Gothic Workshop

So far I really enjoy the gothic novel workshop I signed up for. This is the 3rd of 4 weeks. I admit I had no idea what a gothic novel really was, so I'm learning a lot. Through the exercies, I am forming the idea for another novel. It will have to go on the back burner after the workshop, though. Too many other projects are more vocal in my head.

I have set myself the goal of finishing the edits on my paranormal mystery by the end of March. If I keep my butt in gear, this is realistic. Unless I decide it needs major revisions, of course, which at this point I don't think it does.

Once I finish this (and hopefully have a title for it!) I think I will work on the rewrite of The Moonlight Cafe. That, or I will begin the second book in the paranormal series. I know how that one will begin, and it is ready to go. We'll see where the Muse takes me when these edits are complete.

Sick

The past few weeks I've been sick a lot. It started with sinusitis. I thought it was the flu. Got some antibiotics for it and was laid up in bed for a few days, then spent another many days recovering and being tired. Then was better for a few days. Then got gastro-enteritis (I think that's how you spell it.) The doctor thought the antibiotics wiped out the good bacteria and let other stuff take over. Whatever happened, I was miserable. I was out of work for a full 3 days. So between all that, I got no writing done for a few weeks.

I planned on taking Sunday to work on my novel and begin the readthrough to myself. Those plans fell through. For reasons I won't go into here, my kung fu teacher, Matt, is starting his own school, along with another of the teachers, Kevin. They needed to move all their equipment out of the old school on Sunday, and since I have a pick up truck, I offered to help. It turned out to be an all day ordeal and I was wiped out by the time I got home, so no work on the novel was done.

I must say I am excited about the new school. Kung Fu classes will remain as they are, but there will be additional offerings such as Tai Chi. Lion Dance will not have such a grueling practice schedule, so I will finally be able to join that if I choose. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but have to weigh the time it takes with what I need for myself and writing.

Changing it Up

When I started this blog, I wanted to keep it focused on my writing journey. However, that's not the only part of who I am, and when the writing is going slow, so does the blog. So I'm going to add some more variety here.

One new thing related to writing, though, is I signed up for an online workshop about Gothic novels. It's a 4 week course. While I'm not writing a Gothic, I thought it would be helpful with the paranormal aspects of my second novel (which I still don't have a title for. Argh.) This is the first online workshop I've taken, so we'll see how it goes. Writer's Digest has quite a few I'd like to take, but theirs are more expensive, so I wanted to try a cheaper one first to see how I like the format before committing a couple hundred dollars to a class. It starts this week, and I'm excited about it.

The other major part of my life (outside of my family of course) is Kung Fu. Not quite 4 years ago I started studying Shaolin Kung Fu. I studied for about a year and a half and made it to the 5th chamber, black sash. There are 35 chambers. I then decided to stop training. There were several reasons for this, the main ones being lack of time and a desire to devote more time to writing. It was a difficult decision, but was the right one at the time.

Last July, I decided to go back. My teacher welcomed me back to the school. Unfortunately, I had forgotten most of what I learned before so had to start over with my training. I feel I am now close to being ready to test for my black sash again. (Kung Fu works backwards from karate - you start with black and work your way up to white sash.)

Two nights a week now I have class for an hour and a half. My school is very intense. There is a lot of physical conditioning, which I need to work on more on my own time. I'm still weaker than I feel I should be. Horse stance is one of the fundamentals. Imagine sitting in a chair, but there's no chair. Now stay like that as long as you can. I bet you don't last long. To test for chamber 5, we have to do horse stance for 5 min. This is something I definitely need to work on more, as I can only hold it for a minute and a half. If I practice every day, and hold it for 5 seconds longer each day, I will reach 5 min in less than a month and a half. Now if I could just stay healthy long enough to have the energy for this, that would be something.