I try to set aside an evening each week to go to a bar, relax, and write up a couple of blog episodes. Thing is, I’ve been completely crushed at work (it’s the end of the fiscal year, and I work in the finance department). Finding time to sleep has been a challenge for a couple of stretches lately.
Yesterday my team released not one, but two software tools. A big day! One of those tools is perennially caught in the confusion of fiscal-year shifts, and so today was about last-minute fixes.
Still, I got out of work at a reasonable time, and drove through unreasonable traffic to reach one of my chosen beer-blogging havens. (They’re playing AmeriFootball on a Thursday. Huh.) Anyway, I carved out some space and set up the ol’ bloggin’ box… and proceeded to extend the custom-search feature in one of my work projects. It’s an elegant solution to a problem that had been haunting me, so it’s by no means time wasted.
But holy heck, here I am, at a time I’ve designated for doing pretty much anything but work, and I’m doing work. My head is completely over on the analytical side of my cranium, to the point that I’ve been dreaming about database queries. I’ve gotta unshackle the creative neurons, the ones that never fire the same way twice. Get out the heart-shock paddles! I need to reset my brain!
(it’s the end of the fiscal year, and I work in the finance department).
OMG!!! Somebody singing the same song as me! Okay, my current pain is calendar-half-plus ninety days driven, but still!!!
Without saying anything I shouldn’t oughta, One of our tools tracks events with very, very soft borders between fiscal years. Depending how you ask, the thing might be in one year or the other. And it seems there’s always a new way to ask.
I am a programmer, and I have no idea what your mystical “calendar-half-plus ninety days” is, but now I fear that someday I will find out.
Aaaaaah!!! You said database queries!!!!
I’m sorry, misery shouldn’t be quite so obvious about loving company, should it?
The bar I go to technically has WiFi, but I haven’t asked for the password. This is partly because I don’t do my blogging on the iPad, but rather on printed pieces of paper (if I’m fixing up an existing held post) or a notebook using a pen if I’m writing something new.
This does mean that I have to transcribe it from paper to computer later, but it definitely helps the creative process.
Otherwise, I might spend that time commenting on other people’s blogs…
There was a computerless interval in my life while I was living in Prague, and after being away from manual writing for a long time, it was refreshing and eye-opening to embrace it again. It’s the closest I’ve come to writing in actual drafts since high school. (That’s probably an indicator of how old I’ve accidentally become.)
I still have a couple of good drafts of stories on paper, somewhere.
The transcription stage, deciphering decidedly non-liner scribblings into a text document was instructive and rather fun. Yet, when I rejoined the electronic age, I went straight back to Jer’s Novel Writer.
Well, I was just wrapping up at the office when I posted, and I’d posted something earlier referring to “the not-so-merry month of September”, and a friend asked what was so bad about September again and then I felt bad because I figured I must have been whining so much that my friends were tired of it. So it was actually kind of nice to see that somebody else out there was in the same boat. I actually had a great paddle last weekend that I’ve been wanting to write about all week but I just never finished work early enough (I am the world’s slowest blog post writer, if I’m not starting by 9 I just can’t).
Now if I would cut the Facebooking and focus on work I might get home in time to write.
Anyways, almost through it, didn’t finish the project I wanted to finish tonight but got enough done that I should (knock wood) be able to wrap up in the next business day or two. no work days this weekend!
Oops, simul-post. Your “events with very soft borders” sounds like a headache – closest thing I can think of in my company (kids’ publishing) is on-sale dates – sometimes something shows up in the system before it’s supposed to be on sale and then you have to remember for the rest of eternity that it gets carved out of the one month and added to the other, unless it doesn’t. Yeesh. Anyways, that’s mostly something that my supervisors deal with, thank goodness.
Mystical calendar half plus ninety is just the royalty cycle. Our authors get statements (with royalties if they’ve earned them, but everybody gets statements for all of their books) for periods that run by calendar halves. We have 90 days to compile all the information. We have a lot of authors and a lot of information, the process goes in certain steps, I have a smallish task that happens in the first month & then I come back to help out with final steps in September, which is what I’m just finishing up with now. I’m actually lucky, I have to be mostly wrapped up by tomorrow – the royalty department folks go into high gear next week finalizing everything and then printing and mailing – I am SO glad I’m not involved in that final push to get ’em out the door, I’m just about done now.
My dread of calendar-half-blablabla is withdrawn, in the hopes that someday I will collect on that schedule. A guy can dream.
Yes, as I said over on my wall to the friend who was asking what the problem was – September’s rough for a very good reason, a September when I didn’t have more work than I can keep up with would be a very depressing prospect!