However, with the Grandpuppy here for the next year, I'll need to come up with a different daily schedule. Grandpuppy is a huge beast of a dog, and he's only three years old,which means he's got a lot of energy. The Princess Pup can be worn out by a quick jog around the exterior of the house. Grandpuppy needs a good 45-minute, fast-pace walk to begin to calm down.
Also, my back is letting me know I haven't been to yoga class in nearly a month. I need to work my own exercise into my daily schedule.
But for tonight, I'm relaxing a bit with pizza and the Olympics gymnastics events. Yeah, I already know who medaled in what event, but watching what those kids can do with their bodies still blows my mind. And the joy in their faces this year brings a lovely pitter-pat to my heart.
I still don't have enough spoons to deal with a normal day yet. Either I write or I run errands/clean or I do a bit of both. The post-COVID fatigue is real, and it's a frickin' pain in the ass.
However, I am making forward progress on both A Cup of Conflict and Death Goddess Walking. Every time I start to feel anxiety over my apparent lack of writing progress, I remind myself there's no rush. First of all, I want to make the best stories I can. Also, book sales are down for several reasons.
The Olympics are currently happening in Paris and other French territories. School starts in a couple of weeks throughout most of the U.S. And the American election campaigning has turned into a full-blown soap opera.
That's not counting the war in Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the election chaos in Venezuela, along with the usual armed conflicts, famine, and sickness around the world.
However, I only have the strength to deal with my immediate duties. It's not that I don't care, but other worries will have to wait until I have more spoons in my drawer.
In the meantime, I huff and I puff and I tell myself, "You can do this! One step at a time!"
And that's assuming I could manage to sit through the flick.
I had to lay down after taking a simple shower yesterday. The COVID fatigue is real. And totally fucking annoying after nearly two weeks of barely having the strength to toast a bagel for breakfast.
On the plus side, the brain fog has lifted. I've managed to write the last two days. It may not have been much, but it's something.
I'd planned on using July's Camp NaNo to finish one of the books I'm currently working on, but that got shot to hell with the COVID.
In the meantime, I'll rest some more, write some more, and hopefully, go to the theater to see Hugh Jackman in a comics-accurate Wolverine outfit later this weekend.
Even if it means masking up myself!
Whoops!
Unfortunately, that's reality for a writer. I haven't been able to concentrate over the last nine days. Much less summon the energy to work on the pieces I've started. Sometimes, you need a palate cleanser to clear the cobwebs from your brain.
This new trilogy gives me something to be excited about. Get the neurons snapping to life in my brain. Hopefully by this weekend, I'll be back working on the other projects.
Besides, there's other news that brought glad tidings to my desiccated soul. I'm going to hug this news and hold it tight. I cling to whatever brightens my life because sometimes, you just need to be reassured that the world isn't turning into a cesspit of greed and dysfunction.
The headache and brain fuzz prevent coherent thought, so I haven't tried to write or even read. This morning I woke up exhausted and slightly nauseated. I shouldn't have taken all my pills when I first woke up. My stomach threatened to rebel. I ended up napping for another hour and a half before I could even think about attempting some breakfast.
My big problem is simple boredom. I'm pretty limited in what I can do. If I try to sort through boxes, the dust aggravates my stopped up sinuses. The fatigue prevents any cleaning inside or weeding outside. I'm pretty much forced to lie on my recliner with the Princess Pup and watch movies and TV.
DH is already feeling better and is back to work. But I fear my autoimmune issues will make my COVID-19 last longer. But I figure as long I can breathe, I'll be okay.
I hope!
(By the way, I'm still not testing positive even though I have no doubt that I have COVID. GK never tested positive when he had it either.)
Genius Kid has been making food and medicine runs for us and taking the Princess Pup out for some of her constitutionals. She's actually been super well-behaved. I think she understands we don't feel very good right now.
So she's curled up on my lap, and we will both try to nap. I doubt if I get much more done today.
We'll see how much writing I actually accomplish the rest of this week. Any amount of words will be a victory.
In the meantime, I have Mike & Molly running on the TV. That show makes me happy.
After four years of being super careful, it happened to us. DH got sick after he came home from the Buick Nationals. I was praying it was con crud, but nope. He brought home COVID-19.
After taking the Grandpuppy to the vet for a follow-up on his ear infection and wearing a mask out of an abundance of precaution yesterday morning, I stopped by the pharmacy and got a couple of tests because I wasn't feeling the greatest either. DH was positive. I was negative. But I'm not taking any chances.
I'm not running a fever or coughing like DH is. I'm pretty sure my symptoms are allergies from a friend's kitties and the pollinating corn fields. You know, sinus pressure and itchy eyes. But I'll be staying home for the rest of the week.
However, I found this cute video on YouTube that brightened my day!
The side effects were minimal: fever, headache, chills, but I'm immuno-compromised, which is the reason for getting the blasted shot to begin with. However, I woke up on Wednesday morning, feeling pretty damn. Even the arm soreness was gone, and that usually lasts 4-5 days.
It's one of the reasons I said screw it, and I moved the release of Fae and Felonies to Halloween. There's a lot of stuff that goes into a release. It's not just writing the book (or rewriting the book in this case), editing, and formatting.
And if I can getting that stuff done while I'm in Chicago, maybe I can go see Taylor Swift's concert on the big screen. I may not be a Swiftie, but I can appreciate another artist's work.
We finished the first season of Picard last night, and we started Ted Lasso last night. Do I wish we started these before now? Yes. Do I regret waiting? No.
I don't think I would have enjoyed these shows in the middle of the pandemic. I needed comfort viewing for the emotional support. While Star Trek: The Next Generation is a favorite, I would have lost it over Picard's bittersweet ending of its first season. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I would have had trouble connecting with the characters of Ted Lasso. Not with all the fury and agony swirling around me.
What does this have with the publishing industry?
Readers are the same. They may not be in the right mood to read your stories. I know if I'm feeling down I pull out my copies of Stephanie Bond's novels. When I'm feeling nostalgic, it's my boatload of Star Trek tie-ins, my comics collection, or the Oz series. If I'm super-stressed, then it's romances.
Not everyone is going to love my stories. But more likely they haven't had time to read them yet. And I say that as someone who has roughly 3,000 books. And those aren't counting comics or GK's children's books I'd like to read to my grandchildren if I ever have them.
Otherwise, I may create a new position: rent-a-grandmother.
Alas, there is no rest of the wicked. I need to finish the last proof of the paperback for Famine in French Vanilla today and jump into writing Death in Double Mocha.
Ironically, there's been three deaths in the family over the last eight months, and frankly, I'm not only peopled-out and funeraled-out, I'm approaching burn-out with my writing. It's not a good feeling, and a friend I trust said it was rather obvious in the last 888-555-HERO book.
That's not a good sign.
I plan to finish the Kickstarter books, and write Invasion! and the other two books on pre-order. Then, I will take a huge break for a couple of months. I really need to refill my creative well.
Part of the plan is to start working on OOAK Barbies again. I haven't had time to sew, much less face paint or re-root hair since Genius Kid was a toddler. And yes, I'll post pictures over the coming months.
There's also the MCU movies and series I haven't had a chance to watch over the last two years. I have over a thousand unread books, including research tomes for future writing projects. (She says as the gods on the cover of Budge's The Book of the Dead stare at her.)
I will still be writing, though not at the furious pace I have been since I recovered from cancer surgery. I've been working at such a ridiculous speed because I feared dying before I could write down all the stories in my head. Then I buried myself in writing to keep from stressing out over the pandemic.
None of this crazy behavior is healthy for anyone. And I need to relearn how to live.
We all do after the damn pandemic.
Hug your loved ones and furbabies. Take care of yourselves. And as the Doctor says, be kind to others.
I didn't wear a mask.
Mask use has dropped off in our county. We haven't had any deaths the last couple of months. Omicron-B hasn't wound its through our area. And yesterday was the first time I didn't second-guess myself about mask-wearing while in public.
Heck, I even went grocery shopping after dinner and didn't reach for my mask.
It doesn't mean I'm ready for every public thing yet.
I originally had plans to go to the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas this month. However, I'm still not ready to fly on a plane yet.
Even in the pre-pandemic days, I often caught travel crud from a fellow plane passenger who was flying while ill. People seem to like sneezing and coughing on me. I don't know why, other than sheer rudeness.
So, no, you can't pay me enough to get on a place just yet. I'm going to stay home and type away on my laptop because it's one of the few ways I can stay healthy.
Toss in the current inflation spike which is a long term effect of the pandemic plus the invasion of Ukraine. People no longer buying a lot of indoor entertainment.
Netflix stock dropped by almost 50% last week after thousands of subscribers eliminated the service. The other streaming services are starting to see similar results.
Movie theaters haven't recovered. New releases are lucky to break eight-figures on their opening weekend, much less the nine or ten figures some of these movies would have made prior to the pandemic.
Now, both trad and indie publishing are seeing a loss of sales. And writers are panicking. "We aren't making as much as we did in <name the year>."
I'm really confused by everyone's surprise at this. First, the pandemic growth simply wasn't sustainable. People are no longer trapped at home with limited entertainment choices. Heck, even I'm getting outside of the house. DH and I went to dinner at my favorite Mexican restaurant in town last night. It's been two and half years since I sat down INSIDE this place. And damn was it delicious!
Second, it doesn't mean everybody has quit reading (or watching) forever. This is a a short-term lull. Why do I believe that?
If an introvert like me is getting out, my readers are too. And you know something? That's okay. I'll have new books ready for them when winter rolls back around and we're stuck at home because of ice and snow.
*Don't take either me or Dr. Fauci wrong, COVID-19 is still a dangerous disease, but the U.S. is no longer suffering from millions of infections per day and most of our hospitals have normal capacity again.
Bigger publishing companies are losing income. The reasons for this are among the following:
1) Not only are the mass market writers leaving tradpub, the bigger writers are starting to leave, wooed away from their old publisher by another one of the Big Five (or Four depending on how the DOJ antitrust lawsuit goes with the Randy Penguin-Simon & Schuster merger). So the tradpubs are having to cough up more money to keep their cash cows happy.
2) New writers are doing a better job investigating opportunities. If they do take a tradpub offer, they are seeing lower advances from the tradpubs who want more rights. Furthermore, the tradpubs are doing a smaller print runs for unproven authors. So, it's a catch-22. The tradpub are putting out enough books to break even, but aren't putting the money into promoting a new writer with a small print run so then they get bitchy when the new writer doesn't catch fire instantly.
3) Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the surge in new independent bookstores crashed. We're back to bookstores going under because couldn't browse in-person for the last two years.
4) The big chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble are suffering from the same lack of foot traffic as the independent stores. However, they have the added problem of the decline of shoppers in their home malls.
Like nearly every other company in the U.S., tradpubs are increasing the workload of their staff without any commiserate increase in salary or benefits. The corresponding burn-out leads to employees abruptly quitting.
One of the issues is the lack of stability across all industries. Why would any employee fear losing their job when they know they could lose it on a random whim anyway? At a certain point, it's a matter of survival for any employee, including those in tradpub, to quit the abusive environment and take their chances somewhere else.
I say this because I've been there. Burnout and it's corresponding effects on my health is part of the reason I stopped practicing law and started writing and running my own publishing company.
All I have to do is look at my Fitbit and see the decrease in my blood pressure and heart rate while I write to know I made the best decision for me. I hope those people leaving the tradpubs find something equally relaxing and gratifying.
Over the weekend, I've had more than one friend ask if I was going to any writer conferences in 2022. I've politely said, "I doubt it. I don't feel comfortable traveling yet."
What I really want to say is, "Are you fucking kidding me?!"
I literally cannot afford to get COVID-19 regardless of the variant. When I say I'm immuno-compromised, it means the common cold lays me out for two weeks. The flu? Last time I had it, I was sick from complications from January to May. After using the toilet, I had to lay down on the bathroom floor to rest for 15 minutes before I could crawl back to my bed or the couch.
Believe me, I wish I were joking about the last part. But it's still better than getting blown up for going to a hospital to deliver my baby like in Ukraine right now.
Maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe I'm not. But I'm definitely not the only Gen-Xer making jokes about hiding under our school desks in case the nukes start dropping. We live roughly equidistant from five major U.S. cities. And that doesn't include the fallout from Chicago blowing our way. Our town is fucked if the current war goes nuclear.
The old fear is back. As I explained to GK the other night, I never wanted him or my grandchildren to feel the shadow DH and I experienced when we were growing up. In some ways, now it's worse because we're dealing with batcrap crazy people. Or person. Oh, let's name names. Vlad Putin is knucking futs!
So between the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Vlad's finger hovering over a big red button, I'm not going anywhere for a while. I'm going to hide out at home like I've done for the last two years.
Because if I'm going to die, I want to be with my loved ones when I do.
I think there's a reason Milltown Mel, New Jersey's furry winter prognosticator, died yesterday. The weather is too crazy even for a groundhog.
Welp, we're rolling into the third year of the pandemic scourge. I started counting because I wanted to compare COVID-19 to the Spanish Influenza epidemic a century ago. People resisted the use of masks and ignored health officials' requests for social distancing back then, too. But with today's high speed traveling, COVID-19 is mutating and spreading even faster than the flu.
Despite what others think, I may continue wearing a mask and social distance while in public for the rest of my life. With my screwed-up immune system, those have kept me from getting colds, etc., for the last two years.
Our area of Ohio was still dealing with a Delta outbreak when Omicron came charging in. Being vaxxed and boosted doesn't stop the latest variant, but it does reduce the severity of the symptoms for my friends who caught it.
Ironically, it's a beautiful, sunny Monday. The squirrels are playing in the melting snow. Snow that will either be replenished by another foot of the stuff this week or totally melted by rain. The weather people aren't sure yet. Our area sits at the cusp, and it depends on which was the jet stream shifts over the next two days.
In the meantime, I have writing and taxes to work on. Stay warm and stay safe, folks!
