So, yesterday’s day of rest turned out pretty well and mostly accomplished its purpose. My sleep schedule’s going to take a few nights of regular sleep to get ironed out, but I think I’ll be in a good position at the start of next week.

I’m working today, but it’s mostly a “clear out the backlog/catch up necessary stuff that’s been piling up”. I’m going to try to do my first actual not-direct-political-satire thing since before the election today, at 4:30 (which is when my “write fiction” alarm goes off). Not sure yet what it will be.

The Tales of MU website is back up as of yesterday PM. It will get one update next week to tie off the current story, and then I’m going to take a look at where I am for the next one.

The Daily Report

I just posted what I call my “crowdfunditry” piece for the week to this blog. I’ve done one the previous few weeks, too, but I posted them on Medium. After looking at the fact that my biggest Medium hits have been fiction and satire and the fact that my op-ed pieces get fewer hits there than my blog posts here typically do (despite the fact that people have been paying me to write them in the first place), I’ve decided to shift my serious opinion writing over here. I’ll be crossposting (and post-dating) the previous bits of crowdfunditry later in the day, so the blog category shows you all the entry.

Speaking of satire: my satirical political horror story Crooked Hillary: A Trumped-Up Tale of Terror is now available in the Kindle Store. I hit a snag with the Nook formatting, but hopefully it will be available there before long. You can still buy it directly from me in a multiformat bundle that allows you to read it on any device, including directly in your web browser. If you read the story in any format, I’d appreciate it if you leave a review on the Amazon page. That helps me a lot.

The State of the Me

I’ve resumed fiction writing, but it’s a slow slog. Lot of cobwebs to blow out.

Plans For Today

We’ve got to make a grocery run at some point later in the day. If anyone wants to kick into that, it would be helpful. All tips count towards the crowdfunditry goal.

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve been trying to get back to fiction writing here. My problem is that I’ve been doing it by opening up my NaNo novel, which was going pretty well right up until the week of the election. I figured I’d take a few days off from it to deal with the jitters—I was ahead of schedule—and then come back to it. Well, the jitters didn’t end on Tuesday the 8th, and every time I open up the file, I come back to the last line I wrote, which is a question, in dialogue:

“How fares the Republic?”

It’s a dark joke in a time of dark jokes.

Speaking of dark jokes, though, on Tuesday I did have a bit of a breakthrough when someone replied to one of my threads to say that at least Trump wouldn’t have “Crooked Hillary” to blame any more. I joked that he’d probably have a doll on his desk that he’d yell at when things go wrong, and that turned into a whole new thread, which is now available in an expanded short story form as “Crooked Hillary: A Trumped-Up Tale Of Terror“. It’s currently available in a pay-what-you-will with no minimum (as low as zero, so you can get and read it for free) form here: https://sellfy.com/p/yQGe/.

At the end of business day, I’ll be putting a minimum price on it as part of being able to add it to the big ebook stores at their best royalty rates, so, if you don’t have the change to spare, get it while it’s free?

While it’s not exactly getting away from the topic of the election and politics, I’m optimistic that a logjam has burst and I’ll have an easier time with more fantastic fiction, going forward.

Financial Outlook

Mixed indications. The change in administration may well affect government spending that affects the contracts that go out in a way that may well affect employment in my immediate household in the near to medium future (reminder that it’s neither just people on direct benefits or government employees who suffer when the government slashes spending). My own income is creeping upwards, but not fast enough to compensate for that, and there’s no guarantee that will continue if things get tougher for the below-upper-classes.

I’m interested in landing more opinion writing work, as that pays pretty well. I’m still learning the ropes of pitching (it’s really great when editors come to me and say they want something, takes the pressure off), though, and in the meantime I’ve been taking a more direct approach of crowdfunding my own op-ed pieces on Twitter. Don’t know how long that will be sustain momentum, as the resulting pieces somehow never attract as much attention or are as widely-read as the viral threads that get me the attention necessary to do the crowdfunding. There’s a gap that has to be bridged there and I’m not 100% sure how to do that.

The State of the Me

Complicated.

Plans For Today

I’m easing off of trying to return to my NaNo novel (finishing it in November is probably a wash at this point), and will be working on writing other things this afternoon.

The Daily Report

There are alarming things happening in our nation. I have no intention of minimizing them or normalizing them, but I really need to get back to work. The world will continue until it doesn’t. Life will go on until it doesn’t.

I haven’t succeeded in writing fiction since before the election; I did write some satirical news, which is not quite fiction. Actually, it’s very not quite fiction right now. But it’s a step in the right direction.

Other things I haven’t done lately: post anything that I’ve done to my Patreon, keep up my status posts. Normal things that I need to get on with.

I’m going to start blogging more here. I’ve been posting a lot of my thoughts to Twitter now, which is helpful for gaining views, but bad for organizing and collecting them, and also leads to me haunting Twitter as everything posted there becomes a conversation. So expect that there will be more blog posts here, and that some of them will be political.

The State of the Me

Processing grief. Finding strength.

Plans For Today

Picking up my metaphorical pen to write fiction again in the afternoon. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Daily Report

It is no secret that I have been preoccupied of late with matters relating to the election. What discipline I was maintaining disappeared under the weight of my sinus infection just before Halloween, and I never found it again.

As I found it harder and harder to keep in a creative mindset necessary for fiction—and I found myself unexpectedly attracting paying work in the area of non-fiction—I promised myself that on November 9th, I would start creating again. I would resume writing fiction and poetry and other creative endeavors on a regular basis, no matter what happened.

Well, as it turns out, what did happen. It happened big time. I think I was more cognizant of the possibility than a lot of my peers. I knew it was never a lock, and did my best to convince others of that. I think knowing that is part of what consumed me. I still wasn’t prepared for what happened, for how it happened.

But, it’s November 9th. The day after. The first day of the rest of our Republic. My father’s wise counsel in difficult times is to proceed as though the world will continue to exist, just in case it does. And so I’m back to work. I’m going to be juggling a lot more non-fiction writing with fiction writing, but I’m back in the fiction game.

The State of the Me

I’m still here.

Plans For The Day

I’ve started writing a long-planned non-fiction book this morning. This afternoon, I’m going to pick back up my NaNoWriMo effort (which was ahead of schedule before the weekend), and also write more Making Out Like Bandits.

Well, the last half of the month sort of… sucked. I screwed up my pill regimen, figured that out just in time to get sick, which turned into a sinus inflammation that had the exact shape of my left maxillary sinus sticking out of my face like an illustration in a text book. You know, I have never been more than vaguely aware that I even have maxillary sinuses. When I’ve had sinus problems before, it’s always been the frontal ones (the ones up behind your forehead).

I’ve been calling it a “sinus infection” but apparently very few such inflammations are bacterial in nature (though as with many problems, antibiotics are overprescribed); the swelling and pain were at last brought under control with a stupendous yet apparently medically sound amount of ibuprofen. I’m on mucus thinners now to aid in drainage. I slept most of the weekend, after not sleeping for most of the week before.

A couple of things added to a turbulent end of month. One is that someone took it upon themselves to put up flyers declaring Friday the 28th trick or treat day around our neighborhood. Official municipal trick o treating is on Halloween itself this year, as in most years. In order to make sure no one went home disappointed, we decided to be prepared for both nights. So I was prancing around in my shadow costume with half my face swollen under the mask for a grand total of five children… though two of the parties specifically told us that they were glad we were open as we were always their favorite house, so I’m filing it under “worth it”. Building a reputation as the cool house for Halloween is a year-to-year endeavor. Repeat business is key.

At the same time this has been going on, our landlords/my parents-out-law have been having a series of computer misadventures. I’m their (paid) tech support, plus they’re family, and I enjoy having technical puzzles to solve. Still, there’s only so many hours in a day, you know? It’s all got to come from somewhere.

Being laid up in bed without enough energy or concentration to do much more than tweet crankily turned out to be good for business in one way: someone at The Globe and Mail saw one of my tweet threads and commissioned an op-ed based on it. For those who aren’t aware, that’s Canada’s largest newspaper in terms of readers. Still pretty exciting, even though “Canada” and “newspaper”. I’ve got a second such commission to fulfill today.

I had already planned on beginning to shop around pitches for short non-fiction writing after the election business settles down and I have more space in my head to think. If everything goes to plan, I’ll start with two respectable writing credits under my belt that I didn’t have to go looking for.

Tonight is Halloween proper. I have a deadline for my second op-ed piece to meet, my out-laws called the “tech support number” on a ransomware pop-up instead of calling me first, and I need to get the lights and sounds rigged for tonight.

It should be fun.

So, I have been dragging all week. Brain foggy, body tired, zero creativity. I’ve been really worried that I’m getting sick (Jack was sick last week), but I haven’t had any of the symptoms of a cold. Then earlier today, I glanced at the digital thermometer on my electric tea kettle: 87 degrees.

After weeks in the seventies and then the sixties all last week, I had changed my office and sleeping area from summer mode to winter mode… right in time for a mid-October heat wave, apparently. My temperature regulation issues make me very susceptible to heat, but not very susceptible to noticing it.

Luckily I had not removed the AC from the window, so the office is cooling down to a usable state as we speak. When my brain cools down a bit, I’m going to figure out how to set up an automated alert for days where the high is 80 degrees or above, because this is not an unusual event for me.

The Daily Report

Well, there are two major goals for the week that I’m missing on: re-opening Ligature Works to submissions is being delayed pending a streamlined bullet point version of our submission guidelines (I’m not good at distilling things to bullet points, and Jack is laid up with a fall cold), and getting ahead of the schedule on Tales of MU fell apart yesterday when I hit a point of exhaustion in the afternoon. Same thing happened today, which makes me suspect that I’m either coming down with or narrowly fighting off the same respiratory crud. Either that, or I’m just not sleeping soundly because he’s up with it. It’s hard to say.

This is not a very productive day, though it’s seen some improvements on RealmLike. I’ve never been sure why, but I can do technical stuff with a lower level of mental engagement than creative things. It seems like it should be the other way around. But there’s now background music, travel circles work with the new map saving/loading, and monsters now have a chance to spawn with random variations (e.g., things like Angry Dog, Small Zombie, Wiry Goblin, etc.) that affect their stats, which is a precursor to similar variations on items, which is a precursor to a generalized magic item system.

The State of the Me

Getting a headache that’s getting worse.

Plans For Today

I’m actually going to log off the computer after I post this and get some rest.

The Daily Report

Earlier in the week, I promised a funny political satire piece. This week has made that difficult to deliver, as the bottom kept falling out of the barrel and nothing much funny was left clinging to the sides. My initial idea was a Grinch/Dr. Seuss-style thing focusing on Trump’s overall character, but I found myself moving from that to things like his debate performance, which led me to ponder the similarity between the debate situation (two passed by, one remaining, and each time he’s said he could have hit harder) and that of a baseball game where there are two strikes, two outs, and it all rides on a single pitch.

So, that’s how I came to write (and then record) “Donald In Debate“, a poem in the style of “Casey at the Bat”. My goal in the piece is to address the hateful rhetoric and the pain he causes without making them the joke, which I think is important. It’s a delicate balancing act but I’m proud of how I pulled it off.

The RealmLike update went live last night. This morning I patched a few bugs that came up in the overnight session. The server is still live for play. The “home version” will be brought up to date with the test server once I have the tier three Wizard skills/spells in.

The State of the Me

There is illness in our house, but it’s not mine (yet). This might affect the timing on the Ligature Works issue 2 window opening, but not by more than a couple of days.

Plans For Today

One of my big goals for the week is to get back on track with having Tales of MU chapters written and ready to go at least a day in advance, which means wrapping up the next chapter (which might close out the current book, or there might be a coda) today. If that goes to play, it will be posted for MU patrons this evening.

The Daily Report

Colossal RealmLike update is coming up this evening, if all goes according to plan. I smoothed out the last bump with map loading/saving this morning, leaving me free to get back to the thing I was working on before getting sucked down this rabbit hole: making the level 3 and 5 wizard spells.

It was specifically a teleportation spell that allows you to set (and return to) “spatial anchors” that led me here. I realized that while my map generation procedures could pseudorandomly create identical maps from the same seed each time, those maps had to be accessed sequentially; if you were in the starting town and you tried to teleport to the fourth level of a dungeon on another continent, the game wouldn’t know what to do. Going from “sequential access” to “random access” meant instituting true saving and loading of maps earlier than I’d planned, and it has turned out to be more complicated than I thought to preserve the web of relationships among maps regardless of which order they were loaded in.

But that’s finished, and the spell I was working on when I jumped tracks is now fully implemented. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not sure that I’ll have everything I intended to implement for the wizard finished by close of business day today, but I think I can at least have them tidied up through their current cap of level 3, which is enough for pushing the update out.

It’s easier to add to the game in my spare time and with occasional workdays devoted to it than it is to solve giant technical problems in that way, so from this point on updates should be more like they were the first few weeks instead of taking weeks at a time.  I’ve got a pretty good roadmap for where to go from here.

Financial Status

Once wizards have an equal level cap to the other classes, I’m going to push an update to the downloadable version of RealmLike that not only includes all the new content and advances but enables multiplayer. I’m hoping at that point to get some early access-type sales on it.

The State of the Me

Doing alright.

Plans For Today

I’m about a day behind on things I wanted to write this week. I don’t know that I’m going to get any fiction writing done today before I do a creepy October tale on Twitter later tonight; I really want to get the RealmLike update put to bed around 6:30, and I hadn’t planned on still being debugging the map loading this morning.