Blue Scream of Jeff: Summer

Showing posts with label Summer. Show all posts

Sunday, August 30, 2020

Poolside writer’s retreat not such a pipe dream after all

In my fantasy, I'd be able to spend a year at a place like this finishing my novel.

Summer is drawing to a close here in the Northeastern United States and while I confess to feeling sad about it, I have to admit it has been an unusually productive one for me.

With the Covid-19 lockdown limiting my usual summertime social activities, I’ve had more time to focus on my writing than I usually do at this time of year. In fact, I spent practically all my free time these past few months in my favorite pool chair floating around the same 15-foot diameter circle working on my book.

It’s something I always wanted to do, but life’s other obligations always seemed to get in the way. I always thought that if I could just lock myself away from all those distractions, I could finally finish the “Great American Sci-Fi novel” I’ve been trying to write for decades now. And since I don’t like the cold weather, I’ve always fantasized about doing this at some small, secluded, four-room house in the tropics.

I’d tell myself I’d get up each morning and go out to the pool (did I mention this place would have an immaculately maintained pool?) and spend all day there on my floaty-chair scribbling away on my pad. At night, I could relax, have a light meal and maybe watch a little TV, before heading off to sleep. I’d leave editing and transcribing what I wrote into the computer for the few rainy days that I’d certainly have or for days I wasn’t feeling all that creative.

Following this schedule, I figured I could complete my book within a year, easy.

The only problem with this little fantasy of mine – aside from being able to afford it – is I never thought I’d be disciplined enough to actually do that. But this summer surprised me and showed me I could.

I have a ton of different interests and hobbies and during the nice weather, I usually split my time between my woodworking shop, tinkering with various technology and the pool. This year though, I decided to forgo everything and just concentrate on the writing.

Starting in July, the temperature where I live rarely dipped below the 90s making it too hot and often too humid to do much of anything other than spend the day in the pool. So between the 20 or so vacation days I had in July and August and the evenings I spent in the pool after work, I managed to close a pretty significant gap in the middle of my novel. I also put a major dent into closing another gap near the end. If the weather holds, I think I can close that gap too by the end of Labor Day weekend.

Unfortunately, on read-back, I discovered some other smaller gaps in my story I thought I’d already filled, so maybe I only need six months at my pool-side hideaway now….

You’d think that after spending all that time in the pool this year, I’d should have finished my story. But the process wasn’t always easy. Somedays the I’d get into the pool by 11 a.m. and wouldn’t stop writing until it started to get dark at 7:30 p.m. Other days, I’d struggle. I’d spend all of the morning and half the afternoon just staring at a blank page or at the lines that I wrote the previous day, trying to pick up the thread of where I left off. Eventually, I’d manage to get started again and by the time I got out of the pool for diner, I’d at least have three-hand written pages completed.

Not that they were always good….

The next day, I’d re-read what I wrote, decide it was no good, rip it up and re-write at least half of it. But at least I was making progress and fulfilling my vow to write something every day.

Now with summer coming to an end, I fear my progress on my book will slow back down to a crawl.

Sitting at my desk in my office just seems to offer too many distractions:

• My dog coming over to me wanting attention, or to be let outside or begging me for a walk.

• Mrs. BlueScream popping in to talk to me or to ask for my help with something (usually tech-related).

• And most of all my computer itself.

While an invaluable tool for writing, my computer is probably the biggest source of distraction. In the middle of writing something, I’ll pop over into my browser to look something up, like the meaning of a word, a synonym or even to fact-check some event, and then get sucked down the wormhole of related links until suddenly half the afternoon is gone.

Ah, the Dark side. It is strong….

Floating in the pool with just my paper and mechanical pencil in hand, I’m free of such distractions. The dog is happily outside with me and while I’m sure he’d prefer me to be paying attention to him, he’s happy lying on the patio or in one of the zillion foxholes he has dug in our backyard watching me.

Mrs. BlueScream will either be inside doing something or floating beside reading or working on her own writing (which by the way you can check out here and the only tech gear in sight is my iPod blasting my eclectic mix of music from across the yard. (It’s across the yard because iPods do NOT like to go swimming, and NO, I won’t tell you how I know that….)

Oh well. I guess there is always next year, when – this time for sure – I’ll be able to finish the story and have it ready for final editing.

That is unless I can convince Mrs. BlueScream to forgo her retirement and fund my little writer’s getaway. But I think that’s a fantasy for another time!

Monday, May 28, 2018

Adventures in Woodworking: The Build Begins!

For most people Memorial Day Weekend marks the beginning of summertime cook-outs, beach vacations and long-lazy days lounging by the pool.

For me it marks the official opening of my woodworking shop and start of a project or two destined to take me all summer to complete.

This year, that project is a long-awaited series of built-in cabinets and bookshelves which will eventually surround the new big-screen TV I wrote about getting last November.

I’ve been talking about building this since we moved in 20 years ago, and now that we finally got that shiny, new, big flat-screen TV, and re-arranged our living room, I’ve run out of excuses to put it off. So now that I’m finally getting around to this long-awaited project, I’d thought I should document its construction. At first I thought about filming it, like the way my favorite Youtube woodworkers do. But my medium has never really been film. It’s always been the written word and trying to break into video production with such a large project was not realistic. I might do it someday, but for now I thought I’d just document my project here with a few pictures and captions.

THE CONCEPT:

My house is a bi-level home with what are called knee-walls on the lower level. These are short walls built on top of a concrete foundation wall. The concrete portion juts into the room more than the upper section forming an odd, shallow shelf along the length of the wall, usually at the three-foot mark. It looks odd and makes the room feel more like a basement than a family room. So my plan was to hide the ledge by turning it into a series of shallow cabinets. Then on top of those cabinets I planned to build bookshelves making the entire wall look like a built-in breakfront. There will be an empty section in the middle of the bookshelves where the flat screen TV will hang.

The first thing I did was measure the walls in my living room to get an idea how large an area I had to work with. It was quite big, almost 12 feet long and just under 8 feet tall. Then like all good geeks do, it was off to the computer to draw up a set of plans.

And not just any plans.

I spent a weekend or two refining my ideas to until I came up with a three-dimensional model in Sketchup that you can see above. It may look complicated, but this project really calls for nothing more than building a series of boxes at different sizes and connecting them.

Then, just because I could, I decided to take a quick cellphone picture of the area these shelves will occupy and though the magic of Photoshop merged the plan with the picture to give me an idea of what they’d look like in place. You can see that at right.

THE BUILD BEGINS:

With the plan in place, and after hemming and hawing over the type of plywood to use for the two base cabinets (they will be covered by solid cherry doors), I made my way to the big box store to pickup the material. The parts from both cabinets came from a sheet and a half of 3/4” birch plywood with the backs coming from a sheet of 1/4” plywood.

Here you can see me loading the material into my new car. It’s amazing what you can fit into a hatchback!

Then it was back to the shop to start breaking the material down to its individual parts:

Here are all the individual parts for both cabinets which were cut from the pieces you saw me load into my car: two tops and bottoms, four sides, two backs and four shelves.

Okay, I kind of cheated here. I had some extra plywood at home and cut them into 3 ½” strips to form the bases each cabinet will sit on.

Here’s one of the cabinets dry-fitted together. If you look closely, you can see the rabbet running around the edges of each piece for the back. The shelves are not permanent. There will be holes along each side so I can adjust them. They were just placed in there to verify I had cut to the correct size.

Before assembly, I decided it would be easier to stain each part lying flat on my workbench rather than trying to stain parts that were standing vertically or hanging down and would avoid finish either not getting all the way into corners or pooling there.

The problem with doing things this way, is that there were so many parts, that it took up BOTH bays of my garage workshop for a week. Mrs. BlueScream wasn’t really happy about that as she has this odd idea that garages are for parking cars in and NOT for workshops. Silly, Mrs. BlueScream…..

With the parts finally stained and sealed with three-coats of polyurethane, I was finally able to start gluing the cabinets together and staining the shelves.

Next month, I hope to have the center stereo equipment cabinet together and in place in the house. Then I’ll be able to start on the face frames and doors. I’ll keep you updated!

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Summertime and the writing is easy

I don’t know what it is about the summer that makes me feel more creative than any other time of the year.

Maybe it’s the long and mostly sunny days, the nice hot weather, or the fact that life in general just seems to slow down during the warmer months. Or maybe it’s a combination of all three. But whatever the reason, it seems that my most productive time of year writing-wise always seems to happen between June and the end of August.

I’ve never been a big fan of the cold and often find the winter months depressing. I think bears have the right idea and if I could get away with it, I’d sleep right though December, January and February with them.

But I can hardly wait for the first 90 degree day of the year when I can get in my pool, whip out my clipboard and trusty mechanical pencil and start writing.

And yes, I know, I’m a tech-guy and writing long hand with pencil and paper is pretty much as analogue as you can get.

But just try taking your laptop, tablet or even phone in the pool with you. One wrong move, and you’ve got yourself a very expensive paperweight.

If I get my paper wet, as often happens, it dries out within 15 minutes on the side of the pool, and it’s good to go. Besides, the paper and pencil stuff is only temporary. It’s really a first draft that gets edited and changed when I eventually get around to typing it into my computer.

I try to leave that that part for the colder months, when I feel the least creative, even though writing on the computer make it easy to change and move things around as you write.

Usually by the time my summer vacation rolls around, I feel so burnt out from work, that the last thing I want to do is spend my free time behind another screen. I’d rather be outside enjoying the nice weather while it lasts.

Being in the pool with pencil and paper in hand, lets me do that and still feel like I’m getting my writing done.

In fact, a day writing by hand in the pool leaves me with a better sense of accomplishment than a day spent behind the keyboard. I’m a slow writer, often agonizing over the perfect word or phrase to translate the movie in my head to the paper, so the reader will see it exactly the way I envisioned it. At the end of a typical writing session on the computer I only wind up with two sometimes three pages (single-spaced, using 12 point, Times New Roman font), while after a day in the pool I end up with three to six pages. Sometimes I even break double digits!

Now when I actually type this in, it still winds up being my usual two or three pages, but I feel like I’ve done more and that helps keeps me motivated to continue writing.

I also like being outside. The sunlight just seems to stimulate my creative juices more than the lamp light I need in my home office in the afternoons. Plus being able to soak up all that sun and fresh air doesn’t make me think I’ve wasted one of my precious days off.

It’s a real shame we only have three months of hot weather here in the Northeast where I live. I’m sure if I had six-month of it (as well as the corresponding vacation time) I could finally finish that “great

American sci-fi novel” I’ve been working on (and off) since high school.

Of course, Mrs. BlueScreamOfJeff wouldn’t be happy with that kind of climate. She’s more of an autumn person, so as I begin my annual two-week August vacation, I just have to be content with spending the next two weeks in the pool (weather permitting), binge-writing in a big push to finally complete my book.

Who knows, stranger things have happened during summer vacations…