What to do?

My mind is divided: do I write tonight or do I put in some overtime? 

I had a bit of a struggle at the office today with one of NS's processes and after jousting with it all afternoon, I finally managed to pin it down and figure out what was going on.  Turns out that what I thought was a bug probably isn't one after all.  It also turns out that I have been misunderstanding a few facets of a key overdue interest calculation for quite some time and today's exercise helped me to straighten things out once and for all--at least for Overdue Interest Method #2.  (One down, five to go!)

My internal struggle pertains to whether or not I should work on a "cheat sheet" document for myself while this is still fresh in my mind?  I should use tonight for writing, but I would hate to forget something between now and tomorrow morning.  On top of that, I am concerned that the time I spent today on one test will eat into the overall time I have to complete the rest of the baseline testing that R. asked me to do. 

Sunder: Day 48

More work on background notes, but I got a little bogged down.  I think I may be falling into an old trap: focussing on the fine details instead of the broad strokes.  When I wrote raw draft for Sunder's synopsis, I worried about big events and major plot lines without concerning myself with "getting everything right" on the first pass.  I cleaned things up in subsequent revisions (a process which I am still working on).  With tonight's work I found myself worrying about things like dates and times and names for orbital research companies.  I shouldn't be concerned with that now.  Tomorrow night I'm going to get back to basics and write point form notes about the progression of events from early space colonization all the way up to the return of The Ten Stones then I'll hand that off to K. and get his feedback then worry about filling in gaps and making corrections.

Work at the office is going well.  I finished more release notes today and I updated the key value reference with eight more entries.  The devs and the support analysts will be pleased to hear that.  Did a bit of Christmas shopping after work as well--picked up the deluxe Blu-Ray version of Inception for my brother-in-law.  Even got the special spin-top key chain.  I hope he likes it.

Slept fairly well last night and I was in a much better mood with my co-workers this morning. 

Sunder: Day 45

It amazes me how much detailed background material a story like Sunder can generate.  Tonight I started a historical background piece called "The Ten Stones" based on an idea that my writing partner and I have been talking about for the better part of a year (or more).  Events that underly the opening sequence of Sunder are tied historically to the ideas he and I have talked about in "The Ten Stones" and I wanted to capture 4 or 5 pages of ideas.  Didn't get quite that many, but I'm off to a good start and should be able to get a lot done tomorrow.  (It always takes a while to get started when organizing your ideas.  At least I find it does for me.) 

Productive day at the office.  Managed to complete another set of release notes--that's 3 this week.  The backlog is shrinking.  Professional Services and Support catered a breakfast for the company today and it was quite a spread.  Eggs (scrambled or western omelete), sausage, bacon, homefries and hashbrowns, pancakes, french toast, fruit...you name it.  It was like getting punched in the mouth by delicious. 

Housework tomorrow. :(  Laundry.  Cleaning.  Yuck.  But if I can get that done in the morning I'll have time in the afternoon to do some Christmas shopping and maybe have some time in the evening to do some writing.  Sunday will be spent at K's house smoking cigars, drinking whisky eating meat and "talking story".  I love Sundays.

Sunder: Day 12

I prefer not to write on the weekends, but since I played hooky on Friday I needed to make up the time.  Wrote for a couple hours in the morning, but it was a stop-start effort, sputtering along like a car with water in its gas.  After lunch I watched the season finale of Fringe and then had a nap (read: I slept like a fallen log.) and got back to writing after supper with much better results--1747 words.

Work injected itself into my long weekend.  About half an hour after I finished writing, R.V. sent me a message.  "Are you there?"  Should have ignored him and gone to bed.  Better yet, should have set my Messenger status to Away or Appear offline (even better).  We spent two hours testing and retesting the deposit requirement calculation on customer Move-In service orders.  We were both remotely logged into the Ottawa office, he from his home in Gatineau and me from my parents' home in Cornwall, both of us sending status updates and testing results through MSN messenger.  Telecommuting at its finest.  We made some progress so it was a worthwhile exercise, but I'm going to ignore work messages for the rest of the long weekend.