The Daily Report

Today started out with unexpected technical hurdles. I woke up to see that there was a vulnerability with a recent version of WordPress, and so I signed into my sites to make sure they had automatically upgraded. They had, but there’s a glitch that WordPress can get from an automatic update that turns the log-in into a redirect loop, and the Tales of MU site had it. I’ve seen this before on my main blog, but the solution I employed here (rolling it back to a previous version) wasn’t an option, and it took me a while to find another fix.

Not a disaster, but not a great start to the day. Any time I have to unravel a technical problem, it knocks me clean out of the creative head space, so I’m a bit behind where I wanted to be, quite apart from the time I spent.

The State of the Me

Slept pretty well last night.

Plans For Today

Probably going to be messing around with random writing for most of the afternoon, to get back in gear before working on this week’s MU chapter at the end of the day.

The Daily Report

Pretty sure I mentioned this last week, but I just raised the prices on a bunch of my ebooks across the board. I want to go into my motives here. I look on everything I do as an experiment… even the parts of my schtick that work, could work better.

I tend to be a little squeamish and second-guessy when it comes to valuing my own work, but the way I see it, the prices on the e-books aren’t about what I think my work is worth or even what my readers think my work is worth, but about what’s going to catch The Crowd’s attention and convince them that it’s worth buying, which can come down to some counter-intuitive psychology. Basically, I’m looking for the exact intersection at which the most people are giving me the most money.

Anyway, I closed last week pretty well… had a real “back on the horse” moment where I went from struggling to get back into the swing of things to just swinging as effortlessly as ever. I know I confused at least one person by saying that I wasn’t at a very “dynamite” place in the story and then turning in the chapter I did. Well, that’s because after spending most of the day despairing over what I had to work with, I threw out what I was working on, came up with an entirely new and snappier direction, and wrote a brand new chapter in two hours.

That’s how it is sometimes. I spent two months trying and failing to do one thing while falling farther and farther behind, then decided to do something else and did it in two hours. Chalk up another mark in the “don’t keep trying to work with things that aren’t working” column.

Now I just have to keep it going. At the same time I posted on Friday, I changed the schedule tagline on the MU site to “Updates Fridays”. I’m planning on taking on a variation of my old four day writing cycle, but pegged to a weekly update schedule and with a day of slack built in. I’ll be talking more about this and the future of Tales of MU in later posts, probably this week. The short version is that I’m in the awkward position where Tales of MU brings in most of my money but doesn’t really “pay the bills” any more, and this state of affairs has been exacerbated by indecision about what to do about it… I have a hard time handling things in moderation, so trying to strike a balance where I’m giving MU *sufficient* energy without giving it all of my energy is tricky. But like I said, I’ll be working through that in more posts later on.

The State of the Me

I came into the weekend with a sleep deficit, and it was a busy weekend, and it was also as hot as a very hot weekend, so I’m feeling kind of beat today, hence starting this status post at 11 and posting it sometime after 12.

Plans For Today

Given my physical state, I’m dedicating today to brainstorming/creativity.

The State of the Me

I figured out last night that what I’m dealing with in my sinuses is mostly or entirely environmental… the back-and-forth nature of my recovery after I got over the actual sickness corresponded to the time I spent in my bedroom with the A/C on. We don’t have central air, so each room that needs it has a window unit, and mine was very badly in need of a filter cleaning. I figured this out when I spent most of the day feeling fine only to have my sinuses explode within an hour of laying down. I’ve been getting used to having to repeatedly clear my nostrils and throat when I first wake up, but I did not need to do so this morning. Positive sign!

We’ve been spending quite a bit of time at the hospital the past few days, which does take its toll in time and energy and routine. I didn’t sleep well at all this weekend, which is why even though I was awake before nine i’m not writing my status post until just after noon.

The Daily Report/Plans For Today

I’m feeling very reflective today. I’m going to write a post about something I’ve been thinking about, on the subject of mindfulness practices, or a mindfulness practice. After that, I’m going to be kind of looking at what’s on my table and doing some prioritizing, since we’re a week into the month and I’m feeling behind on everything.

While I was out Thursday afternoon getting my ID renewed/updated, we got a call that an older family member had gone to the emergency room following a fall. They’re out of the woods, but we just got back from the hospital. Everything is more or less okay, though they’ll be there for a few days and the recovery period is likely to be in the months.

Needless to say I got even less done today than I’d expected and I am wiped. No idea what tomorrow’s going to be like.

My decision to basically play triage with my throat has turned out pretty awesome.

This morning before I properly woke up, I was coughing so hard that I was a little worried that I’d been kidding myself that my cold was getting better and it had just migrated south. Then I realized my cough, as horrible as it was, was completely non-productive… my throat was just so irritated that the smallest things would set it off.

I had a good supply of lozenges and ginger candy already, because I made a point of stocking up on that stuff before WisCon… con crud or no con crud, a convention can be murder on your throat. But I also have this giant stockpile of mint tea that I started laying in back when I was mostly off of caffeine. When I started drinking soda again, it started to fall by the wayside and then when Dorian died and I re-arranged my entire office, I lost my tea station and never bothered to set it back up again.

But now after drinking hot liquids all morning, I’m back from my throat feels like someone’s taken a roto-rooter to it to feeling so normal I have to watch that I don’t overdo it with the talking. I have not needed any kind of cough medicine or even a lozenge since this morning.

But man… I forgot how good a good cup of green tea with mint makes me feel. What it does for my body and  brain. It’s like the perfect combination of the green tea’s mood boosting effect, the mint’s focus/creativity boosting effect, and the caffeine’s affect on dopamine… it’s like the thing that has been missing from my herbal supplementation these past several months.

The State of the Me

I’m at the stage of respiratory illness recovery where I feel completely great except for my throat, which is bearing the scars of the previous week’s drainage. So I’ll be doing great until something sets it off, and then I have a coughing fit that leaves it raw. Mint tea, crystallized ginger, and lozenges are the order of the day.

The Daily Report

It’s going to be a weird week, as my enthusiasm and energy conflict continuously butts up against the reality of my upper respiratory tract. Ah, well.

Case in point: I have a brand new microphone that I got shortly before I got sick the last time, and I’ve barely used it. Yesterday I was feeling so awesome I decided to try doing a test recording. That was a mistake. So, instead of trying to do anything big and bold, I’m easing back into creative writing after essentially two weeks without it.

Plans For Today

I’m declaring today a random write whatever day. Got to prime the pump.

Meeting people at WisCon is always interesting. There are people I know or have seen around online for years but only see in person every year or less. Prosopagnosia (face blindness) means that it doesn’t always penetrate when I have met someone before. Each year there’s a few people I have the mildly embarrassing experience of not quite remembering, but at least the WisCon crowd is pretty forgiving about that kind of thing.

This year was a little more interesting because I made a splash with something (my Sad Puppy Book Reviews) in the weeks immediately before the con, so it seemed like there were a lot more people who knew my name or had a touchstone for my work.

The main purpose of this message is to address the people who are looking me up after getting home. I had meant to put up something like this a lot sooner after the con, but… travel woes, then sickness.

First, let me say that if you just found about me and you want to know what else I do besides Puppy parodies and WisCon panels, I’ll direct you to my about page, which has some links to quite a bit of my work that’s available for free. The sidebar of this blog also has stuff you can buy. If you want to keep up with everything I do while also giving some support, I recommend my Patreon page.

Next, since you’re here, I should mention the benefit anthology Angels of the Meanwhile, which contains works by many notable past and present members of the WisCon community. This project exists to benefit Elizabeth R. McClellan (aka @popelizbet), who is both the main reason I’m still writing and the only reason I started going to WisCon.

She suffered a serious injury in the course of avoiding an auto accident earlier this year, and the expenses and complications from that have spiraled. I have put together a collection of donated poetry and prose, some brand new and some previously published, from writers who are close to her or connected to a community she belongs to.

The only way to get this multiformat, DRM-free e-book, is to pre-order now by sending Lizbet a PayPal contribution in any amount you deem fair. All proceeds go directly to her, helping her out in a time of need.

And she does need help.

The initial response was good, and the caliber of talent involved is great, but… we really need more attention for this project in the next few days, and more pre-orders. I can’t help feeling like I am failing my dear firend here. Despite being successfully self-published, I’m actually not that great a promoter or networker. I’m shy, I don’t like to make waves or feel like I’m annoying people.

So please, check out Angels‘ amazing Table of Contents, make a contribution of any amount, share the link, and encourage others to do the same. We need more eyes on it.

I’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming up in the relatively near future, though an exact timeline is going to depend a bit on my health, so I’m not going to go into specifics just yet. For the next few days at least, this blog will probably be full of WisCon recaps/reflections/post-mortems.

The State of the Me

Late yesterday, I began to exhibit symptoms of having picked up a case of the creeping con crud. This is the first time in a couple of years I have succumbed to such. The “good news” in all this is that since we were all sick here so shortly before the con, we already have some supplies on hand. The bad news is that I’m already in worse shape than I was during my previous bout, when I was hit less hard than anyone else in our family circle… and even that was enough to knock me on my back for a while.

The Daily Report

I went ahead and did a Sad Puppy Book Review this morning. I’m not sure it’ll be anybody’s favorite unless they’re familiar with the specific bit of Puppy-based criticism it’s parodying, but meh. It was necessary to get my hand back in after more than a week away from it. A short review that mostly spins off one particular line of criticism is about all I can manage right now, to be honest.

Plans For Today

I’m basically up and about right now so I can make sure that I eat actual food and drink something. After I’m done with lunch, I’m going to go lay back down. I might try to do some writing from bed later on.

Okay, so… still feeling better and trending upwards, but I was tired enough to fall asleep a couple of times this afternoon, and pretty logy in between. Not a terribly productive day, in short. I received a package of emergency cold and sinus stuff I ordered on Monday when my symptoms first presented. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

The Daily Report

So, the day before yesterday, John Scalzi tweeted a link to my first SPBR post. Yesterday, Wil Wheaton put it on his Tumblr. A number of other mid-to-high profile authors have also noticed them. It’s amazing. I am terribly grateful. I hope that the eyes being sent my way might result in more attention to my fiction writing, or more participants in the  Angels of the Meanwhile pre-order, but even if the only result is a lot more people reading my satirical reviews, that is in itself a blessing.

The unavoidable side effect of that blessing is that this blog, which I mainly meant as a place to house my personal thoughts, has been getting enough traffic to destabilize the server that also houses Tales of MU, which is the majority of my livelihood. Now, for the love of all that’s holy and a few things that aren’t, please nobody read this and then decide not to share the reviews or worse, lambaste the people who are circulating them. For an indie writer, this is a good problem to have. It is perhaps one of the best problems to have. Please, if you enjoy the reviews, share them. Tweet, tumbl, pin, digg, redd, thorbl, or skrop them to your heart’s content.

I’ve upped the resources that the host allocates for my use a couple of times, which also increases my hosting costs. To offset that, I’ve added some monetization to my site. The Amazon links in the sidebar are now affiliate links, and I’ve started linking to the books mentioned in the reviews. Yes, that “Rules For Radicals” book that right-wing reactionaries are sure we all have memorized is a real book, and it’s on Amazon.

It’s pretty subtle right now… just links, now “BUY NOW” buttons or widgets or anything like that. Things could keep snowballing from here, or they could die down. If they keep snowballing, I’ll have to make this site pay for itself… that will probably involve more explicitly tying it into my patreon more so than intrusive marketing.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. I woke up really early this morning, though.

Plans For Today

Well, the past couple days have sort of been taken up by the unexpected success of the reviews. Today I’m planning on focusing on writing fiction… or at least, less meta-textual fiction. Tales of MU will be updated today, but very possibly it will be in the wee hours again, depending on server stats.