Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 42

Adventures With Technology

I've always skated through Mercury Retrogrades without any issues. I heard an astrologer say that a person born when a planet is retrograde doesn't have to deal with the issues that others do and I was like, okay, that makes sense. It explains why I just pretty much have zero problems when Mercury goes retrograde.

Until this past week.

Mercury Retrograde: Sep 27 through Oct 18, but Mercury is in its shadow on either side, so the dates can be a little fluid as far as the issues go.

Anyway, I'm gloriously sailing through Mercury Retrograde with zero problems--just like always--until last Friday.

I overslept. Like really overslept.

I'd only had about 2.5 hours of sleep the night before, so I assumed I was so tired that I'd just slept through the alarm. But Saturday morning told me the issue is bigger than that. I heard it go off, I hit the snooze, and then it stayed silent. I lifted the phone, it showed the alarm was going off, but nothing. It was dead quiet. This isn't good. I rely on my phone to wake me up for work.

An online search showed I wasn't the only one with this issue, but I didn't find any good solutions. So even though I wasn't ready to update to iOS 15, I hit the button to download it. I'm hoping that this solves the problem. I'm writing this on Saturday and will test it out on Sunday.

Normally, I wouldn't worry about updating my phone during Mercury Retrograde, but my technology woes didn't stop with the alarm issue.

When I got home from errands on Saturday, I went to Joann to buy some super cute Halloween fabric. I never thought making a purchase could be so frustrating. I'm all but screaming at the website: Take my money, please!

First, I wanted to order four yards of each of the fabrics. That worked for 3 of the 4 fabrics. I tried every permutation I could think of to get four yards, but nope, three yards only. Okay, I probably don't need four yards anyway. I'm planning to use the fabric to make some Japanese knot bags and maybe some bowl cozies. Maybe I'll try the project (pillows) that they were advertising, but those aren't my decor thing. Anyway, three yards. I can live with it.

Then I tried to check out using PayPal. Rejection. Something isn't verifying with my PayPal. I kept getting the error no matter what I did. Finally, as I muttered curse words, I thought: Fine, I'll use a credit card. I prefer not to enter it, but whatever.

Joann's said I didn't have an email address with my payment method. I look. My email address is there. I try and try to get my order in. Joann's refuses to believe I have entered an email.

If the fabric wasn't so cute and limited to Halloween, I would have given up then and there, but I really wanted it. I opened a different browser, signed in, and checked out the cart on my credit card without a single problem. I even had an app from that browser find a coupon code that got me an extra 20% off.

But the past two days have been so frustrating and it revolves around technology which is Mercury's bailiwick, so I'm chalking it up to retrograde.

I'm hoping the last 36 hours are all I have to deal with because I'm done with it. I guess I'm pretty spoiled, but I don't like this.

EDITED TO ADD: Joann's just emailed me. The fabric it was only letting me buy three yards of is out of stock and there's another fabric I can only have half of what I ordered. Grrr!

Flash, Bang

One of the things that amazed me after I sold my first book was the people who would come up to me and offer to give me their ideas and split the profits with me. Usually it was 50/50, but sometimes they thought they deserved more because clearly the idea is the hard part.

Insert a snort of laughter here.

Ideas are the easy part. My God, I can't do anything without ideas jumping into my brain.

Introduce a throwaway secondary character? Ideas come to make him a hero in a later book.

Watch a baseball game? Get multiple ideas.

Overhear part of a conversation? More ideas.

Meme on Facebook? Ideas!

You get the picture. I have notebooks and file drawers full of ideas. More than I could write in twenty lifetimes.

Not all ideas are created equal. Some of them don't have enough substance to them to become full-fledged stories, not even a short story. Others are intriguing, but I don't love them enough to spend months and months writing them. And the biggest problem, of course, is finding time to write the ones I do love.

So yeah, ideas are literally the easiest part of writing. The hard part? It's actually writing. It's hammering out the details, filling the plot holes, coming up with ways to get from point A to point Z. It's discovering what you think will work leads to logic problems. Or that your characters absolutely refuse to go along with the idea. I've blogged before about how my hero and heroine will stop talking to me if I write something they don't like. When I'm spinning my wheels, I try to figure out where I made my mistake.

And then all the words back to that point get cut.

Yeah.

You do not want to see the file labeled "Old Stuff" on my computer. Each book has one of those and it's where the stuff I wrote that didn't work goes to live. I don't just delete anything because maybe I can use it. Some day.

Notebook Dilemma Continues

I thought I had my notes problem for my books sorted out. I'd found these junk journals online and they were thick, with plenty of room for notes. The problem? These were made for art or keepsake/scrapbooking type uses, not handwritten notes.

What I discovered was that some of the papers in there really needed a thick marker in order for the words to be seen and I don't like writing in marker. I have my pen of choice and don't want to use a different one.

These junk journals really are cool--just not for my notes.

I ended up buying some notebooks with really nice paper. OMG, I love the paper quality. I'm not sure, though, (despite how cool they are) that this is my permanent answer either.

I'm using the green notebook in this picture for Paladin League notes right now. (I had it personalized with Paladin League on it rather than my name.) But it's not that thick and I anticipate running through it pretty quickly because I make a lot of notes as I write. It's how I think things through.

This continues my ongoing notebook problem. I can't find a thick, spiral-bound notebook with paper that I love. Well, that's not quite true. I did find one that was perfect. So (of course) Poppin stopped making it. I'd only bought one because I wanted to try it out before I committed to more, and by the time I realized it was exactly what I wanted, they were gone. I found one on eBay and bought it, but when I fill that one up, there are no more.

What notebooks is Poppin still making? Their thin ones that don't have enough paper and their ones that are bound. I tried one of those, but much prefer the spiral for story notes.

BTW, the original Poppin notebook is filled with Paladin League notes. It filled up right about the time I finished Wicked Salvation. I actually had to put my revision notes in the new (green) notebook.

One Letter

Last week, I blogged about character names and an author asking if she can reuse names. I mentioned that the question surprised me because I don't get to name my own characters, but I forgot to mention I'm kind of dealing with a similar issue right now.

You see, I have two heroes who have told me their name is Zach/Zack. One spelled with an h and the other spelled with a k.

Since Zach with an h is already started, I tried to convince the other Zack that his name wasn't going to work and he should pick something else. I even offered a few suggestions. He declined.

And because I've written two chapters of Zach's book, it's too late to change his name.

Since they're spelled differently, an argument could be made that they're not the exact same name, but they're pronounced identically. And if I were to have a conversation with someone and talk about Zach/k, they wouldn't be sure which one I meant unless I gave them additional information.

On the plus side, Zack with a k is far enough back in the queue that I have time to work on him. His story would be number three in a second set of four Paladin League books. I'm still writing number four in the first set of four. (No, Zach with an h isn't in this story.)

I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about it yet, but my characters can be pretty stubborn--especially about their names.

No Bugs Allowed

I hate bugs. When I lived in Minnesota, I just had to deal with mostly small ones. A few spiders, some ants, maybe a box elder bug or a beetle of some sort.

It's a totally different story in Georgia where you have pest control on a retainer.

When I stayed in the ground floor condo, I would wake up to palmetto bugs in the house. I would chase them around at 4am with the vacuum cleaner because they were too huge for me to deal with.

The bug vac I had ready in Minneapolis? Useless against the bugs down here.

But the condo was old and not well-sealed. Things would be better when I bought a house down here and moved in.

And things were better. Mostly.

There was just this one little problem in my new home. The scorpions. I can still remember the first time I saw one. It was in my bedroom, it's tail curved up and I'm like, GAH! What do I do? My usual tactic of spraying bugs wasn't going to work because of its shell. I finally stepped on it. EWWWW! But I was wearing my Birkenstock sandals, so I knew my foot would be safe and it's not like I wanted that thing hanging around, and maybe making more scorpions.

So every time pest control came out, I had them spray the attic for scorpions. That's how they were getting in the house. Or at least that's what we suspected.

My second house down here has no scorpions. The bug situation has been blessedly calm. Until last Wednesday. My dad reported to me that there were ants in his bathroom. But he wasn't positive they were ants and wanted me to look at them. No! I don't want to see bugs.

He was going to put down sticky traps and I told him to call pest control. This is what I'm paying them for--quarterly spraying and to show up whenever there's a bug issue.

The pest guy came out last Friday and said they were spider ants. WTF are spider ants? I'm not Googling that! He also sprayed outside and around the doorways and the kitchen although we hadn't seen anything there. Fingers crossed that this takes care of the problem.

If bugs want to live, they need to stay out of the perimeter of death around my house and they for dang sure need to stay out of my home. No bugs allowed.

Names, Names, Names

The other day on Facebook, I saw an author ask a question about reusing character names in a writers' group. I actually don't know what anyone said to her because I was sitting there amazed that she got a choice about the names.

This isn't the first time I've been dumbstruck by this idea. Authors talk about things like this and occasionally I see the comments, but if it's been a while between postings, I forget.

You see, I do not get to name my characters. They let me know what their names are.

I don't always like their names. I had one character who used subterfuge. He said to just use the name as a placeholder for now. He'd give me a name I liked later. He lied to me. The name I didn't like? It's still his name. (This is an unpublished book that I'd still like to finish some day. It did go out on proposal, but didn't sell.)

Most often, though, the characters just show up in my brain and tell me to browse through name books or name websites until they say that's it!

That happened to me on Friday night. I had a few characters show up on Thursday night--enough heroes for a trilogy--and Friday they had me browsing name sites. One of them has a name that start with a T. I wrote down the one I thought it was and it didn't feel right. Even as I worked on the other guys, I kept looking back at that hero's name. Turns out I was close, but it was Tyler, not Tucker. I told him I already have a character named Tyler. His response? Too bad.

I've had a heroine who announced her presence by saying her name. Mika. And I've had another heroine that made me search for weeks and weeks and weeks until I finally found her name. Ryne. This is normally a boy's name which is why I didn't find it after all the time I spent looking. I finally had a book that listed it in the girls' section and she jumped on it.

So with this history, I sometimes forget that there are authors who get to choose their characters' names. But for all the complaining I do, I'd much rather have things the way they happen for me. I don't have to worry about reusing a character's name because they just don't let me choose.

Decision Made

Last week, I blogged about needing to make a decision on my planner for 2022. I hemmed and hawed, but I finally went with Day Designer over my usual planner.

It really was a hard decision because the planner I've used for the last five years or so has trackers for water, sleep, and vitamins printed on every page as well as a check box for workouts. I'm losing all this with Day Designer and will have to get stickers to replicate it.

But my usual planner has added so many unnecessary things to monitor that it was ridiculous. Not only am I incapable of leaving those fields blank--I tend too much toward OCD to do that--but I was losing space in the part of the page I needed most. So those added fields felt too much like work and I'd be pushing against space limitations on a lot of days.

Day Designer's flagship planner is bigger than my usual planner, so I'll actually have more room and they have all kinds of handy boxes on the page where I can add stickers to track water, sleep, vitamins, and workouts. Plus!

And Day Designer was ready to ship the day I ordered it. My usual planner is a preorder that wouldn't have arrived until sometime in November. Probably. So I'll have my hands on my 2022 planner shortly and won't have to make notes for 2022 appointments in the back of 2021 like I've been doing. Plus!

You don't want to know how much time I spent watching YouTube videos of reviews for daily planners. Weekly planners do not work for me. There doesn't seem to be that many daily planners available. My number one requirement was it be in one book. I don't want two or four planners to cover one year. I want and need everything in one place. That took out two of the planners I was looking at.

My other requirement was that it be dated. That took out another planner. None of the remaining planners had full days for Saturday and Sunday which I would love more than anything else on planet Earth. Who are these people who have idle weekends and don't need a huge amount of planner real estate on the weekends?

Another thing that ended up impacting my decision was that I wanted the times preprinted in the planner. I didn't want to have to write in my own times for appointments. That eliminated several more planners and it basically came down to the three I was looking at to begin with.

I did start working on the customizable planner because having a full Saturday and Sunday would be the best thing ever, but it gave me an error message part way through, and it suddenly all felt like too much work when I could just order the Day Designer and be done with it. So that's what I did.

I still feel strange about changing planners. I really, really loved my other planner, but their tinkering made it too difficult for me to use any longer. I'll keep my eyes on them for 2023 and see if they streamline, but who knows? Maybe I'll love Day Designer so much that I never switch. We shall see.

Updates to come after I've lived with the planner for a while.

Adventures in Sewing

Way back in 2020, when masks were nowhere to be found, I dug out my mom's sewing machine, watched some YouTube videos, and made some for my dad and myself. They actually turned out halfway decent and I've had this in the back of my mind ever since.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago. I found a pattern called "Oversized Boxy T-Shirt" and it was labeled for beginners. I bought it. This is the style of Tee that I love and I'm definitely a novice.

I ordered material, I watched some videos that said to wash your knit fabric before cutting it out, so I did that, and then I printed out the PDF pattern, taped it together and cut out my pieces. Everything went well.

Wow, maybe I really can do this!

I wasn't able to start sewing because the pocket is supposed to go on first and I needed fusible interfacing which (of course) I don't own. That came in on a Monday, but I was too tired to attempt anything until last Saturday.

This is where my problems started. I must have cut the pocket out a little bit off because the point wasn't in the right place and I couldn't get it to fold down right even after I ironed it. I had this brilliant idea of snipping a little Vee with my scissors--and accidentally snipped into the pocket. :-(

I do have extra material, but I didn't want to go through all the fusible interfacing steps again and the pocket is optional, so I decided to proceed without it.

To say my sewing was less than optimal would be understating it, but at least everything was lying smoothly and that's all that mattered to me. Besides, I was figuring things out as I sewed and when I make a second shirt, I know I'll do better.

I was nearly finished. All I needed to do was put on the collar and hem the bottom and sleeves.

This is where I ran into big trouble.

You see, my beginner sewing pattern doesn't have enough explanation for this beginner. As in I have only sewn masks and nothing else since I was 13 years old or so. I watched YouTube for the pocket and I should have watched YouTube for the collar, but I thought it couldn't be that hard, right?

Oh, yes, it could be that hard. I ended up with puckers and slips where I didn't catch the material. Instead of stopping to regroup, I just sewed those spots again. And again when I still had problems.

Yeah.

I watched a YouTube video that was very helpful on how to put the collar in and realized I needed to take out what I'd done and start over. I found a seam ripper in my sewing kit.

Here comes problem two. I had thread that matched the fabric as close to exactly as you can imagine. The stitch I was using on my sewing machine sewed teeny tiny little stitches. My seam ripper is some cheap piece of junk tossed in a sewing kit. So 1) I could hardly see the stitches to begin with and 2) the seam ripper has a pretty wide point, wider than the stitch, so getting it under to slice it is hard.

And I kept sewing over spots multiple times. Sobs.

This is where I sit right now. I've been searching online to see if there's an easier way to get tiny stitches out, but apparently not. There are, however, finer point seam rippers, which it appears I'll need to invest in.

So no T-shirt and I'm frustrated right now. I did learn a valuable lesson, however. Watch videos and don't assume anything is easy.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

September is the month where I order my planner for the next year. I love my daily paper planner and would get nothing done without it. I even have a favorite company. Or I did have a favorite company before they kept tinkering with the planner.

This is why I test drove another daily planner to see if I could live with it. (Spoiler: I could!) But the cover for the new planner from the company I usually buy from is gorgeous this year. They sneak peeked it.

I'm going to need to have a sneak peek of the interior before I decide whether or not I'm sticking with them or going with the other planner I tried out.

And then there's option three. This is a planner company that allows people to customize their planner which means (for the first time ever!) I could have a full day for Saturday and Sunday instead of the two days sharing a page. (How stupid is this? The weekends are busier than the weekdays!)

But the problem with the customizable planner is that I'd have to do a lot of work to get it the way I want it. Full days for the weekends though.

In other words, I don't know which direction to turn at this point. I wish my favorite planner would go back to the layout they had in 2020, which was the one that worked best for me, and stop tinkering with the daily pages. Grrrr.

Walking Iceland

Guess who discovered virtual races this year?

One of my favorites is a company that allows you to set your own time goal to complete a medal. Right now, I'm walking around Iceland and I'm nearly at the 50% mark.

Iceland's route is 1332.5 kilometers. At 20%, 40%, 60% and 80%, a tree gets planted. And at various points along the route, I get a digital postcard with some facts and information about a city or location that I've just walked through.

If you can see the little human figure at the lower left of the blue portion of my phone's screen capture, that's where I press for Google Street View. It allows me to look around the area.

This is the second medal I'm working on from this company. The first one was the Ring of Kerry virtual challenge. I walked 200 kilometers in 45 days. It was fun and it seemed a little short. I wanted more! So that's why I signed up for Iceland. Only I learned Iceland is too long. I need something between the Ring of Kerry and Iceland. I have one more medal I'm registered for and I do believe that one will be more manageable. But I don't remember for sure. :-/

I have a couple of 5K challenge medals to work on after my walking tours. One has a medal from Joshua Tree Park and another is aliens and the third is Umbrella Academy.

And lately in my Facebook feed, I've been seeing ads for a planetary challenge from another company that I totally want to sign up for. But I need to finish Iceland. Just 676.2 kilometers to go. :-/