The Daily Report

So, my bedroom is still drying/airing out. This has implications for my ability to keep my office ventilated. Monday and part of Tuesday I was trying to work in my office anyway, but without the ability to use the adjoining room to cool it down this is probably the hottest room in the house, given its exposure.  It’s tolerable in the early morning, but starts to get uncomfortable around 10 (my start time) and uninhabitable in the afternoon.

That’s why things have been a bit catch-as-catch-can this week. I’ve worked in the downstairs office when it’s available, with my laptop at the kitchen table, and even sitting in an empty bathtub.

The last of which I have to say is surprisingly comfortable. I mean, I like to be reclining a bit when I work and the tub is already perfectly pitched. The room is already fairly cool and cooling it further is much more energy efficient compared to the larger and more exposed rooms. The tray I use for books and drinks can support my lapdesk and laptop. Plus, the bath has always been one of my favorite places to write or brainstorm. The only downside is that it feels a bit silly, but I have yet to notice any particular material benefit to avoiding silliness.

The State of the Me

Sleeping in a different place makes my sleep different. It’s taking me much longer to fall asleep than has been the case for a while, but I suspect I’m sleeping muuuuch deeper than I have been lately because I’m remembering a lot more dreams and waking up feeling more refreshed on less total sleep.

Plans For Today

Today is a write, write, write day. I have the opportunity to get out of the house today much like I did last Friday and I’m going to take advantage of it.

The Daily Report

Good news, bad news time!

The good news is that I have discovered exactly why I seem to have been having intermittent upper respiratory problems/the killer allergy season from heck at the end of July through all of August. It relates to a frozen-over A/C dumping water on the floor, and an unfortunate floor slope that caused it all to pool out of sight before it could be noticed.

The bad news is that my bedroom is, for the time being, unlivable.

That’s a small thing, considering. I still have a place to work during the day and a place to sleep at night. That it’s not *my* place might have some impact on my sleep, but it’s too soon to say how much. In any event, the situation is temporary. I’m taking the opportunity to give my bedroom the kind of deep cleaning and serious reorganizing it hasn’t had since I moved in, and the move on was so hectic and disorganized due to the circumstances of the house that it’s basically been a glorified store room that I sleep in the corner of. That probably played into how I didn’t notice the growing mustiness before, as I was only going in there when I was ready to fall asleep.

Right now, we’re letting things dry and air out. There’s not much else to do. Once the room no longer smells like wet things, I’m going to treat the floor and get on with the cleaning described above. Not sure what the timeframe on that is, but it is likely to cut into my work days during it.

The State of the Me

Feeling better after spending a night breathing a better quality of air, but bit tired due to getting less sleep and the physical activity yesterday in doing the initial clean-up.

Plans For Today

Not sure,because of the immediately above.

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.

The Daily Report

So, call this another day that didn’t begin quite the way I expected. I’ve been waking up early each morning and finding something to blog about to occupy myself and warm up before I actually start writing. Today I noticed that Rabid Puppy leader Vox Day had released a book he’s been promising for some time with the charmingly rhetorical title of “SJWs Always Lie”.

(Vox Day never lies, of course. He only speaks rhetorically.)

Well, I had to see it for my own eyes. I’d say I wasn’t disappointed, but I actually was. It was worse than I thought, not in the sense of being any more blatantly offensive or out of touch with reality, but in the sense that he didn’t even deliver the book he’d described. It’s far more concerned with re-hashing old sleights and old hurts. The chapter that’s supposed to be the tentpole chapter, outlining his premise of the “Three Laws of SJW” (hint: they always lie) is devoted to his bizarre recurring conspiracy motif about how author John Scalzi supposedly inflates his web traffic statistics, which is important to social justice or anything else because reasons.

He got one thing right, though: SJWs always double-down. Having spent 35 minutes of my life that I will never get back reading Vox Day’s magnum opus, I proceeded to spend the next few hours bringing to life the only possible response:

Yes, it’s Theophilus Pratt’s important new tract, John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels. It should be available on Amazon later today. I maintain that of all the books with “SJWs Always Lie” in their title that were published today, it is the clear victor.

For one thing, Vox Day’s book only contains two Chapter 5s. Mr. Pratts boasts three, an increase of 50% over the next leading competitor.

Not how I intended to start my day, but there you go.

The State of the Me

It’s getting easier and easier to get up in the morning. I’ll say that much.

Plans For The Day

Man, I’m not even sure, really… all this Puppy stuff is just so increasingly surreal. Next week I might just have to put it all on block for a while.

The Daily Report

One great thing about all the Hugo-related attention right now is that it reminded me that I had started a John Z. Upjohn novel before circumstances and sickness laid me low. I’ll be continuing that next week. I’m working on it now, but I want to get a little ahead of the game before I get too far ahead of myself.

In the spirit of not spending another day alternately overwhelmed by the volume of response and fending off Puppies repeating the same propaganda lines, I’m turning off notifications on multiple sites for a bit.

The State of the Me

Things continue to trend well. I’m having a bit of an emotional rollercoaster effect today and yesterday, and I’m definitely feeling the valleys a bit more acutely than the peaks. Like a case of the blahs, interrupted at intervals. Emotional state weird, but manageable overall. Physically good.

Plans For Today

Bowing to the strangeness of the day, I’m making no specific plans except that this afternoon I’m going to do the major writing for my new draft of the next Tales of MU chapter. Between now and then, I’ll work on what lets me maintain a kind of level, as it allows me to do so.

…but after a lot of soul-searching, and looking at my own past trends, and thinking about what works and what doesn’t, I’ve decided that next summer, I’m just going to take an official break from Tales of MU. Whether we have another record heatwave or not, whether I have another year of terrible allergies and summer colds or not… well, there’s a reason hardly anyone spends the whole year writing the same story without a break, year after year. It wears you down.

I keep recognizing this. I keep saying I need to build actual breaks into my schedule. I keep not actually holding to it.

History tells me that summer’s going to be messy. Next year I’m just avoiding the mess. The length and details of the break are something I’ll have to figure out then, but it’s going to happen.

Personal Note

I haven’t said anything about it because it happened during a time when I wasn’t really blogging or saying anything very personal in public places, but a friend of mine from a close-knit internet circle passed away the weekend before last. It was sudden, it was unexpected, and the circumstances of it hit me and Jack both pretty hard. She was a member of the community where Jack and I first met. The day I found out about it was the first day that my recent illness was really in bull bloom, and I have to say that the two things didn’t help each other.

This weekend, we met some of our other friends from the group for a memorial brunch. It was the first time many of us had met each other. Sad circumstances, happy occasion. It did provide something like a bit of closure. I suspect writing about it, even in this oblique fashion, will also help.

This is what I mean when I say that last week was one of the worst of my life, though the end result of it all may be that I bounce back from what was already a growing period of silence, self-censorship, and ennui.

Let the doing of things commence.

The Daily Report

Day one of digging myself out from under the pile. I’ve got a lot to do, and it’s time to set priorities. Priority number one: rebuild what I lost of Angels of the Meanwhile. I have failed to keep a self-imposed deadline. It is important to remember that this is not the same thing as failing to accomplish the task, unless I let that missed benchmark overwhelm me.

At the same time, it is necessary to build and keep up momentum on my writing, particularly with Tales of MU, but I also need to keep the creative juices flowing more generally. For a while I had really good luck with setting some time aside on Mondays for truly random writing. This gave me short stories, longer stories, and poetry.  There’s still a week for me to enter the SFPA’s poetry contest for this year. While I do have a couple of pieces I could send in, I don’t have anything I feel is really suitable for it. Maybe I can come up with something?

The State of the Me

My sleep was really mixed last night, but I woke up at 8 in the morning today feeling awake. I got up and had breakfast, and was here starting this post at 10 on the dot. It’s a good start.

Plans For Today

I’m going to alternate creative and other work.

First thing I do after this, I’m going to make a long overdue update post about Angels of the Meanwhile.

Then, some random writing.

Then, some e-book formating.

Then, I’m going to work on Tales of MU. As I often do when I have a chapter that’s just not working, I’m going to try starting over from the beginning and going a different direction. Even if what I have is fundamentally workable, I’m just in a very different headspace than when I started it.

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve been having a better day today than I have all week, and for some time before that. I’m looking back at the end of it at this point, though. I didn’t want to make too many plans in the morning because I didn’t want to overestimate myself, or undersell myself. That post I made yesterday was definitely a turning point. My improving physical health definitely helps (seriously, so sick of coughing). The intense rains yesterday also lowered the humidity a bunch and the temperature a bit for today.

The main reason I didn’t status post this morning is I wanted to see how I would do on getting a MU chapter up today, but didn’t want to make a prediction. Because I was starting from literally nothing.

I probably should have called it as “no”. It’s not that I’ve never written a decent thing in a single day, it’s that I can’t ever count on it, and even if I can do decent-in-a-day, I can improve decent if I sleep on it.

I just have this crushing awareness of how haphazard the posting schedule has been lately that makes me want to push on, kludge something together, and post it. But I’m never happy when I do that, and my thought right now is: I would rather be unhappy about posting nothing than be unhappy with what I’ve posted.

I don’t feel great that the day after I’m like, “I’m back, baby!”, I’m also like, “…I’ve got nothing in the tank.” But wallowing in guilt over it’s not going to help me next week.

The State of the Me

My latest summer cold has been getting better for three or four days, but “better” is relative. I have still had a few coughing jags today, but they are a lot fewer and farther between, and my throat feels pretty dang close to normal when I’m not coughing, which is a brand new thing. Last night I had the first really good night of sleep since I started getting sick, and probably a bit before that.

The Daily Report

Apologies to John Z. Upjohn and his readers for the lack of a new Liberty chapter on Wednesday, but I was busily backing up hard drives in preparation for the Windows 10 launch, which as I mentioned has gone fairly smoothly for me.

I mentioned “internet hiccups” in my update post yesterday, and it turns out it wasn’t a coincidence of timing, but neither was it anything terribly dire. My new computer came with a wireless networking card built-in, something I had never noticed before because my office nook is way too far away from the cable hook-up to get decent wifi reception, so I have a USB repeater cable that goes out into the hall, twines around the banister, and then dangles down to where the signal’s clear.

Windows 8 made that the default network adapter as soon as it detected it. After the upgrade, it was trying to use the on-board adapter. I figured that out just before going to bed last night. I couldn’t figure out how to change that, so I disabled the card. This morning things are working fine.

I’ve probably been a little overly cautious about doing stuff on my computer while it does things like copying a backup or installing the update (which even comes with a cheery—by Microsoft standards, anyway—invitation to keep using your computer while it’s working), but the computers I grew up with were a bit more touchy and temperamental. The few things that hadn’t backed up to the cloud before my previous computer bit it have made me a little jumpy.

The State of the Me

Doing good.

Plans For Today

It’s possible I might have a family tech support call to take today, though it’s supposed to just be a quick drop-off of a thing I can hopefully take care of over the weekend. Supposed to be. That’s a bit of a wild card. Given that it’s Friday and thus posting day with that in the mix, I’m not making any other plans beyond tying together the chapter and putting it up.

Sorry for the blog being dark the past few days. I’ve been working on getting both my laptop and my desktop from Windows 8 to Windows 10, and working on stuff on my phone while they download and set up. It’s been pretty smooth so far, though there have been some odd internet hiccups that might well be a coincidence of timing. Everything else seems to be noticeably faster, which I wasn’t really expecting. I’m definitely liking it better than 8.