It's been a really long time since I blogged here.  I just posted an article about my trip to Thailand.  It was a pretty long blog but doesn't go into a lot of detail about other stuff I've been doing.

The last couple months have been crazy busy.  I went home for almost three weeks at the end of October and beginning of November.  It was great to be in Calgary and to see family and to attend the 2008 World Fantasy Conference.  I was really lucky it was being held in my home  town.  I always wanted to go to this conference and it was great.  I have a long blog about it at another blog I have.  http://loriono.blogspot.com/2008/11/world-fantasy-2008-recap.html. 

I met a lot of great people, heard a lot of great speakers and went to some good parties.

After the conference, my dad was nice enough to drive me around the outskirts of Calgary so I could take some photos.  I got some lovely photos of cows and fields.  I never would have been interested in that topic before living in Tokyo.  Now I find cows very interesting.  I'm not quite sure why.

I joined in on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and actually managed to complete 50 000 words of a book I've had kicking around in my head for a while.  I don't have a finished manuscript at 50 000 but I fleshed out so much more of the world and the plot and characters so I am pretty happy.  It was also good to just sit my butt in a chair and force myself to work.  It's not a work method that I can say I fully endorse, but a lot of good came out of saying "just get something on the page and worry about the editing later."  The scary realization is how much better I am at working to externally set deadlines.  I guess some emotional baggage attached to intrinsic motivation is present.

I also went to Thailand, as you may know from my previous blog entry.  That is where I finished the NaNoWriMo.  I wish I could say that I had leisurely writing sessions by the pool with mojitos in hand.  Sadly, that only happened once.  I videotaped my husband's soccer games for his team so I really ended up scrambling at the end.  Hitoshi volunteered me to do some photography for someone else and I wasn't good enough at saying "no" so that caused me a lot of stress even though it involved less than an hour of my time.  I hate hurry up and wait situations when I have a lot of my own stuff to get done.

The crowning point is the photography exhibition I am taking part in.  If you want to see last year's pictures you can go to www.nakedtokyo.com (warning:  some of last year's photos are pretty explicit so...)to see them.  I have no idea when 2008 pics will be up.  I had three pictures in the show this year.  I had a lot of positive comments about my work and one particularly negative one which I decided to not take seriously as the speaker was pretty drunk and hadn't looked at my artist's statement.

I'm looking forward to some down time to work on my pics from Canada and to hopefully get my website done.  It really irritates me that I am having so many problems getting ap div tags to stay in the place I want when I have the screen align to the middle rather than have it aligned to the top left.  Grrr...  I may just hire someone to sit with me and help me finish it.

So I think things have been pretty exciting and that is one reason why I haven't blogged for a while.

If anyone reads my blog, I hope you are well and gearing up for the holidays!

Cheers!