You know, somewhere around two in the morning, as I was having yet another bout of insomina, I wondered if I actually got anything usefully done this weekend. Then, I realized as the list grew, that yeah, I had a very nice and productive weekend, right up to the point the picture shattered.

Start with the easy stuff, after thinking about the entire editor/self-deprecation, I decided to join a critique group based on the advice of Anton Strout. Not completely on his advice, he just happened to be the last person to heap an idea on the pile so it got over the "enough people are saying it, so do it" line. Wandering through the Internet, and finding a complete lack of groups in my area, I found Critters. It has nice rules, seems to provide what I want (10-12 critiques every month or so) and seems to have a nice critical mass to make it function. I have to do at least one critique a week, but that shouldn't be too hard. Did my first this weekend too, kind of fun, though I may know a bit too much about cannibalism given the length of my response on that horror story.

Related to writing, I also worked on my commissions this weekend. Struggled a bit, but still got about 2,500 words into the thing. I should be done by the end of the week. And, to my surprise, I got another commission through word of mouth. It started off a huge one, then got halved, but it is still significant monies at this point so I'm not going to turn it down.

One of the reasons I struggled was the creation of a Blank Punk wiki site. Its a general story (maybe picture site some day) for various forms of *punk, such as cyberpunk, steampunk, brickpunk, and anything else. Not really complete, but I made it to give a clearing house for the various *punk stories in the TigSource ####punk Writing Competition which I also entered into.

At the same time, I finally got my own personal site up and running, including a brand-new spanking theme created by me! This is going to (hopefully) be my professional writing and "who am I" site. Front page is a little sparse, but this page will give you an idea of where I'm going with it. It uses a CSS font (I'll put a reference on the front page) but it won't work until Chrome and the rest of the browsers get that functionality (probably by the end of the year for Chrome, a year or so for the others). It's pretty, looks like an old-style typewriter (Underwood Champion if you want to install it to see what I see).

I also got to go on a banking date with my lovely, Fluffy. It was online and related to our Master Plan. Apparently, when BankA was bought out by BankB, they always planned on changing the website (which explains why they didn't fix said site for 1.5 years). But, I got a letter from BankB that says to make the migration of my online bill paying smoother, they were just going to delete everything.

...

So, new bank: BankC. Our date was setting her up, talking on the phone and just being together while we waited for some computer to get off its ass. And wondering how in the hell you can remember your home phone number from a decade before as a viable proof of identification. I mean, seriously, ten years? How many people actually remember their phone number from ten years ago? Yes, I know everyone who responds will, but still.

Oh, and the picture. I managed to stay up a little late finishing Enchanted Arms (comments coming later on that). Okay, very late, like midnight late. Six hours is enough sleep given I slept in the entire weekend. Just as I was falling asleep, a picture fell off the wall and pretty much sent broken glass clear across my studio. The surge of adreneline woke me up, hard, and I couldn't sleep for about four hours after that. So, I had two hours of sleep last night because of a picture.

See, it all makes sense.