We hit the road for my in-laws’ place in Livermore tomorrow morning. If you’re in the area, there’s talk of a get-together. I’ll have books, pins, and stuff I can draw on (no colored markers though — I’m on vacation.)

And speaking of vacation, half the volume of my luggage is taken up with minis, paints, and D&D books. I’m serious about not working this next week.

So… I’ve been expecting a phone call from the bank for the last couple of days, and I realize this morning that I can’t find my cell-phone.

It’s an easy fix. I grab the land-line, dial my cell#, and follow the ringing down into the clutter-fest that is my office. There’s my phone, right where I forgot last leaving it. I hang up the land-line, and the insistent ringing stops.

I pick up my cell phone.

*GASP*

It says I’ve missed a call!

Maybe it was the bank!

I’d better… oh. I missed a call from ME. Just now.

I like blogging, but usually when I find myself in the mood to write I have to exercise some discipline and write strips rather than blog-posts.

This has led me to realize that there are jillions of things that need (or want, anyway) doing, and I don’t run out of time to do them — I run out of brain.

Let’s start:
1) The buffer. Script, pencil, ink, color, repeat. Right now this needs to be done faster than usual so that I can a) take a family vacation at the end of the month, and b) come back from said vacation and work on the book.
2) The Next Book: I don’t even want to think about this right now. It is an enumerated list of its own with things like “assemble all 507 days of comics one one DVD and ship them to Steve Troop,” and “write the bonus story.”
3) Blog stuff. I need to remember to remind people to buy books before it becomes everlastingly too late to ship them in time for Christmas. I should probably also remind fans to shop at Amazon via this link so that I get a cut of Amazon’s profits. But mostly I need to blog INTERESTING stuff, like mini-painting, fan art, cartooning in a building with no heat (I fixed that today) and so on. I can’t always be shilling.
4) New URL cards. Convention season begins mid-February, and I’d rather not put this off until it becomes a rush-job.
5) Convention ribbons. Again, the season begins in two months. This needs to be done soon.
6) Have some family time. Hey, this evening I cooked dinner. That counts, even though I then retreated into my office and hid, right?
7) Exercise. I’d like to lose about 10 pounds before fans start taking pictures of me again. The calisthenics work, but they only work if you actually DO them.
8) Clean my office. The acquisition of a messy, clutterriffic hobby is definitely part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution, but it’s only PART. I need to start in the corners of the room and work my way to the middle, chucking stuff in boxes and bags as I go. If there’s no place for it, then it must not be Something I Need To Have In My Office.
9) New T-shirt designs.
10) New website design (now that 80% of my income comes from book collections the current layout is suboptimal).
11) Hobby Time. I wanna paint stuff. Can I take a break now and paint stuff?

I’ll go ahead and stop at 11.

#1 ate the last two days. I colored, scripted, pencilled, and inked a week’s worth of strips in two days. Nice. But no blogging got done, because if it HAD gotten done I wouldn’t have had the scripts to pencil and ink, nor would I have gotten the coloring done.
#5 is pretty easy. I just need to look up the right printer and order the ribbons. But I’m blogging now, and by the time I finish this I probably will have forgotten about that. When I remember it again it will be when I’m checking my task list, but the odds are pretty good I’ll be back at #1 by then.
#4 and #9 require serious creative energy. #1 hoovers that right up.
#7 actually got done this morning. Yay.
#8… I get physically sleepy just contemplating this one.
#10 is tricky. I think I’ve caught myself waiting until I get rich so I can pay someone else to do it right. Ah, the productivity-sapping power of “hope.” Or was that “wishful thinking?” I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get rich until it GETS done right. Catch THIS 22, Mister Heller!
#2 is going to have to wait. There’s just no brain space right now.
#3 is what I’m currently doing. And I just got an email notification from Sandra saying “Last day to ship priority mail is the 16th, you’d better remind people.” *sigh* Time to shill (but I just posted Fan Art… I can’t shill and push that below the fold yet. It’s too cool!)
#11 is what I stopped doing in order to do this. That stupid Troll Impaler doesn’t look perfect yet. Why oh why do good people do bad things to nice minis using too much perfectly good paint?

I should add “stream of consciousness rambling” to the list. The only reason any of this makes sense is because I forced myself to <OL> the whole thing. And since I’m out of numbered items, I think I need to stop typing.