Well I am on Cloud Nine right now.

Cloud $946, to be precise!

What I hoped for but never dreamed would actually happen has happened. I got my monthly cheque today, and even though my Persons With Disabilites (PWD) status is not official until Nov 1, I still got the new, enhanced amount.

And that amount… is nine hundred and forty six freaking dollars! W00T!

That’s an increase of almost $250 per month, a 36 percent increaseand that will make a huge difference in my life. Even after Money Mart takes their three dollars on the hun (Atilla?), that’s still $918 in my pocket every single month.

Rent, utils, and whatnot are $400/month, leaving me $518/month for various and sundries.

Needless to say, I am pickled tink. That’s almost $130/week, or if you want to get really cute, something like thirty dollars a day. A DAY.

For me, this is like winning the lottery.

I was certain that I would have to wait until the check in November for the beginning of this bounty, and let me tell you, it would not have been a fun wait. I am subject to painful levels of anticipation when I am looking forward to something big, and a month of that would have been potentially quite excruciating for excitable ole me.

So, phew on that! I got me a nice fat check and I am going to make me some *plans*.

One line of potential is finally getting my little mini studio together. Get whatever cords I need in order to make my video camera talk with my computer again, rearrange my room a little in order to maximize performance space, and best of all, finally get a decent green screen, one that comes with a stand and hopefully sufficient foolproofing so that even a highly inventive fool like myself can make the damned thing work.

Then, I can take this whole making videos thing to the next level. Oh, and I would probably also get an SSD drive for my computer specifically for storing and editing video, because SSD drives are basically just huge Flash drives and hence are FAST.

Honestly, I would love to have a brand new computer, and I might work up to that eventually, but that is the sort of thing that you have to do in stages. This month the CPU, next month the motherboard, and so forth and so on, and right now, I am all about the instant gratification.

I am going to have such an awesome Xmas! I will be able to afford to send my family actual gifts, and not just Xmas cards.

Nothing fancy, of course, but still…. actual gifts!

Another line of potential is my wardrobe. I have a decent amount of clothes now, enough to see me through the week, but I want more.

Specifically, I want more pants, motherfuckers. I want to get up to at least seven pairs of wearable-anywhere pants, plus more comfy pajama bottom type things for lounging about.

I already have more than seven shirts and seven pairs of socks. So if I hit the magic number of seven completely functional pants type garments, I could wear a total fresh outfit every day of the week.

And that is something I have been contemplating. I have been wondering what would happen, both creatively speaking and in terms of mood, if I simply treated the stuff I do like a job, and so I get up at eight in the morning, shower, groom, and change into a fresh set of clothes, and then sit in front of this here computer from 9 to 5.

I have noticed that getting showered and dressed energizes me, and it has made me wonder if a lot of my feeling of frustrated ennui and lack of motivation has to do with this near-sleep existence I lead, never far from my bed and napping many times during the day.

If so, then changing that via the vital rituals of showering and dressing could really be a big game changer for me. It could be just what I need in order to give my life some momentum and focus and put me in the right mood to send stuff to publishers and write to editor’s specifications and beat the bushes for some sort of freelance work, and all that other stuff that I “should” have been doing long ago but have never had the focus or determination to do.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a change of routine, but I think that if I can make the transition into thinking of being a writer as a job that I will work from nine to five every weekday (with an hour off for lunch, of course), I will have incentive to think up things to do with all that time.

It’s a big step, and I won’t be doing it any time soon, because I will be writing a novel in November (1667 words a day… no problem from the guy who wrote a million in a year) and that is not the time to suddenly change everything up.

I have my basic concept for the book (won’t be short stories after all) and some scenes plotted out in mt head, but as usual, I will most likely be flying by the seat of my pants.

It’s not the smart way to write, and every year I think “Next time, I will write an outline first!”, but that is just not how my muse works.

What gets me to write every day is that intoxicating sense of possibility that you can only get from something that is not planned out in advance. Writing a book when I already know everything that is going to happen sounds like the definition of dull to me.

And sure, that probably means my novels will never been intricately plotted masterpieces of precision clockwork (although you’d be surprised at how much I can keep in my head), but at least they will get written, and that’s something.

All I need to know is what happens… tomorrow.

After that, who knows?