When I was a kid, we used to joke that we wished the groundhog would see his shadow, so we'd ONLY get six more weeks of winter ...

Apparently, thanks to a bill that Palin signed into law shortly before leaving office, Groundhog's Day in Alaska is now Marmot Day. Insert your own joke here.

I mucked out the chickens' litter on Monday, and this morning, peeking at me from the clean sawdust, was a little brown egg -- the first egg of 2010. Still unfrozen and everything! The new chicken setup, with its floor heating, is so much better for getting usable eggs during the winter. Last winter, I probably had to discard about 2/3 of the eggs in February and March because they froze and cracked open before I could gather them. This year, the ambient temperature in the chickenhouse may not be above freezing most of the time, but the floor is warm. During their brief laying spell last December, I only had to discard one egg due to temperature-related breakage.

First egg of 2010!

I should make a mini omelet. And, hard as it is to believe when it's -25 and there's snow everywhere, it's time to start thinking about gardening. I would really like to have an actual garden this summer, in containers if nothing else. And I need somewhere to put my big strawberry.

Ugggggh ... now that classes have started again, I'm trying to reset my schedule from mostly-nocturnal to at least somewhat diurnal. It's not getting off to a fantastic start; I went to bed at 1, popped awake at 5:30 a.m. and now here I am, zombie-shambling around campus. braaaaaaaaaaains...

( Just nattering about school )

Time for my annual year-end creative roundup post. First, let me check my progress against last year's goals! Then, I'll be back in a new post with this year's goals.

I started last year flying high, and then got knocked down, first by work -- I wasn't planning on having to go back to work full-time, let alone full-time plus freelance out the wazoo -- and then I went back to UAF full-time to finish my degree, at which point my creative output basically plummeted to zero. Still, I'm not too unhappy with what I actually managed to accomplish.

( Checking last year's goals against my actual progress )

I'm actually feeling pretty good about the past year. Here's my short list of what I did in 2009:

- Recorded daily writing totals (I actually started this in mid-2008, but this is the first year I've done it from the beginning of the year and been conscientious about it).
- Wrote ~117,000 words of original fiction; finished several short stories; worked on two novels.
- Finished several Kismet short comics.
- Started Sun-Cutter; then had to put it on hiatus.
- Quit work; went back to school.
- Sold three short stories - Hetsie's Wonders and two stories which will appear in very small-circulation anthologies coming out next year. I'm not precisely taking the world by storm, but I'm pretty damn psyched about this.
- Made solid progress towards publishing the print edition of Freebird.

Back shortly with my 2010 goals!

So, one of the reasons I'm feeling massively accomplished this week is that I finally got my welding project done for the sculpture class.

( Pictures of a very big strawberry under the cut )

Picked up next semester's course schedule today, and have spent the entire evening poring over it and happily fantasizing about next semester. I made half-hearted attempts to work on my homework in the Native studies class and also to study for the two(!!) art history exams I have next week, but ... lack of functional brain is a problem. So I'm back to looking at the schedule.

The big question, I guess, is whether I want to take classes that I'm not really interested in, just to finish up the degree in the spring, or give myself an extra semester or two, and take the courses that really excite me. Right now I'm leaning towards the latter option, because there really is no big rush for me in finishing the degree. And it would be nice to have a couple of part-time semesters during which I can work on the novel(s) and Kismet, instead of another full-time semester with no time to do any creative stuff outside class. (Though I just realized the zooarchaeology class that looks really awesome next fall doesn't qualify towards my degree. Bugger.)

Tentatively I'm looking at 8 credits in the spring and maybe 6-9 next fall. At this point I pretty much just need upper division humanities/social science credits, so I can cherry-pick the things I most want to study ... and throw in other stuff to fill out my schedule.

One such hole in the schedule is on Tuesday and Thursday mornings next semester. Orion and I share a car, and the first class he's teaching is at 9:45, while my first class doesn't start 'til 11:30. So I'm poking at various one-credit phys-ed courses to fill the gap during which I'd just be hanging out on campus anyway. It's currently a toss-up between yoga or beginning rock climbing. I really want the rock-climbing course because not only have I always wanted to learn (I was climbing-wall certified in college, but I wasn't very good at it), but I also think it would be awesome research for stories yet unwritten. (Writing. It's a disease.) The problem is that I'd only have 15 minutes to make it all the way across campus -- sweaty and tired -- to my next class. Whereas yoga would be a nice relaxing way to wake up and then I'd have half an hour before my next class. Decisions.

Yesterday it snowed lightly, and it's been kind of misting snow all day; there are a couple of inches on the ground. I think this is probably the "big one" ... the one that's going to stick and not melt off. Last glimpse of ground until spring. Well, it's not like I can complain at this point -- this is almost a month later than our usual big sticking snow. Six months without snow this year rather than five! This almost makes up for the frost in the middle of August. Almost.

Naturally, yesterday, as snow lightly drifted past the windows of the UAF sculpture studio, was when our instructor let us know that we would need to collect found objects for the next project. Not during the last two months when I could have availed myself of all the cool old gold-rush stuff in the woods. *headdesk*

I ought to take a picture of some of the things I'm making in sculpture. So far we've done three things: a bronze casting, a wooden box made with a bandsaw, and a big welding project. The class is currently hip-deep in the welding project; it's been going pretty slow due to the studio only having two MIG welding rigs, and both of those have been having intermittent problems. I just need to weld on a couple more pieces and then I can start covering mine with chicken wire (the next step in the shape I decided to make).

Otherwise, school is cranking along. I can't WAIT until the end of the semester so I can have free time to work on my own projects again. And here, at the start of the semester, I was all confident in the knowledge that it doesn't matter if I get A's (all I have to do is pass!) and I'm going to take it easier than I did when I was in school before. HAHAHAHAHA. Apparently I am not capable of not working my ass off to do well in my classes, even though I know I'd probably be happier if I weren't spending so much time outside of class working on this stuff. Speaking of which, I guess I have homework in art history and a midterm to study for. *trundles off*

It really is astonishing to me how school EATS YOUR LIFE. Or, perhaps more accurately, makes it impossible to focus on anything that isn't school, because I'm the sort of person who doesn't really like having tasks hanging over her head -- I either want to get it done right now, or I end up engaging in a lot of avoidance behavior trying not to think about the fact that I have to do it. And school is all about a constant series of tasks that you work on in your own time. I'm realizing why the only period in my life when I wasn't actively working on creative projects was my first three years of college. It's just hard to concentrate on them. I am developing a sudden, intense respect for people who can manage to go to school and, say, update webcomics or write novels at the same time. Compared to being in the working world, I don't think I'd say that college is hard. It's a different kind of of hard, though -- it's lower-pressure in some ways (you can roll out of bed, scrabble into a sweatshirt and slouch off to class; you can miss a class if you want to and it won't hurt you financially; you can do most of your work at home) but there's also no real ceiling to how much effort you can put into it. And while it's easy to tell myself beforehand that it doesn't matter if I make a C here or there -- all I have to do is pass my classes; it's not like anyone is checking up on me -- when it comes right down to putting it into practice, it's not as easy as all that.

This weekend I need to write a 5-page paper on the Tlingit, study for an exam in History of Photography and spend a lot of quality time decorating my bandsaw box for Sculpture. I'm thinking woodburning + watercolor should look nice; I did some tests on a piece of scrap lumber and it's really a lovely effect.

I'm still massively intimidated by that sculpture class, even though working with the bandsaw is turning out to be fun. The only thing dumber than spending the entire semester stressing about doing poorly in the class, though, is ... well, take your pick:

- stressing about it all semester and then doing fine after all.
- stressing about it all semester and then doing badly anyway.
- stressing about it all semester, working my ass off and *still* getting a poor grade.

The only thing that makes sense is to relax about it and then deal with whatever grade I get. But it's difficult to convince myself that.

Am currently struggling to rewrite the scene in "Freebird" between Liz and her mom. I don't think Liz's voluntary estrangement from her family is particularly convincing with her Athabaskan heritage; I'm not saying it's impossible, of course, but I don't think someone as apparently happy and well-balanced as Liz would be as distant from her parents as I originally wrote her. (If she were white, yes, I can see it, culturally speaking. Native, no.) So I'm trying to indicate more warmth between her and her mother. And I'm also trying to avoid pinning the vague political references down to any particular election cycle or even identifying where in the election process Gretchen is currently, because I don't want to sidetrack onto a subplot about Gretchen trying to get elected; I just want to indicate that she's in politics and for some dumb reason I used it as the lead-in to this scene. HARD.

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I am also struggling with the urge to sign the Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation For Morality as "God". I wonder how long it would take to be deleted. (Their basic point is apparently that the current economic downturn is caused by the moral decay of the nation. Obviously abortion, pornography, divorce and same-sex marriage -- these are specifically listed -- will inevitably lead to a recession! This is perfectly obvious, if you have the IQ of a fruitbat.)

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In other news, Texan Tea Party protesters in DC are now protesting the overcrowded subway and insisting that more trains should have been available for their use. Their Rep. is all huffy about the government's failure to provide plenty of publicly funded trains for the protesters; of course, he vetoed a bill back in July that would have provided more money for the DC subway system.

Government spending, I guess, is bad as long as it's not for something that you yourself need, right now, at this very moment. Of course the rub is that you don't know in advance what you're going to need. But it's still bad right up until the point that you suddenly realize that you do need it, at which point it's the government's fault for not already having it ready and waiting for you. (I noticed the reference to "elderly veterans in wheelchairs" in the WSJ post ... any guesses on how many of those vets are accepting benefits from the government?)

I've been really dragging my feet because this is an announcement that I haven't wanted to make ... but I'm going to have to put Sun-Cutter on hiatus for a while.

I'm taking a full-time credit load this semester. More importantly (to me!), there is a local publisher who is definitely interested in publishing Freebird next year, but needs 20-30 pages of new material to bulk out the book enough to make it worth their while, which I've tentatively promised by the end of the year.

I had already fallen far enough behind on Sun-Cutter, due to work and travel, that I'd run through my buffer of pages done in advance, and was working week to week anyhow. I didn't have a safety zone, and this is the week that it caught up to me. I'm not going to have a new page on Monday. I was hoping to get through this scene, at least, before I had to stop, but I think this is where it's going to rest for now.

I love working on Kismet. Of all my different projects, it's my favorite. I'm really happy with what I've done so far on Sun-Cutter, and no way am I abandoning it for longer than I have to. My tentative plan is to work up a buffer of pages after I get Freebird squared away, and start updating hopefully early-ish next year. (And if I can get a buffer, I'd like to update twice weekly for a while -- I never was really happy with only doing one page a week.)

In the meantime, thank you for bearing with me! I'll be posting snippets and teasers ("sneezers"?) of the new Freebird pages as I work on them. And yeah, there WILL be a Hunter's Moon book eventually! I mean it this time! (The big thing slowing me down on HM, honestly, is that I can't figure out whether to get it printed as one big expensive book or two small, more affordable but not self-contained books. I got into weighing the pros and cons of this, and kinda stalled out in a sea of indecision.)