Adventures du jour!
If I crap out today, it’s because I feel like I can barely keep my eyes open. Ray says she feels the same way. It’s gray out, possibly a storm coming in.
Yoga: The knot at the back of my neck had started to creep back in yesterday. I tracked it down late last night and took an emotional weather gauge: dissatisfied, crankypants, unable to say what I wanted to say, stuck. I gave some voice to those things, then went back to the knot. It was less than before I unleashed my inner bitchiness. I can’t change some of the things that are driving me nuts. I just want to stamp my pretty little feet. Why? Why do things have to be so hard? Why are people so attached to pushing their private (and public!) boulders up that fucking hill?
Once I got that stuff out, I remembered how convinced I was that things had to be the way they were, back when I was convinced everything had to be hard, because reasons. I was VERY convinced and there was nothing anyone (other than a few people) could tell me any different. Detaching myself from those beliefs took miracles. So: miracles may be required. But I am literally just that stubborn, to try to trick miracles out of stuff that isn’t supposed to have miracle sauce. (See: Midjourney?)
I think that a) I’m still processing the plot twist from my book, which still just wrecks me (every time I think about it directly I tear up about something that doesn’t exist), and b) everyone’s tensing up because of the upcoming elections. I have to start being aware of how much negativity I let into my sphere over the next few weeks. High-quality negativity is good; I don’t want to be cut off from the world, and I can take it. But an onslaught of people throwing temper tantrums is something I need to be careful of, or I’m just gonna join them instead of doing my good work on the story and other things.
At any rate, after I vented to myself last night, I kept my fingers on the back of my neck. I felt feverish and hot for a while (same as last time I adjusted my head), then went to sleep. This morning = tired, hot, low energy, but not feeling sick. Hips felt pretty free, chest a bit wonky but not terrible, neck mostly okay. Some good forward stretches for sure. The tailbone knot wasn’t there. I was sore all over, probably from dancing like a fool yesterday.
Walkies. The neck knot has tried to creep back in several times; I’ll catch myself thinking “I can’t say that” and yep, there it is. On the walk today, it wasn’t my traps that gripped up and hurt, but the back of my neck; I stopped and let myself just feel what I was feeling and sing along to the music a little, and that helped. No dancing today.
Midjourney: I’ve been working on a project for a friend for clothing that would make her feel like she could do some damage and not by asking for the manager. I’m still not happy with it, but I need to check with her. So far, I’ve broken things down into different phases: gather more specific information from her on a variety of conceptual tools I could use to help in designing clothing, un-train Midjourney from the big mass of the stuff I’ve fed it recently, train Midjourney to reflect the stuff that’s more to the friend’s tastes, then ask for the more modern clothing.
I’m hampered by the fact that I have to step down the Midjourney version from Beta to v3 in order to include images as photo references. Using v3 feels like using crayons at this point, after I’m all used to high-end art markers. (I’m still not up to the point of fine sable-hair brushes, but okay.) The modern clothing looks clunky and terrible to me.
I’m also struggling against some major glitches over the last few days. I got a nude male penis at one point, but it looked so disturbing that I decided not to embiggen it, as it were, and if you know me reasonably well, that should speak VOLUMES about how fucked up it was. This was the sort of penis that was penis shaped, yet somehow more disturbing than tentacle porn.
Anyway, today Midjourney is running better, and I’m sticking with the same project without the photo references to see what I get with Beta but without the Renaissance pictures including as a direct part of the prompt. I’ve pulled some AWESOME clothing.
I also got a picture of a writer friend that cracks me up every time I see it. Shannon Lawrence would make an extremely apt Renaissance Woman of Power. The “you are too stupid to live and now you shall die” face is freaking radiant. I love it.
Finally, I’m going to take the most interesting image from this set, combine it with an image of the original friend (not Shannon) and see if I can “dress” the friend. Probably not. But I still might get something good.
Story: This morning I realized that I’d written a story with something off my bucket list of writing projects. I’ve actually written several stories with this thing. All three of the romances that came out of this romance/spy class I took in Vegas have it, to some degree. This is the third project with it, and now I don’t know if I want to work on anything without it.
I wrote joy.
What is joy? It’s subjective, so I can’t say that I communicated joy to the reader or anything (readers will have to decide that), but the character experienced joy, as I define it: that which makes an entire life having worth lived, even if you never experience it again. The character mentioned it yesterday while I was writing the scene, then came out on the walk and confirmed it. (While I was busy feeling stompy and annoyed, of course.) Even now, he wants to say more things about it, but I’m going to make him save it for the story.
I worked on some of the signals I talked about yesterday and managed to include one and a half of them in the scene after planning like eight. In a real-world situation, obviously there’s more room and time for nuance, but this fictional world is running on a short timeline (at a conference that lasts only days) and has to be readable and not confusing. I’m annoyed that I can’t put All the Things in the scene, but okay. I still have the system worked out, so I know what kinds of things it’ll work to add later if I need them. Plus I think the “wait/pause” and “resume” signals would be horrifically easy to disrupt or misinterpret, so I need to rethink them.
At any rate, I hope you find something good today. Maybe not joy, but at least something good.