Story flow

about being pessimistic...

Yesterday we left work relatively early, at around 7:30 pm (the norm these days is past 9 pm). But.

But there was a complete traffic standstill about 6 kilometers long in a place where this kind of traffic is as rare as a warm spring day in Antarctica. I inched up slowly until I could make a U-turn and took another route, which was also plagued by heavy traffic (albeit not as bad). I got home just about a quarter to 9.

Along the way I developed a full-blown cold.

Then as I was getting ready to make supper, I get a call that a client just uploaded their questions meeting. So I looked at it, detected several major problems, called my supervisor, called his supervisor and then called the boss, then I sent some emails. I finished around 10:20.

For supper I drank a few liters of water and warmed up some leftovers (I wasn't going to start chopping vegetables that late). I managed a little time at the PC web browsing, then I went to bed.

Maybe the weekend spoiler took place earlier, maybe it was a teaser for what is to come.

Definitely a teaser. I spent the weekend going through boxes of tissues, gallons of citrus juices, cold meds (ha!) and Tylenol, in between trying to breathe and keep warm.

Write? I couldn't even concentrate or focus more than a few seconds at a time. I brought home the receipts for the petty cash reimbursement form, and I couldn't even organize them by company...

Hopefully next weekend will be better.

Hope you feel better Nareed!

Quote: FrGamble

Hope you feel better Nareed!

Thanks!

BTW, you know what doesn't help a cold? Working 15-hour days.

Unless you're trying to make it last longer. then it definitely helps.

So the challenges for this weekend are as follows:

1) work out Saturday, Sunday and Monday (yes, I know Monday is not part of the weekend).

2) Finish (and start*) "Ours" by Tuesday at the latest.

3) Cook something simple that isn't pasta.

I got tasked with travelling to Carmen on Tuesday to deliver a proposal to our office there, and to help finish it. I'd return early the next day. This is perfect, because the work still required is nearly negligible, but I can bring the laptop along and finish working on my story if necessary (if not, well...). Also I booked a hotel with a gym, so I can work out either late Tuesday or early Wednesday. My flight Tuesday leaves at 11 am, so that gives me plenty of time to work out. the Wed flight leaves at 8:30 am, but the hotel's gym is open since 5 and the hotel is like three minutes from the airport.


(*) not necessarily in that order.

For some reason 2 out of three seems rather bad.

I never liked that Meatloaf song, either.

It's amazing how a bunch of little things, and some not so little things, can conspire to kill the weekend plans.

The trip to Carmen didn't turn out as expected. the people we have there work differently. So instead of being done mid-afternoon as I'd hoped, we finished around early evening....

So the laptop came along only to see the X-ray machines at the airports. But on the plus side I made good use of the hotel's gym. The elliptical wouldn't work, but I lasted so long on the treadmill I got blisters on two of my feet. Then Wednesday I logged about 3 kilometers walking at the Mex City airport and a trip to the bank.

I did think some more about the story, perhaps too much. I came up with two scenes I should insert, whittled them to one, but am unsure whether it will fit.

There's this thing I do. When I read news which get to me, I try to imagine something similar, though fictional, and perhaps on a larger scale, but with a better, more optimistic resolution. This scene is one such thing. It does fit the theme and story, too, but perhaps not the pacing. It might help in getting Marina defined for the reader, though. We'll see.

I need to plan my weekends better.

First off, three's the wake up problem. On most weekdays I get up at 6, reluctantly, when the alarm goes off. On weekends I turn off the alarm, but usually wake up at between 5 to 5:30. It's as though my brain is telling me "Come on! It's a day off! We don't want to waste any of it sleeping!" And try as I might, I can't get back to sleep then.

So I get up, make coffee and spend time at the PC or the tablet browsing the web. By 11 am I am so tired that, despite coffee, I want to take a nap. I don't, most times, but rather head out to the supermarket to shop for the weekends' cooking. After lunch around 2-2:30 pm I do take a nap. I'll get up around 5-6 pm. Next I'll work out, which tires me out so much I feel like just watching TV or browsing the web again (or both), until I'm ready to go to bed...

Sundays are more of the same, with the addition of 90% of the time having to go to the office. This to finish up some work I couldn't get done over the week (don't ask) and to deliver office supplies which I buy on Saturdays. I also cook on Sundays. Lately I don't even watch Football.

What can I do?

A good beginning would be to sleep in. I don't think that's possible. I've tried lots of things, like not getting coffee, staying in bed, etc. So the next step is to eliminate the nap, or at least shorten it considerably (set an alarm for an hour later, for example). Also I need to trim my Facebook feed so I don't spend so much time on it. It's nice to find links to shops, visit them, pin items from them on Pinterest, but ultimately it's pointless and it wastes time. Also, I noted I saved about 20 items on FB I haven't even seen. That ought to stop, too.

Take last Saturday. After waking up at 5:20, I spent the next five hours on the web. Really, five hours. Not all on Facebook, as there are other websites I do check often. But still, the time would have been better spent shopping for groceries early (that's when the stores are not as crowded and there's less traffic), or working out at that time, or even cooking early.

It would be great, too, if I could do all my office work on the weekday, but this effing business is too unpredictable. Last Friday we were asked to do an price analysis at 7 pm, just when we were leaving. While I could have done it then, I was too tired from the whole week to stay a second longer than necessary. So I did it on Sunday.

The point is to give myself time to write and to work out. So today I'll spend some time slimming down the FB feed, uninstalling some games as well, and making up plans for next weekend.

Oh, some Saturdays I've electrolysis in the morning. The day is about the same, except I go out between 8 and 9:30 am, depending on my time slot, and suffer for big gains for some time. But the rest of the weekend is the same.

I'm getting there, but I need to do two things:

1) Schedule electrolysis earlier. Usually I go at 9, but lately their schedule is busier, so my appointments fall at 10 to 11. This seems good, but it means finishing around noon, dead tired and facing more traffic than usual, more people at the supermarket, etc.

2) either skip going to the office entirely, or getting in earlier.

I tried the latter Sunday, but it didn't quite work.

I left home at 9, intending to be done at the office by 10:30 at the latest. I just had to get the car gassed up on the way in. Well, the gas station had trouble dispatching. We use a chip embedded on a collar around the gas tank intake, so the company gets the bill. If I pay for the gas myself, I can't bill it to the company later. the problem is few stations can support this system. I went to one more, which also didn't work.

I arrived at the office around 10:30.

I had to tally the receipts for petty cash and draw up the requisition. And also I had to download some files from the web and print them. Well, the file server refused to let me save the files. I stored them elsewhere, but then they refused to print. I gave up even trying by around noon.

Then it was just a matter of tallying the receipts...

I got back home around 2.

<sigh>

Quote: terapined

You lost me at "ship's token alien"

Ships have token alien's?

Nareed makes a lot of references to the framework of story telling.

Quote: Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock explained the term "MacGuffin" in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin". The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

The standard action group in storytelling consists of a group of 5.
The Leader — A mastermind, charismatic, levelheaded, headstrong, or some combination of the four. Usually a white guy.
The Lancer — The Anti-Hero.
The Smart Guy — Physically weak, but intelligent.
The Big Guy — The strongman of the team. May be dumb. Or mute.
The Token — Woman, minority, or alien.

Guardians of the Galaxy deliberately plays with the stereotypical group by having only one human


In the "Cabin in the Woods" Joss Whedon builds a story around the five archetypical characters of horror movies: the athlete , the scholar, the fool , the whore. and the virgin .