#inside baseball

I get 2 hours each morning (9-11am) to work. Those are my most productive hours. I'm caffeinated and my ADHD meds are fresh and my dog is happy to cuddle her lamb chop and give me peace.

I get another 45-90 minutes in the afternoon. That session is post-workout with no caffeine in my system and my ADHD meds are long gone (I refuse to take an afternoon dose because of the frequent shortages and my lack of health insurance. It's cheaper to take less than I need and give myself a slight cushion in the event that I can't get my rx filled immediately.) and my dog is off her nut because her anxiety meds haven't yet kicked in and she's barking and racing around and doing her best to get us a noise complaint.

I do a lot of thinking during my evening walk with my dog. I will typically have some insights that I dictate once my dog is in my car so that I don't lose them as we travel. I will then translate that garbled Siri bit and add it to my draft or outline. I might expand on it a bit. So that's usually another 10-15 min before I cook dinner.

Sometimes I have insights as I cook and I ruin my food. Sometimes I will stay up late dictating stuff from my bed because I have thoughts as I'm trying to sleep. Sometimes I will wake up in the middle of the night and leave more dictation that makes even less sense.

After dinner I will typically watch whatever media that I need to watch for my WIP(s). I suffered through tons of Audrey Hepburn movies for the sake of the last one. I have more suffering to do for this next one. The next Pluribus fic is on hold because I'm trying to read an entire book for that series. I haven't had time to do that recently because the world is burning down around me. But that usually happens between breakfast and the start of my 9 am writing session.

I spend each of my 4 meals reading every damn thing I can about the military and the US's endless involvement in dumb as fuck wars. I am sooooooooooooooo deep in the weeds by this point, it's scary. Half of that shit isn't even relevant anymore because the terrorist plot business is over, but there's still so much left to learn and I do keep finding useful tidbits to round out my understanding of Cruz's military years and the cultural stuff is helpful for getting Aaliyah down.

Adding that all up in an exact way isn't possible. But let's say I average 1 hour for that afternoon session. That's three writing hours per day, seven days a week. Which puts me at a minimum of 21 hours per week week. I have taken a grand total of 3 full days off since my DC trip in October of 2024 and I wasn't so happy about the lost time. Writing is what's keeping me going. I love it. I'm happy to take this time. But it's hard work and I'm doing a lot of it and yeah... I'll stop here...

So, bulk revisions for yccm are done, baby!!

We unexpectedly sat down and did a turbo session tonight, fixing basically all of one chapter and combing through the last. All that's left to do is small notes our beta reader is giving us while they read through the chapters, and that should be it! Revised chapters will be uploaded probably during the first week of June.

My list of Disney achievements is pretty good if I do say so myself (if you're at all interested, look below the cut), but I wasn't sure today was ever going to happen. This is the Lilly Belle, pulled by DRR #1 C. K. Holiday. As part of the train tour, you get to complete the the Grand Tour Circle inside this luxurious cabin. Thanks to the Lovely & Talented @kjuw89 for helping this dream come true via the Disneyland Railroad Guided Tour

I have been thinking of this video for a while. I'm not going to watch it. But, like, Youtube videos used to be short, right? Like 10-15 minutes. So if you're watching every (xyz) movie, you could do one video for each. 30, even 60 episodes. So why don't you? Well, that's easy.

I remember the Let's Play boom. My cousin and I even started our own channel. When you start a series, episode 1 is your peak and things slowly fall off from there until the end, and sometimes there's a big surge for the final episode. Happens to everyone. It's natural.

By rolling a series into one, big, long video, you can point to a big viewership number -- like Big Joel's 887,000 views. But I'm going to guess not even 50% watched past the 30 minute mark. Source: my own hour-long Youtube video. Analytics tell me 53% of viewers abandon in the first 30 seconds.

Of those 887,000 viewers Big Joel got, how many made it to the one hour mark? 200,000? Or what about the four hour mark? I doubt its even 50k at that point.

How many creators are lying to themselves, I wonder? To say nothing about Youtube itself, which pays for longer watch times over raw views.

There are a lot of questions I don't have answers for. Is it intrinsically better to have longer videos? Surely you're getting some amount of people who forget they have it on and watch the whole thing to completion, right? And that has to be higher than if it was a series of videos. But how high? And even if only 10,000 people watch all six hours of a long essay, the bigger viewership number has to be good advertising, right? "Oh wow nearly a million people watched this six hour essay, maybe I'll give it a shot." Right? That probably exists. But that's a "probably."

A while ago I posted this image I made to represent the emotion of "When the costume shop manager is being particularly difficult"

(This is the iconic graphic design of the website offstagejobs.com)

And now I'd like to share various memes I have made about work in the hopes of finding some theater tech and/or sewing solidarity.

This one is "When you have to sew on your domestic machine at home after sewing on the industrial machine all day"

This one is "When you're stressed at work so you turn on "Appalachian Spring" to calm down but it's not working so the vibe is like:"

(That one's pretty specific).

These two are untitled:

This one's more of a general industry meme:

Ok this one is titled "After sewing all day and then going home and doing crafts and then doing craft projects all weekend"

And this last one is "Stuff in my Shakeapeare theater costume stock that just makes sense: Like twenty strawberry handkerchiefs"

"Oh, your dad is unhinged," my cousin says at dinner, between the calling hours. "Un. Hinged."

We're in a medical-only state, but I know from Thanksgiving that my aunt has a hook-up, if no one else does. It turns out the hook-up is my cousin Sarah, a goth femme hairdresser, who rents an apartment from our elderly grandfather. Sarah's guy even has edibles, and I take two. "That's...kind of a lot," Rosie says. I roll my eyes, and say, "These are weed guy edibles. Weed guy edibles are 7.5mg, max, compared to dispensary edibles." Rosie clearly doesn't believe me, but I'm also mad at her for calling dibs on the JFK portrait, so maybe I'm just coming across snotty.

I was about to say my dad had seemed more or less hinged, but just now, literally while I was typing this, he stormed into the living room to yell at me. I talked to my therapist (!) about boundaries (!!) so now I am in an Uber back to the Airbnb.