Science Fiction

I've been starting to look into NaNoWriMo for November and I'd really like to write a science fiction story, but can't seem to come up with any good ideas. I stumbled across this flowchart with fantasy/sci fi book suggestions and I'm looking forward to going to the library now!

Content

I went to dinner with two of my roommates tonight at my favorite sushi place. We ordered a ton of food and chatted about things. It's something I really wish we'd done more often in the year we lived together. It'll be sad to leave these guys. I'm really starting to feel this imminent move.

Bliss

I've been baking for a couple years now, not really seriously, but enough that I've invested in a ton of equipment: dedicated pans, a cookie dough scoop, two flour sifters, several ramekins, a massive bag of active dry yeast. I bake often enough and have such a small sweet tooth that I find fault in every recipe that I make. Cookies are always too dry, too crumbly, too soft, too hard, too floury, too sweet. Cakes taste off, frosting gets overly sweet, icing doesn't set....the list goes on. I'm my own harshest critic, and I rarely stumble upon recipes that seem worthy enough to add to my personal recipe box.

But today I came across a fudgy brownie recipe that baked up so wonderful that I have to reconsider my life. I always thought I preferred cakey brownies, so the recipes I would make usually ended up having three or four eggs, lots of flour, and a small amount of butter or oil. But I gambled and this recipe paid off.

This isn't a baking blog, so I won't get in depth about the experience, but producing such an excellent product is invigorating, and I feel suddenly supremely confident about my baking abilities (my last batch of cookies had a bad brown-granulated sugar ratio and turned out too dry and crumbly). If one recipe can turn out this good, think of what else is out there just waiting to be made!

Now if only I can replicate this kind of success in my writing...

Biscuits

I just completely tore apart a biscuit recipe and made them the only way I know how to make them: mix the dry and wet ingredients just enough to combine, place on baking sheet, and bake.

They actually came out quite well, which was a little surprising.

For about five minutes I tried to come up with an analogy about baking and life, but it got away from me. Tonight I get to go help my aunt look for whatever wild animal is climbing around in her attic. Spooky.

Routine

I've noticed in the past week that my body is starting to get onto a schedule. I have an alarm set every morning at 7:30 am, and while this has been a standing alarm for the past year or so, my body is finally starting to adapt to it. Rather than hitting snooze and rolling over, I've started feeling more awake when the alarm goes off, and the few times that I've rolled over and wanted to go back to bed, my body won't let me. This morning I woke up four minutes before the alarm was set to go off. This used to happen back when I was in high school and had a set wake-up time every day, but the weekends would always throw everything off.

My mind is developing an evening routine as well, partially due to the fact that I have a standing order to produce a blog post daily and wish to do so before I go to bed, and partially because I've (surprise surprise) been able to keep my promise to myself that I'd accept the challenge and do just that, no matter how stupid or incoherent the post.

What's really weird, is that feeling my body and mind fall into a routine is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in a long time. For the past three years of adulthood, I've blundered along, making lots of mistakes and just barely learning from them. One of those mistakes, I found, was allowing myself to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. If I told myself I wanted to get up early to make breakfast, the next morning I would have no qualms hitting snooze 47 times then rolling out of bed and rushing to get to work on time. If I told myself that I would definitely be finishing a particular project by Friday, I had no problem letting the deadline past and deciding that since it was already too late, I might as well do something else.

Lazy-me didn't hold myself accountable to not-lazy-me. It was frustrating, because as months passed, seasons passed, and holidays passed, I realized that the project I'd thought about 8 months ago could be nearly complete if I'd started immediately and held myself accountable to my vision. Instead, I wasted my time away. I wasted three years away.

I feel like I've been asleep, or at least in a fog. It sounds stupid, but things seem to be finally falling into place for me.

I should beat lazy-me with a crow-bar.