The Daily Report

So, last night my first Teespring attempt ended only halfway to the tipping point. I had an inkling when I jumped in that a Catullus joke would be a bit too “niche” to fill a pre-order, but part of doing it was getting over the fear of failure. I feel bad for the people who wanted one… I’ll probably re-do the campaign down the line when I have a better idea of how to promote it, and in particular when I have the money to order one for myself (one step closer to the goal line!)

It was a learning experience, though. I’ve got my second shirt up. It’s still niche, but a much broader niche:

You can get it in on it at http://www.teespring.com/criticalhit. The campaign runs through the next three weeks.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. Still feeling a bit of the doldrums.

Plans For Today

Today I plan on posting a chapter of Tales of MU, as part of transitioning towards a Wednesday posting schedule. It’s a bit early to say if it’ll work out. I have some good material, not a lot of momentum.

The Daily Report

I’m in a bit of an awkward spot right now, insofar that my writing is paying off more… in a way that doesn’t pay off as frequently or immediately. The recent surge and (so far, sustained) upswing in book sales prompted largely by the visibility of my parody book “John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author” is going to make the next few months, at least, more comfortable and less tense, but right now I am dead broke and running out of the pills that keep my body and brain chugging along without complaint.

So if you’ve been enjoying what I do—whether it’s blogging, writing, or twittering about—and you’d like to help keep me dancing for your amusement without interruption, this would be a great time to leave something in the tip jar or send any of the OTC supplements in my Amazon wishlist (they’re listed in order of current priority). I have been rationing my dopamine boosters lately to try to avoid a hard crash, but that can only take me so far. Already it’s getting harder and harder to get going in the day. I’m getting lots of small stuff done, but the big stuff is still pretty daunting.

The State of the Me

Looming crisis aside, doing okay.

Plans For Today

Well, it’s noon thirty and I’m still kind of pulling myself together for the day? I’m going to have lunch and then go cloister myself away to see what I can make happen.

The Daily Report

Today events are taking me out of the office for a good chunk of the day. I’m doing some random writing in the morning. Today’s Thing of the Day might go up a bit later than usual, it’s hard to say.

The State of the Me

Did some extra walking yesterday because it was such a nice day for it, and I had a ton of nervous energy. I’m feeling pretty amazing. The walking is not the only factor… I wouldn’t have started if I wasn’t feeling good… but there’s definitely a virtuous cycle at work.

Plans For Today

See above!

The Daily Report

Okay, the start of a new week. I’m going to lay out some goals:

1. Every day this week, post a Thing of the Day (a piece of creative writing such as a flash ficlet, short story, or poem). I have more than five things sitting in my folder, so I can do this irrespective of other goals.
2.  Every day this week, write a Thing of the Day, so I can keep up the pace. Some Things of some Days will be better than others, obviously, and the day might come when I write two or three short things, not all of which are winners. The key here is to keep writing and keep publishing.
3. Finish the next chapter of MU and post it Thursday.

I have some other, less structured side goals. These are the main things I’m holding myself to specifically this week.

The State of the Me

Had a fairly horrific nightmare last night, didn’t sleep very well before or after it. My caffeine schedule was off all day Sunday, I think that contributed.

Today is one of my favorite kinds of days: cool and gray but not actually wet. It’s the kind of day that’s great for opening every window in the house, and the kind of day that’s great for walking around outside.

This past weekend, I upgraded my walk from my usual paper-thin ballet flats to a sturdy pair of sneakers, because my normal footwear is definitely not made for walking 2-3 miles in a day and doing so was starting to wear on both my feet and my shoes.

Now, the reason I prefer shoes that border on the insubstantial is related to the reason that my favorite exercise is walking at a steady pace: a chronic fatigue condition that makes my muscles use energy at an extremely inefficient rate. So switching to heavier shoes is easier on my feet, but harder on my legs and overall energy level. While I was up to a three mile walk with the slippers, I’ve had to start my conditioning over again with the sneakers. Frustrating from a mobility/independence point of view, but better from a health/safety point of view.

Plans For Today

I think Monday works really well as a low-pressure, free-form kind of day, so I’m going to keep with that.

The Daily Report

So, today I moved a little bit closer to my “morning commute” concept by taking my walk in the morning, if not exactly during the hour before my scheduled start time. The more I do this, the less energy/attention it takes to walk and the more my mind can wander, which is really useful. I used to do a lot of my creative recharging/planning/brainstorming during the long walks I *had* to take for work.

I mentioned I’m moving towards a “thing of the day” creative model, where every day I post a thing. Once a week, most weeks, that’s going to be a Tales of MU chapter. It might also be poems, short stories, flash ficlets, whatever. I’ve also been trying a thing with my partner Jack where we use a random plot idea generator and write a flash story together around it. Our goal is to do this once a week. We’ve got two of them so far. Starting next week, I’ll be posting them among my Things of the Day, probably on Friday.

My last remaining mental obstacle on getting Angels of the Meanwhile put to bed and sent out was the thought that my own e-book formatting skills are too meager for anything but my own butchered wares. I’m going to say, in the past week or so I’ve seen a couple of other e-book offerings where absolutely no care was taken in converting them, to the point that there are broken links, missing page breaks, etc. Like nobody even double-checked that the set-up still worked across platforms, just fired it off into the void and called it good.

I’m better than that. I might not be the best, but I’m not the worst, and I’m good enough. This is a thought to hold onto as I go into next week.

The State of the Me

The walking thing gets easier and easier. Each day by the time I got home my lower back was hurting. Today, nope. I’m a little surprised I haven’t exhausted myself, but I guess I’ve been rigorous enough in my occasional exercise bike use and pacing around the backyard that I’m not completely out of shape.

Plans For Today

Got a MU chapter coming up as the Thing of the Day.

The Daily Report

Everything is going super awesome for me, except for one thing: the back of my brain is still super sold on the idea of Friday as posting day. I spent a lot of yesterday fighting to get the creative gears engaged, took a walk, blew some steam off on Twitter, moved around the house… and still couldn’t get out of the “mostly brainstorming TOMU” frame of mind. Just wasn’t happening.

After a super productive Monday and Tuesday, I got very little done yesterday (except for the walk, which was nice). Today I’ve had a bit more luck, but it’s not coming together into a finished chapter for me. So, I think I’m going to need to shift things around progressively. This week, I’ll post on Friday. Next week, I’ll aim for Thursday. Week after that, Wednesday.

Everything else is seriously super great for me, mentally and emotionally. I think it’s just a matter of having stressed so much out over the idea of Friday posting (while being unable to actually do it many weeks) that trying to turn the train around is harder than I imagined.

The State of the Me

Remember when I mentioned I took a walk yesterday? Well, the day before I had a slightly shorter walk as part of an errand. I walked about five minutes out and five minutes back. The next day, when I realized I was stuck, I took another walk, about twice the length… ten minutes out, ten minutes back. Today, I walked twenty minutes out and twenty minutes back. I made it about a mile out, as the Google Map flies, which puts my average speed at about 3 miles per hour.

When I worked outside the house, I actually used to walk to or from work quite a bit, a distance that was between five miles and eight miles, depending on where I worked at the time. Having this kind of endurance/range made a huge difference for me as someone who doesn’t drive, in terms of being independent and self-reliant.

I stopped walking so much when I wound up working from home, and then even less when I moved to a part of town that I knew less. Then I moved to Hagerstown, which I know even *less* and which I’ve never walked around. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve only gone to a store by myself twice… at least, not counting the small plaza across the street from the apartment we were in during the years I was bouncing back and forth.

I have two goals here. One is to get in good enough shape and town-knowledge that it’s not a big deal for me to pop out for an hour or two on my own from time to time. The other is to get so used to walking that I can incorporate it into my workday as part of a daily pre-work “commute”. My ideal is that every day I’ll go out of the house, walk for half an hour, then walk back. This will give me an hour to myself, away from the internet and alone with my thoughts, and a clear start point for my day. This was something that came up at last year’s WisCon, I think in a panel about self-employment (if that wasn’t the major topic, it was at least an ad hoc theme), and that I have yet to fully put into practice because I haven’t been comfortable enough walking around.

Plans For Today

I’ve been working on Tales of MU. I’m going to post a thing here in a bit. I’m working myself up to the idea of posting A Thing A Day. It won’t always be a long or meaningful thing like it was Tuesday, but it’ll always be a thing.

The Daily Report

Well, yesterday I said I’d be posting a short-short story, but I wound up unexpectedly finishing my 4k story “Walk Briskly” and posted that instead. I feel like it’s a good example of what I meant when I was talking about creative sorcery, as it was basically conceived and written in 24 hours. One of the comments on it said that it’s my best yet, and at least in terms of standalone short stories, I’m inclined to agree.

For a while, I’ve been thinking about getting into Teespring in order to bring out some new and gently refurbished t-shirt designs, as their pre-order model seems to allow for better pricing than true print-on-demand concerns. On a whim this past weekend I threw up my first design, something for the dirty-minded classicist that reads “Free The Catullus 16” on the front and has the opening line of the referenced poem on the back. You can see it at http://teespring.com/freecatullus.

First couple of days, I nabbed one order a day, which is the exact minimum rate of orders that would be needed for them to actually take the shirt live at the end of the campaign. It seems to have caught fire overnight, as there were three more orders between yesterday and today, putting us halfway there. If anybody’s been looking at it thinking that they might get on it but it seems like a long shot getting it to print, the odds are looking better and better. Note that this is zero-risk, as the orders only go through if the remaining necessary five shirts are ordered.

Assuming a positive experience with this, I’ll be putting out some other t-shirt designs… actually, even if this one somehow doesn’t make it to the finish line, I still probably will. Most of my other ideas either appeal to my existing fandom or just have a broader appeal than an infamous Latin poem.

The State of the Me

Feeling good. Feeling super good. Last few days have brought some much-needed perspective.

Plans For Today

Well, as of right now, I’m pretty solidly on track for getting my first Wednesday post up. I’m going to keep focusing on that in the afternoon.

The Daily Report

So, in the past couple days I’ve been blogging about what I might broadly call purpose and process and the purpose of process. I mentioned on Sunday how Friday had evolved into being the worst day for me to try to get anything important done, but I’d left it on my schedule as the capstone of my workweek.

On the other end of the week, Monday’s become the day where I am completely alone most of the day, giving me a muuuuuuch needed “recharge time” when I can float around the house without inhibition. Yesterday I came up with a new story and wrote 3,500 words of it, and also straightened my head out on a couple of important points.

Monday might seem like the logical day to pick as the day to Do All The Things, but I think it’s far more useful as a day to be a sort of day to clear my head and figure out what I’m doing with the rest of the week. I think taking it as a guilt-free “do whatever” day is likely to make the rest of the week that much better. And “do whatever” sometimes translates into “do nothing”, but sometimes my attempts to do something wind up doing whatever… and sometimes “do whatever” means exciting new story and the best writing day in a long time.

I still don’t have my actual schedule ironed out. I’m still mostly aiming at Wednesday for the main MU posting day.

The State of the Me

Feeling pretty good. It’s cool enough here, at least at night and in the morning, that I can sleep deeply and then enjoy fresh air and hot tea in the morning.

Plans For Today

Still figuring stuff out. I’m going to post a complete (albeit very short) story in the afternoon, for your entertainment and edification. I’m not sure if I’ll be doing it here, at my flash site, or on my Patreon feed, but it’ll at least be linked from here.

Okay, so, honesty time: the Friday update schedule was not a good idea.

It was a pretty decent idea when I <em>had</em> it, but my situation has changed and I have not acknowledged that. Friday is the one day of the week when everyone in the house is <em>in the house</em>. Monday through Thursday, Jack and Sarah both get out of the house and go to work. On Friday, they have the day off and telecommute, respectively. I have gotten used to working in a full house before, but it wasn’t ideal… and it’s hard to set a routine for something that only happens once a week, at the end of the week.

There haven’t been a lot of “ideal weeks” lately and there aren’t likely to be in the near future. Rather than trying to set a schedule arbitrarily, I’m going to be trying a couple of different things out and seeing what works. My first experiment is going to be with Wednesday updates.

This is not the only work/process-related revelation I’ve come to recently. I aim to be a lot more active at work in the coming week then I have been, and I’ll be talking more about them.

The Daily Report

Okay, so… the moisture situation in my bedroom is resolving itself pretty well. I think the airing-out process might be completed this weekend. I’m hoping so, because as previously described, it is making it hard to use my office. This is not as big a deal the rest of the week as it is Friday, as on Friday everybody in the house is home during the day.

On that note, Tales of MU is going to be coming up late tonight rather than early evening. I’ve had a hard time resolving a central conflict about the chapter, and the heat’s not helping. I thought getting out of the house for a bit would help, and it did… insofar as it gave me the idea to wait until the sun goes down and things cool off rather than beating my head against the wall of frustration.

The State of the Me

Sleep continues to be weird but decent?

Miscellaneous Plans For The Near Future

Again, the moisture problem seems to be mostly gone. This weekend I’m going to start a deep clean process on my bedroom, taking advantage of the fact that I’m not currently living in it in order to whip it into a shape it hasn’t ever been in the whole time I’ve been living here. The circumstances of the house when I moved in meant that I had to basically cram everything I own into a single room, and while things have improved, my actual living/sleeping space never fully recovered from never having a chance to be put in any kind of proper order. That definitely contributed to not noticing the A/C leak sooner than I did, and can’t have been doing wonders for my psychological health.

Since I have another place to sleep and a reason to deep-clean the bedroom, I’m basically going to take the chance to give myself a “do-over” on the move on.

I doubt I’ll get it done during a single weekend, even if I’m able to close the windows and run the A/C again, but it’s not going to be taking over my life since I don’t have a deadline. It might be something I spend some time on during the week as a “needed to walk away from the computer and think for a bit” thing.