. Still angry at myself, I headed in the opposite direction of my house to gain enough ground to lose him so he didn't know where I freaking lived. He followed me at a distance for almost 5 blocks around two turns before I randomly turned a corner and, once out of sight, began running down the road and cut down a side path (another not-so-safe route but at least this one was lit by street lights), through a network of condos, and back onto a road a few blocks from my house. I jogged to my house, cut into the back yard, and got inside, locked all of my doors, and slapped myself (not really) for being so dumb.

Uh, of course a freaking dark park in the middle of a city isn't safe, idiot.

That being said, one man is hardly a threat to me, regardless of whatever weapon he might have had (even learned how to beat a gun in a fist fight...) but first rule of all martial arts is run. Run, and if they catch you, break them enough so that they can't follow you.

So yeah, a bit heart-pounding. Gave me some GREAT stuff to write on, though!

Also, my getup was pretty badass. What you can't see in this picture is that I'm wearing black knee-height boots and black tights in addition to this. And a black hood. But you can kinda see that. I felt like the badass female action character that you see in movies and shit.

 

Today's episode of WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT?!

Right. So, girls sit weird. Like... a guy sits around, he's either knees apart or ankle on thigh leg cross or "girly" leg cross if he's a skinny/classy guy. Girls are like LET'S SEE HOW MANY WAYS OUR KNEES CAN ROTATE. And I TRIED explaining this to my friend once and he just gave me a very unconvincing "... uhuh..." and went back to his ignorant life of not knowing what normal sitting is. So I was just working on my novel and I came up on a blank spot and so I curled up into my "I'm thinking" pose which I will get to in a moment, and happened to glance at myself in the mirror across from me, which I usually NEVER do because I never look like someone I'd like to see at the moment because I've never done anything more than throw my hair into a messy ponytail and shove glasses onto my face.

Holy run-on sentence.

So my version of a thinking pose is pulling my feet onto the thing I'm sitting on (in this case, my bed), crossing my ankles, and shoving my knees into the insides of my elbows, then locking my wrists together. It's crazy amounts of comfortable.

What I saw in the mirror made me think about my conversation about girls sitting stupidly.

It's true. Look at what I look like when I'm thinking:

Sorry for the bad makeup job. 

Anyways, I made this post to prove a point to a friend who will never read it. Yeah. I'm in a writer's block.

Mental backflips of an active brain.

I'm going to warn you all right now that this post is going to LOOK like it's going to be depressing, but it's really not, I PROMISE.

Okay, onto the post.


I'm half convinced my color-matching, story-making, sound-differing brain is what's gotten me into this mental mess. Artists of all walks are weird. I went to music school in a purely arts building. Everyone was weird. The musicians were all crazy/screwed up, the theatre students obnoxious and overly dramatic, the writers were secluded and a bit creepy at times, the fine artists were purposeful and colorful and had their eyes half-glazed over all the time because they were trying to picture everything under their pencil. It all fits. None of it is unexpected, and somehow they shoved thousands of weirdos and oddballs into one big building and nothing burned to the ground.

Except the one time that the cafeteria's deep frier exploded one morning. No worries, everyone was fine but the entire building reeked of smoke and oil for days after.

I guess I just have to reiterate my point here. Artists are screwed up people.

So it's okay that I'm no exception. I've come to terms with it a long time ago, but there's a roller coaster involved. Also, just learned roller coaster is not one word; if you type it, spell check thinks you're trying to say "cholesterol." Anyways.

I break super easy. In every way except for physical. Okay. physical too, I'm pathetically uncoordinated which, surprisingly enough, is pretty common for drummers. Except mentally is a bit harder to explain. I break every which way incredibly easily, and it takes some getting used to.

There's extremes of being "broken" and not-so-extremes. The first one that happens is kinda like what you might witness from Abed on the show Community:


You mess too much with my brain and I just kinda have a system failure and curl up in a ball and stare back at you awkwardly and wait for the thing that scared me to go away. I have no coping mechanism for life-changing things that might happen, or things that I might find life-changing and everyone else is just okay with.

I call it terrifying, others call it funny. I don't see what's so funny about having your life flipped over unexpectedly, at the time, but I can usually come to terms with it.

The other side is the humor break. My funny breaks sometimes, if people have been too much funny. The funny breaks both ways; one way I'm in a constant state of eye-watering, unsettling silent giggles, usually once again seen from behind my knees as I'm curled up in a ball. Usually in an upright position, this time. The other side of humor break is the elimination of exterior response. I will genuinely find something hilarious, and laugh on the inside, but on the outside I'm stone-faced and usually only say, "that's funny." It doesn't clue in to me as an inappropriate reaction because inside I'm reacting accordingly. It's not until a friend gives me a sideways glance that I realize that I've done something not normal.

The other break is what I've started to call the British break. I watch too much British television and I become obsessed with filtering my speech because I'm terrified of British inflections making their way into my dialogue. It gives me a look of irregular frustration and my active listening dies. Which is bad, because active listening is the way I follow conversations and social cues, and if that's gone then I become terrified that I've missed something important and my conversational abilities break.

Which leads us to the speech breaks. One is like the above where I forget to actively listen, and the lines of speech that draw themselves out for me disappear and I have nothing, which destroys my ability to contribute. The other is deep active listening. While I'm picking apart the conversation and guessing where it's going, they've stopped talking for a couple of minutes and have to say my name a few times before I realize it.

These go in so many ways. There's every corner of human action and emotion, and at every corner there's an edge that I somehow find very hard to not slip off of.

The final big one is the accidental moral break. Something happens that scares my moral subconscious and I do another "Abed break". Sometimes it's something in a movie; my friends made me watch Zach and Miry Make a Porno and there's one scene near the end with excrement involved that had me, once again, curled in a ball and whining and temporarily unable to function. Sometimes it's in conversation. Someone who's rather crude and doesn't know me well, usually from my University, will say something shocking that shuts down my coping mechanisms. Sometimes it's situational; I see someone making out in public. I break.

My brain does all of these high-speed back flips to try and sort out my life for me, and it works so hard overtime that sometimes it does one too many flips and has to take a few to untangle itself, so I patiently wait for it to get back to normal.

Today I British-broke AND scared-broke, AND moral-broke, all at once, so I ended up walling myself into my bedroom and living here all day trying to be productive and failing.

Procrastination and the lazy artist.

I DON'T WANT TO DO ANYTHING TODAY. Nothing. Not. A. Damn. Thing.

You know what I've done today?

I walked 10 minutes to the pet store to buy a mouse for my snake because he's hungry.

It's 4:30pm.

You know what I NEED to do today? I need to fix a painting that a customer hated, I need to get to work on a commission someone is picking up tomorrow (so I have tonight and tomorrow morning to do it), and I need to put some ink on a character sketch I did for an author.

And speaking of authors!

I WANT TO WRITE SO DAMN BAD. I've been grudgingly sitting around doing nothing because I don't want to paint and I do want to write, but I have to paint and I'm not letting myself write until my damn deadlines for fine arts are met so I'm in a bit of a conflict with myself which I'm sure would send a therapist, should I have one, over the edge. It's sad. I should really just fix this painting... it's only going to take a couple of hours. But I really dislike painting.

Yeah. I dislike it. I became a professional artist because I thought everyone would love my drawings and I could bask in the loving glow of my beloved graphite forever.

But everyone's all OUUU I LOVE YOUR OIL PAINTINGS MAKE ME ONE SO I CAN BE A PICKY PICKY CUSTOMER ABOUT IT BECAUSE I'M RICH AND I PAY YOU STUPID AMOUNTS OF MONEY FOR IT.

Okay, so I do make about $30 an hour for my oil paintings, so they are good money...

But I charge that much because I hate doing them and I hold the hopes up that if they're that expensive less people will want them. But I just think it sends the message that they're super high class instead, and rich people want them.

Really I'm just blogging right now to complain about nothing to avoid doing work. I'm feeling so unmotivated again.

Okay. I'm going to get to work, now.

This house is so empty!

Ian and I are going to be holding down the fort together for the next few days as John is gallivanting off to the USA somewhere and Laura is gone with her band on tour. So Ian and I are the only ones in this house and it's turning out strangely awesome. I really have nothing else to post about. So I'm watching Community and drinking craptonnes of water and keeping calm.

I tried to be productive today because I have such a soon deadline but my motivation tanked halfway through the day so tomorrow will be busier than I had planned. But I was so tired. And just not motivated. Or interested. It happens sometimes.

Anyways! Yeah!