The Daily Report
Okay. First, I started this morning with over 450 unread emails in my contact email address. I’m not sure at what point the dread of opening it became too much. In my mind, it’s been months. In reality, probably weeks, maybe a month at most. In my mind, most of it was people furious with me for not writing back or getting stuff done. In reality… most of it is automated notifications, ads, bulk email, et cetera.
What finally got me to look at it… and clear out about a quarter of the backlog, answering some very important work related emails in the process… was that I have had people getting in touch with me over my latest work of satire, John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular.
For those of you who only follow this blog for my own original work and are mystified about what I’ve got against John Scalzi: nothing. Believe it or not, he’s not the target of that title. Someone showed it to him last night and he thinks it’s hilarious. He has offered to perform a dramatic reading of it in exchange for donations to Con or Bust, an assistance fund for bringing diversity to fandom conventions.
Scalzi Is Not Popular is now the number 1 seller in multiple categories on Amazon, and in particular, number 2 in the category dominated by the source material that inspired it. To invoke an old family saying: so, I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
In the midst of all this and a little renewed attention on my equally off-the-cuff book about loss and grief that I wrote last year in the wake of Dorian’s death, I have been reminded of an important thing: as an author, I’m an experimenter at heart. I do best when I dare. And while depression sometimes makes me feel like I’m surrounded by the bones of my failures, all a failed experiment really signifies is that I wasn’t afraid to try.
That realization even more so than the positive attention this little booklet has garnered has done a lot to lift my spirits.
The State of the Me
Even though it’s still August and we’re still seeing very summery temperatures in the afternoons some days, today I realized that waking up early as I have been doing means I can open the windows for a bit without turning my office into a swamp. It’s very refreshing.
Plans For Today
It’s MU posting day. I’d hoped to be done with today’s chapter before today, but on top of the circus that’s been happening all around me, I had to close the office early yesterday because of external circumstances. That’s okay. I don’t have anything else that needs doing today. I’ve got a chance to get out of the office and still do some work in the afternoon if I want it, and I think under the current circumstances I might just do that. Time to get away.