Personal Note

I haven’t said anything about it because it happened during a time when I wasn’t really blogging or saying anything very personal in public places, but a friend of mine from a close-knit internet circle passed away the weekend before last. It was sudden, it was unexpected, and the circumstances of it hit me and Jack both pretty hard. She was a member of the community where Jack and I first met. The day I found out about it was the first day that my recent illness was really in bull bloom, and I have to say that the two things didn’t help each other.

This weekend, we met some of our other friends from the group for a memorial brunch. It was the first time many of us had met each other. Sad circumstances, happy occasion. It did provide something like a bit of closure. I suspect writing about it, even in this oblique fashion, will also help.

This is what I mean when I say that last week was one of the worst of my life, though the end result of it all may be that I bounce back from what was already a growing period of silence, self-censorship, and ennui.

Let the doing of things commence.

The Daily Report

Day one of digging myself out from under the pile. I’ve got a lot to do, and it’s time to set priorities. Priority number one: rebuild what I lost of Angels of the Meanwhile. I have failed to keep a self-imposed deadline. It is important to remember that this is not the same thing as failing to accomplish the task, unless I let that missed benchmark overwhelm me.

At the same time, it is necessary to build and keep up momentum on my writing, particularly with Tales of MU, but I also need to keep the creative juices flowing more generally. For a while I had really good luck with setting some time aside on Mondays for truly random writing. This gave me short stories, longer stories, and poetry.  There’s still a week for me to enter the SFPA’s poetry contest for this year. While I do have a couple of pieces I could send in, I don’t have anything I feel is really suitable for it. Maybe I can come up with something?

The State of the Me

My sleep was really mixed last night, but I woke up at 8 in the morning today feeling awake. I got up and had breakfast, and was here starting this post at 10 on the dot. It’s a good start.

Plans For Today

I’m going to alternate creative and other work.

First thing I do after this, I’m going to make a long overdue update post about Angels of the Meanwhile.

Then, some random writing.

Then, some e-book formating.

Then, I’m going to work on Tales of MU. As I often do when I have a chapter that’s just not working, I’m going to try starting over from the beginning and going a different direction. Even if what I have is fundamentally workable, I’m just in a very different headspace than when I started it.