Switching gears

Now that I’ve been focused on the journalistic side of writing lately, I need to buckle down and get back to my regular fiction writing for a bit.

I’ve got two pieces for the charity anthology that need polishing this weekend, which shouldn’t take too long but between the work with Talk Nerdy With Us and my recent flare up I have been procrastinating.

Also, I need to get reading again. A friend of mine was kind enough to loan me her Kindle in order to read some books in a series that I’ve been wanting to catch up on, and I don’t much like keeping people’s belongings longer than absolutely necessary. So I have to binge read as well.

Busy weekend for me.

A good start

Well, my first two completed interviews for Talk Nerdy With Us went well. 🙂 Here are some links

http://talknerdywithus.com/2015/06/17/interview-with-joe-mallozzi/

http://talknerdywithus.com/2015/06/17/interview-with-war-games-band/

The top link is from a phone #interview I conducted this past Tuesday, and the bottom link is from my first ever interview, an email interview.

The phone interview had some hiccups because I was nervous and kept giggling or saying “Right, right,” while poor Joe was talking. Next time I do a phone interview I’ll try to be more professional, but hey, it was my first phone interview. I think overall I did pretty good, and I think I learned my lesson after having to try to hear Joe over myself when transcribing from the recording lol

It was amazing being able to interview a TV show creator and producer so early on in my journalism career (if that’s what this pans out to be). I’d love to be able to continue on in this field, because I am truly enjoying it. I still like working at the eye clinic, but this is a different kind of work entirely. I’m still learning things, and I’m still meeting and engaging with new people, so it’s still two things I like to get from a job, but they’re quite unique experiences.

Tomorrow is another West Coast time live tweet of Joe Mallozzi’s #SyFy show #DarkMatter, so log on to Twitter at 10pm PST and follow @talknerdywithus to follow along as I tweet along with the show 🙂

Feeling the (barometric) pressure

Aaaand monsoon season returns. How do I know? Well, even if it isn’t a huge thing on the local news around here in the desert, my upper spine notified me yesterday. I can pretty much literally feel the changes in the air pressure in the vertebrae of my back.

Right now it feels as though the portion of my spine between my shoulder blades is both swelling and compressing, like there’s this intense pain and, well, pressure. It’s kind of depressing, because I had been doing so well for months now that I had almost forgotten what it was like to have a bad day. Now my back is rebelling against me again, and it kinda sucks to be reminded that I still have #rheumatoidarthritis and it’s still affecting me.

But I don’t have time to wallow in self pity today. I have work to do. Not just the interview I mentioned–I can do that with the back pain–but real work at my real paying job. I can’t let this get to me. I’ve dealt with it before. I just need to remember what it was like to deal with it and channel those memories to deal with it again.

I got this.

To Be Or Not to Be: That’s Not One of the Questions

Big interview tomorrow! Not a job interview, but an interview with a writer for TV and comics. I’m really excited about it.

I’ve got to write up some interesting and thought-provoking questions tonight to prepare. The interviews that I’ve done so far have been by email, but this one is over the phone. Stammer reflex, activate!

Seriously, though, I think I’ll be fine. I’m not going to fangirl because I’m doing a job, and I’m not going to panic because I’ll be prepared. 🙂

Bad press is better than no press I guess

I was really surprised this morning to find that one of the bands I reviewed retweeted and shared on Facebook my review of their latest album. Why was I surprised? Because the review wasn’t 100% good. :/

It wasn’t all bad, either. There was really only one thing I critiqued, but I was still surprised that they shared the review considering it wasn’t completely glowing. One of the band members even followed me on Twitter, which made me kinda happy.

Maybe I should be mean more often 😉

Apologies

I’m sorry

I’m sorry for all the friends I’ve lost touch with

I’m sorry for all the conversations I’ve made all about me

I’m sorry for not getting it

I’m sorry for withdrawing

I’m sorry for not knowing how to care

I’m sorry for everything

And I’m sorry for not knowing how to change

Counting sheep

Tom sighed and looked at the ceiling. One, two, three, four…. He kept losing count around ninety.

Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty…eighty….Damnit. How was this supposed to relax his mind? Damn therapist. One, two, three, four….

After the sun began to rise on his third sleepless night in a row, Tom dragged himself out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen for some breakfast. He forced down some dry toast and ice water. Anything else, and his sleep-deprived stomach would reject it.

He stared at his briefcase for ten minutes before picking up his cell phone and dialing his boss’s number. There was no way he was going to be able to function at work today. Feigning a cold, Tom called in sick, and his boss wished him a speedy recovery. Tom hung up and wished for an end to the madness.

The day was spent staring out the window, looking at the meadow behind his back porch. As he sat, Tom counted. One, two, three, four….

Tom wasn’t aware he had fallen asleep until he opened his eyes and saw the darkness before him.

Darkness…and the eyes.

Beyond his porch railing, Tom saw dozens of pairs of eyes staring back at him.

The sheep he’d been counting for nights on end had come to visit. There had to be eighty or ninety sheep standing in the meadow.

Eighty or ninety pairs of eyes reflecting the porch light back at him.

I feel so alive

Did my first #livetweet of a TV show tonight. It was so much fun! Talk Nerdy With Us ( talknerdywithus.com ) ever so kindly let me hijack their Twitter account for an hour so I could live tweet the #DarkMatter West Coast premiere on the SyFy channel. It was cool to see the official show Twitter account and even the show producer retweeting and responding to my tweets (ok, to #TalkNerdyWithUs’s tweets), and to see other fans interacting.

Of course now it’s almost a quarter after 11 at night and I’m still awake because I stayed up well past my bedtime to watch the live West Coast airing of the show lol I definitely couldn’t do that on a work night, but on a Friday or Saturday I’m all over it!

I’ll find out tomorrow what my Talk Nerdy family thought about the tweetfest. Hopefully I did them proud. I certainly enjoyed myself, and next time I’ll try to remember to look up the actors’ Twitter accounts so I can tag them individually. I added a few of them on my personal Twitter account, but since I was using the other account I didn’t want to overstep by following people without permission.

That reminds me: I need to OCD my Twitter account so I can keep track of who I follow. Now that I have my Talk Nerdy family on there, plus the authors I follow, and artists, and now TV shows and actors and musicians and….anyway, my OCD commands me to fix it. In the morning. Right now, my brain in commanding me to stfu and go to sleep. I’m ignoring the brain because I’m still all excited about tonight’s fun, but I won’t be able to fight it for long.

Common cold…or delayed con plague?

Yeah, I think I’m getting sick. I’ve had a nagging cough & a tickle in my throat for a couple of days, and last night it got considerably worse. This morning I woke up feeling like crap, so I’m guessing I caught the ick.

Not too bad that I won’t go in to work (I’m a masochist like that–plus, who calls in sick for a cold?), but I’m probably going to be spending a lot of the weekend sleeping and nursing the NyQuil. Or rather, the store brand Nighttime, which we all know is NyQuil.

Still have a TV show to review and write up tonight, plus more binge watching of #OITNB (Orange Is the New Black) on Netflix–great show, but I’ll leave the reviews to Barbara from #TalkNerdyWithUs.

That’s right: talknerdywithus.com …get used to seeing this link. They are my people. Join the #nerdfamily.

Mind blown

So I had never considered myself much of an article or review writer before. Sure, I wrote a review of that amazing dinner I had at Texas Roadhouse a couple months ago, but I had never thought about doing it on a regular basis.

Well, you are now looking at the blog of a contributing writer for Talk Nerdy With Us, an online blog magazine about movies, music, books, and television. 🙂

A friend of mine found the job (for himself) through Craigslist, and when they mentioned they were looking for writers on the West coast, he asked them if the Southwest was good enough. Some emails were exchanged, and the rest is history. I turned in my first article, a review of an album (way outside my comfort zone, considering I’m not the most musical of people) last night, and it has been posted to the site.

It’s not a paid job, but it gets my name out there and also helps with my writing. The more I write, the more I improve, even if it’s just one or two articles/reviews a week. Bonus: I can use it on resumes and author bios. 🙂