OK! I'm going to try and be as concise as I can POSSIBLY be here. Which means that I'm probably going to babble on for pages. Bear with me. So much is going on recently that I barely know where to START.
Ok, let's start with a blog progress report. YES! I am still working on the Inside Animal Emotions series. Thanks to my wonderful friend, Paleo, who gave me a copy of the fantastic book When Elephants Weep, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson & Susan McCarthy. The book is now a highlighted mess. :P And I haven't even finished READING it yet.
I have a whole folder in my bookmarks bar with research and things I want to cite while I'm writing, and pages written up in a word document with the citations in place for certain things. I'm approaching this thing like a research paper rather than a blog series, and I know that...but I want to be as thorough as possible while covering this controversial and close-to-my-heart topic. I'm also hoping to present some newer information as well - as soon as I can find a source for where I heard it and make sure that I'm NOT pulling it out of my own assumptions. I swear I read it, but I'm having trouble finding the source - and if I don't find the source, I can't use it. Which is a shame, because it's fantastic. :P
In other news, a wonderful friend sent me something fantastic that just arrived today. She goes by the name Shimmerhawk, and I've known her for many years. She's a taxidermist among other types of artist, and I received this glorious, beautiful boy in the mail today:
Coyote 2 - Pale Coyote by *shimmerhawk on deviantART
He has had the wood base removed, but I'm going to personally make him a new base for his rock to sit on - maybe with some driftwood or something to accent the rock. When I have time. Right now I'm so slammed with work...Which brings me to my next thing! :D
Claudia Suzanne is not only the CEO of the company I work for, Wambtac Communications, but she's also a survivor of one of the most insidious and debilitating diseases out there: Multiple Sclerosis. She's a ghostwriter with over a hundred invisible credits to her name, and several books she wrote have been on the best seller's list over the years. However, this is the first book she's written for herself, about herself. And we're trying to get it funded to get to the printer. And you can help! Just share the link if you can't donate - every little bit is appreciated.
Kickstarter Link
Still on the topic of work - I've been promoted. :P Sort of. I'm still Lona's assistant, but on top of that I'm also an intern in the marketing department. So while my life used to be fairly balanced between work and personal time, the personal time has kind of been cut in half as I learn what amounts to a completely new thing on top of everything else I already do. As a result I've started establishing a professional name that I may or may not keep...or that may become a pen name, since I do like it quite a bit. But again, as a result, I'm completely swamped with work, and my personal time keeps being taken up by helping friends with various things so I don't end up getting what I wanted to get done, done.
I'd talk about my gaming life too, but that's a topic for a Tooth & Arrows update, so I won't do THAT right now. Leave it be at saying I'm still progressing through content and am now a much more confident bear tank than I ever have been before...and my hunter's kind of getting left in the dust. Other topics!
Thanks to the Nook that my best friend got me for my birthday, I'm able to read comfortably and regularly again. That makes me SO very happy. It's the only personal thing I seem to have time to do lately, since I also have to allocate personal time for fulfilling commission artwork, and advertising for myself to get more commissions IN since my primary income right now is less than I'd like it to be.
Speaking of art and reading, however, I had the pleasure yesterday of attending a lecture by the wonderful author Dean Koontz. I'd taken one of my favorites of his books in the hope that he'd be able to sign, however he'd had to leave quickly after the (incredibly entertaining!) talk, and so instead of signing books, he had provided for the library 300 copies of a couple of his books that he'd already signed. Everyone who attended got one, and I snagged a signed copy of A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, which I think really IS my favorite of all his books, and not one I happened to own yet. So that was fantastic. He's incredibly personable and amusing, and told so many wonderful stories about his life as an author. It was really great. :)
My health is improving as well - I'm doing more moving around and, well, let's be honest, less eating. :P As a result, I've dropped a few pounds in the last few weeks, and I'm not having so much trouble with my legs. I'm trying to find time in and among everything else I'm doing to ride my bike, and to actually work on my own writing - primarily the book I have a deadline on. See, the rewrite of Tigerwolf has been picked up by our in house publishing group...so I need to have that done in the next year. It's hard to split my time between all of these different things and still find time to blog and keep up my online commitments, but somehow I'm doing fairly well.
I'm leading a truly blessed life right now, and my fiancee and I are looking forward to moving out fairly soon and into an apartment of our own, as soon as one comes available. So we're also working towards that, parring down our possessions and designating what will be going into storage - either in her mom's garage, or in our storage unit - once we move out. When we visited my parents last month, we did the same with my stuff that remains in Texas, marking what is to be sent to us once we have our apartment. So I'm looking forward to that - and I'm sure my parents are, too, because they'll have far more room in that big closet once my stuff's out of there. :P
I THINK that's it, as far as I can tell, for updates. I probably forgot something, but I have no idea what it might be. So there'll probably be more posts later when I remember them. Because, see, you can't upgrade the memory in your brain. And that, I feel, is very inconvenient.
