WorldCon was the biggest con I’ve participated in, by a wide margin. It was also physically larger (as in, covering more ground), during a hotter month, and involving more out-of-doors walking than my home con of WisCon. Suffice to say, it kicked my behind far harder than I expected it to. I spent the first couple of days recuperating from actual injuries sustained walking around in the wrong shoes. That’s all over except for the blistering; now I’m trying to get my sleeping, eating, and pill-taking regimens back on track.

Next year the climate might be a bit milder. We’ll be aiming for a hotel closer to the con site. And I’ll be better prepared. I remember WisCon used to knock me on my backside for a week, too, and this year I came home and started the best month of my career to date the day after I got home.

For now, I’m taking things easy. I’m trying to go as long as possible before I have to squeeze my feet into shoes, and keeping them up as much as possible. I’ve done some light writing, but my brain’s a bit too foggy to do more than finish up and fire off those WorldCon note posts I put up the other day, and tweet intermittently.

I’ll keep you posted about what’s what as I recover.

Doing a quick status post. I am more or less recovered from the fatigue of the con and travel and sleep loss and all that, but I am going to be spending at least one day as close to completely off my feet as possible.

Due to a footwear malfunction that left me wearing my dress shoes for more than 50% of the con and the entire trip home, I have not just blisters on both of my ankles but some stressed tendons and pain in my calves from standing/walking/limping weird to try to alleviate the initial pain. Adrenaline covers a multitude of sins, so it was only on my way home that I began to realize how badly messed up my feet were.

I thought yesterday that just walking around without shoes would be sufficient for recovery, but it seems like I could really do with putting my feet up for a bit.

Well, everything certainly is up to date in Kansas City. Despite our early trepidation about being lodged so far from the convention, the KC Streetcar is fast and efficient and the estimated wait times and travel times seem to be based on the worst reasonable traffic assumptions. WorldCon 74 is better run than our worst fears based on administrivial SNAFUs in the run-up, although I have to say that even at its best, we still find ourselves missing WisCon, and our absent friends.

Jack and I have been working on our routine for plugging Ligature Works in a way that plays to both of our strengths (neither of us are the most naturally forward people) and have given many authors and poets the good news. I’ve also had the interesting experience of telling people who know me as a poet that I’m also a humorist, those who know me as a humorist that I’m also a serialist, and so on, while telling all of them that I’m also an editor/publisher.

This con thing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The first two days, many people are still in transit or just arriving. We’ve been retiring relatively early in the day so far (around 6 Wednesday, just before 10 last night) in order to pace ourselves for the main event. So I feel like we have missed out on some of the real social culture of the convention, but I’m looking forward to rectifying that.

I’ve already had the pleasure of participating in a massive File 770 bar meetup, which allowed me to put faces (or at least name tags) to the names of some of my biggest boosters over the course of last year’s Puppy-related posts. Several people have approached me to tell me how much they enjoyed Sad Puppies Review Books or John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular, my takedown of Vox Day’s commercialized grudgewank he poorly disguised as a definitive guide to fighting “SJWs”.

My weirdly intimidating aura seems to be in full effect, though. Yesterday, Jack could barely get out of the building for all the people who suddenly wanted to talk to him or have him pass things along when he ran back to the hotel to grab something I forgot. I really wish I had a better way to signal that it’s cool to just come up and say howdy directly. I’m not the most sociable person but cons are a good context for practicing the arts of diplomancy.

The rumors that I’m Chuck Tingle also still seem to be in full effect, as people keep going on fishing expeditions with Jack. I really don’t get it, beyond he writes funny things and I write funny things. There’s quite a difference in styles. I think it’s like how people assume every parody song is by Weird Al? I don’t know. People are far less willing to talk about it to me directly, so I can’t really ask what they’re thinking. I just read about it in comment sections and message boards, and hear about it from my partner and friends who have been questioned.

Anyway, whether it’s direct or indirect, I have enjoyed hearing from so many people that they enjoyed my satirical works. It is really nice to know people have been thinking of me and talking about my work. I also appreciate being told I was on people’s nomination lists, and while I appreciate the sentiment, I do wish people would stop telling me I was robbed. I think I was probably a longshot in my first year of getting any buzz to begin with, and the idea that the Hugo is anyone’s to be stolen away in the first place is the kind of mindset that gives us Puppies. The Hugo belongs to the winners. It is an honor conferred, not the systematic result of a process one author can initiate for themselves.

And whether or not you make the shortlist, it is still an honor to be nominated. If Larry Correia had understood what an honor it was to be picked out of thousands to be one of the finalists for the Campbell Award, we wouldn’t have had Sad Puppies to begin with. Though if we didn’t have Sad Puppies, I wouldn’t have had my breakout year as a satirist.

(All that being said, if someone taps me on the shoulder or drops me a line to usher me to the Losers’ Party, I will be absolutely over the moon. But if not this year, I’m sure I’ll get there someday. No one is owed a Hugo, but I am a born loser.)

The Daily Report

August has proven to be a bad month for plans. Yesterday one item at the top of my list was to confirm my hotel reservation for WorldCon, after there were some shenanigans back in July with one of the convention hotels being still under construction and some other administrative screw-ups by the con itself. In the process, I found an email from Friday that got ignored as spam, saying that due to ongoing renovations at our hotel (not the one under construction!), we were being relocated to another one twice as far away. I think the reason it got filtered as spam was that there were several dozen other recipients CCed on it with whom I had never corresponded.

Yes. The hotel open CCed everybody affected, broadcasting our email addresses, situation, and the hotel we’re now staying at to a random assortment of strangers. It’s not too likely to result in anything bad, but that’s not really the point. It’s very distressing, and frustrating because it’s entirely the fault of the hotel/the person who sent the email, but there isn’t a remedy. The arrow cannot be called back to the bow.

Cue me dealing with the fallout of this, figuring out the logistics of two physically disabled people getting around downtown Kansas City, making fallback plans, talking to the staff at the hotels, and dealing with the shot of travel-related anxiety created by uncertainty and change.

After finding out as much as we can about the area (and realizing that I’d stayed in another hotel very close to it before, as a teenager), we did decide that the new hotel can work and we’re actually looking forward to staying in it. But it basically destroyed my work day.

I’m impressed with the staffer at the new hotel; less impressed with the one at the hotel that bounced us. It’s not so much the renovation thing. I do think it’s odd that they didn’t know they wouldn’t have enough rooms until less than two weeks before, but maybe something took longer than quoted and they were keeping their fingers crossed it would be done under the wire. I can roll with that kind of thing.

It’s the handling of it. It’s the mishandling of private, personal information. It’s the fact that the initial email on the subject contained multiple points misinformation that I’m not going to get into, but which the staffer at the new hotel had to immediately and very apologetically correct. She got left on the hook cleaning up a situation that was made messier than it needed to be.

Anyway. That was my day yesterday. Figuring out the logistics of downtown Kansas City and talking to hotel people about hotel things.

Considering the impact of WorldCon, I had already planned on putting Tales of MU on vacation for the two updates closest to it (the Friday I’m there and the Tuesday after I get back). The vagaries of the summer have already got it down to once a week for the end of July and August so far.

Given all this, I’m officially calling it a reduced schedule for August: once a week, irregular. I hate to do this so soon after establishing a regular update pattern (and it will mean less money, because of the Patreon model), but it’s better than burning out.

Financial Status

Not much to say here. September will be leaner than expected because of the reduction in Tales of MU output, though the continued growth of other revenue streams could help mitigate that.

State of the Me

Did not sleep well last night; combination of heat and anxiety.

Plans For Today

Going to be finalizing the judging of the stories for the first gender challenge, with an eye towards announcing the winners and posting the round-up today or tomorrow. Today is the plan, but lack of sleep may catch up with me towards the end of the day.

I wrenched my dominant arm something fierce today. Forearm is all twingy, hand is sore, and my shoulder (my bad one, which has the poor judgment to be attached to my best arm) is a little worse for wear. It’s painful and difficult to type, which makes me feel like I shouldn’t be doing it. My ability to write one-handed on a touch-screen is pretty good, but only with my right hand. Go figure.

I’ve been alternating between trying to take it easy and soothe my hurts, and cautiously working. At this point I think I’m just exacerbating it. I have posted on Patreon an update to my members-only serial story Making Out Like Bandits, written earlier in the week but never posted. Non-patrons can read the beginning for free. If you pledge, you gain immediate access to the rest of the story.

Despite being a very up and down week physically and not exactly hitting all of my career goals, it’s been surprisingly successful in most respects. I have not posted much, but I did top at over 9000 words of usable fiction.

The Daily Report

It turns out the new work/life balance is work/work balance, when you’re working multiple jobs. Right now the way I’m approaching it is I have three of them. I am the head editor of Ligature Works, I am new media author/personality Alexandra Erin, and I am the author of Tales of MU. Of the three, the middle one pays the most, followed by the last one, and then the third one is currently a net drain; it’s less a job I’m doing for money than a service I’m providing to the world. It’s an avocation, for now.

One of the things about time management is that just about any job can expand to fill the available hours, and as I’ve started working in earnest on Ligature Works’s editorialia (that’s a word; an editor said so) these past few days, I’ve discovered that’s a real risk. I think I’m going to start confining it to a day or two a week.

Financial Status

Doing okay? Some improvements to both cash flow and some improvements to how we approach budgeting made possible by the improvements to my cash flow are doing a lot to alleviate the tensions around money in our household.

The one thing I’m not sure about right now is our budget for WorldCon. I keep counting how many meals the two of us are going to need and looking at how much money is set aside from the fundraiser for that. Hopefully there will be some budget options in the area round the hotel and convention center. We met the bare minimum GoFundMe goal and a little bit past that, but if anyone wants to pitch in a little more to buy us dinner, it wouldn’t go amiss.

The State of the Me

I had one of those nights last night where I just couldn’t get to sleep. Combination of stomach upset and nerves (I think from the terrible dream I had the night before). I was still awake at a bit after three when I threw in the towel and decided to get up for a bit. I laid back down a bit after 4 and didn’t fall asleep until what I would guess is close to 5. I slept for 3-4 hours solidly after that, then another hour or so after briefly waking. I’m feeling fine now, but I have a feeling there’s going to be a major crash in the afternoon.

Plans For Today

Fiction, fiction, fiction. I spent most of last month stymied on my queer lady fantasy romance serial Making Out Like Bandits (a Patreon exclusive, though you can read the first bits for free), so I’m eager to progress that. I’m also trying out ideas for August’s short fiction entry.

The Daily Report

Well, it’s now August! Hugo voting ended yesterday. Jack and I were a bit late to the party with WorldCon memberships, so vetting the nominees and deciding how we would each vote took up time and energy right up to the deadline. That’s why we haven’t done much more than some initial slush-sorting for Ligature Works submissions, barring one “sorry, can’t take” and one “gotta have”. Now that we’re past that, though we’ll start responding to submissions in earnest.

This early in the window, there’s going to be more rejections going out than acceptances. That’s just the process. We have received in excess of 70 submissions so far. There are ones that are just wrong for us, then above that there are ones that are not the best of what we’ve received, and those one aren’t going to improve no matter how many more pieces we read, but even the ones that grab us might not prove to be the best by the end of the window.

Speaking of windows’ ends: the gender neutral writing challenge ended today. I kept meaning to put up more reminders so people who were working on stories over the longer term would know, but there was a lot of stuff going on and I didn’t have a lot of energy or focus. I received a request over the social mediums for a deadline extension, but that doesn’t really seem fair to the participants of the first gender-free challenge. Yes, I’m already planning the second one. It will be less off-the-cuff and cover a much longer period. Like 2017.

I figure if I make it a floating annual thing, that will make it easier for traditionally published stories to be considered, since they won’t have to try to hit a narrow target in terms of when they come out.

Financial Status

Well. It’s the first of the month. Payday! WorldCon 74 in Kansas City is likely to strain the budget a bit. I do have a nice little nest egg for it, but I suspect food and other miscellaneous expenses will run us up quite a bit.

The State of the Me

I’ve been so tired. Taking more rest has helped. I have a plan, a serious plan, for next July and August to be mostly a hiatus. It’s something I think of every summer when the hot months roll around and I remember how bad it is, but I’m not much on long-term planning so I don’t think of it until it’s too late, but I am currently mapping things out about a year in advance so it might work out well. Right now if I just declared summer break at the start of all my big plans, it’d all come crashing down. Next summer I should be well situated to take a couple of months of reflection after the end of my planned awesome year of awesome.

In the meantime, I guess I just have to step lightly from task to task and not take on too much at once.

Plans For Today

Well, where to start? I’m going to be meeting with my submissions editor (i.e., Jack) as we nail down howour routine for sorting, evaluating, and replying to Ligature Works submissions will work in practice. There’s also some writing to do.

The Daily Report

Yesterday was a bit disjointed, but I did accomplish two goals: wrote a piece of flash fiction, which I posted for my patrons, and wrote a new Sad Puppies Review Books. Both are things that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

My Patreon terms are flexible by design. I promise a minimum of one item each of several forms/genres. One of the items is flash fiction or poetry. I did this because I know I can’t write a poem every month. I’d like to. I really wanted to, this month. And so I kept sitting down and trying to do that, and not getting much of anywhere, and not doing anything with that time instead.

I think if I had taken the hint and written a flash piece the first time that happened, I would have likely had multiple flash pieces in the same time. And maybe even a poem, because creativity is funny that way. I’m not looking to lose any sleep over that, just reminding myself that there’s a reason the “or” is there in my checklist, and to pay attention next month.

The SPRB was blocked for a few reasons. One of them was that things that weren’t terribly funny and were more important than the alt-right’s entertainment media culture war. But I came to a realization last night that there’s not really a clean separation between this tempest in a teapot version of the culture war and the bigger one they’re waging outside it. The tempest is not contained within the teapot; the tempest envelops and includes the teapot.

At this point, there are only two remaining items on my checklist for the month. One of them is a big one: finish the zine version of last month’s output. The other isn’t: finish at least one new chapter/installment of my patrons-only serialized novel, Making Out Like Bandits.. The first one is just taking a lot of time because it’s a new thing I haven’t done before. Next month’s will be easier, because I’ll mainly be plugging stuff into a template. The second one is another thing I’ve been blocked on.

I actually started the next chapter of MOLB fairly early on in June, shortly after I put up the most recent one. But I got stuck on it, and I’ve been stuck on it. A little hung up on it, even. I think I’ve figured out my hang-up, though.

Financial Status

Again, I’d love to see more Patreon sign-ups before the end of the month. Since we broke a hundred pledges early on in the month, anyone that’s pledged when the month ticks over to August will be included in a drawing for my signed contributor copy of The Martian Wave 2016, which includes my Rhysling-nominated long poem “Observations From the Black-Ball Line Between Deimos and Callisto”, which may be my favorite of my poems. I believe the rights revert sometime in the fall, at which point I will put it up somewhere that more people can read it.

The State of the Me

I have been sleeping really poorly this week due to a series of misadventures with my phone. First malfunctioning earbuds meant that my sleep playlist was randomly interrupted by Google voice search telling me it couldn’t understand what I was saying. I replaced my earbuds, and the next night I kept getting pinged awake by submissions for Ligature Works. So I put my phone on Do Not Disturb last night, and somehow I turned on “Repeat 1”, which was distracting enough to rouse me a bit every time the track it was stuck on looped (it’s just under an hour long) but not wake me up completely enough to fix it.

None of this is quite as genuinely awful as an insomniac episode, and I tend to sleep a lot more shallowly in the summer anyway due to the heat. But it’s contributing to a low-grade general exhaustion that the heat and the humidity during the day don’t help.

Plans For Today

In terms of things with immediate results, I’m going to be working on Making Out Like Bandits.

The Daily Report

As the impending presidential election continues to consume more and more of my brain cycles, I find it useful to remind myself of the advice my father gives: always proceed as though the world is not going to end, just in case it doesn’t.

Even if the world does come crashing down around our ears in the aftermath of November, of course, Ligature Works is set to launch at the end of September. I’m moving forward on making it into a real thing. We’re now listed in Duotrope, the online writer’s marktplace/submissions manager thingy. It has also been submitted to the Submissions Grinder and we’ve sent a note to the SFPA website saying that we exist. Going places.

Financial Status

I would really love to see more growth on both my personal Patreon and the Tales of MU one before the end of the month.’

The State of the Me

Doing pretty good.

Plans For Today

Work, work, work. This is going to be a hectic week, but I think it’s going to turn into a good start for next month.

The Daily Report

Last week of the month, and I really need to hit this one out of the park. I need a week like my first week in June. I think I’m in a good position to have one.

This past weekend, Jack and I had a decadently life-affirming lunch with Renaissance woman C.S.E. Cooney and her mother. We talked books, movies, and what we’ve been up to lately. I talked up Ligature Works a bit, but as much as we talked about work stuff, most of the time was just catching up and hanging out, and weirdly, being able to sit there for 2-3 hours with another writer, a writer I greatly admire, and just talk might have been the biggest shot in the arm I’ve had since WisCon.

My family member in the hospital is still in the hospital, but likely to be discharged in the next few days.

Financial Status

Well, thanks to a very generous gift, we are now officially registered for WorldCon 75 in Helsinki. I’ll be looking at how my financial are lined up for actually getting us there after WorldCon 74. Nothing else much to report right now.

The State of the Me

I think I’m hitting my stride with this “summer” thing. Midafternoon nap and adequate hydration are really the keys.

Plans For Today

It’s a creative day. Last week’s aborted end means I’m a little ahead on Tales of MU for this week, so I’ve got that going for me.