The State of the Me

Still sick. I have made the decision to make a status post every day even if that’s the most substantial thing that I do, as I’ve been terrible at keeping up this habit lately even when I’m feeling fine. I feel somewhat better today than I did yesterday.

The Daily Report

Well, having spent most of the past two days lying on top of my blankets or occasionally lying in a bathtub staring straight ahead, I’ve spent a lot of time missing the days when I had a phone with a physical keyboard I could hold in my hands and write comfortably in that kind of position. Swiping feels clumsy, slow, and inelegant to me at the best of times. When I have serious fatigue and muscle soreness, it’s also exhausting compared to the practiced, precise finger movements needed for physical keys.

I have a wireless handheld keyboard/mouse controller thing that is the perfect size and shape for this kind of exercise, but I have no way of viewing a screen while I’m laying down. I’ve thought many times about various solutions, like a projector pointed at the ceiling, but that seems like an expensive experiment with uncertain results.

Then late yesterday I realized that I have been doing most of my writing on ILYS.com anyway, where the whole point is to not look at what you’re typing. It wasn’t until today that I had the wherewithal to get things set up, but I now have my wireless keyboard hooked up to my laptop. I can start a session in ILYS, then put the laptop aside, lay back, and tap out words as my energy level allows and the muse moves me to.

Because of the slightly greater disconnect between me and the medium, the text is not as clean as my typical first drafts, even using ILYS. But at least I’m writing.

Note that you don’t need a specific applet to not see what you’re typing if you’re lying down and not looking at the screen, but the advantage of ILYS for this purpose is that it’s impossible to accidentally move the cursor or whatever.

The State of the Me

is that I may be coming down with something. The rest of my household and the local extended family has previously been stricken with an upper respiratory thing, and today I woke up with a clogged sinus and nostril and a sore throat. I should have been suspicious when I was sore and headachey all weekend, as that almost always precedes the display of symptoms for me, but I figured that was psychosomatic as I knew everybody else was sick. I also attributed it to dehydration, because the weather’s been warmer. On the plus side, I’m sure all the water I’ve been drinking was a good idea regardless.

The Daily Report

Another possibly early warning symptom is that I wrote the wrong chapter at the end of last week. I completely screwed up some chronology and the chapter I had intended to post on Friday would have been a continuity-breaking mess, which I didn’t put together until I was looking at it in the wee hours of Friday night. I took a couple of stabs at trying to fix it so I could post it with just minor reworkings, but couldn’t make it work. The good news is that I can still use most of its contents later.  The bad news is this means I’ve pretty much got to start from scratch in how to get there.

…okay, I started this post around 11:30 and then decided I needed to lay down. Two hours later, I have woke up feeling just completely ruined: mind foggy, head stuffy, body just full of old concrete. I’m going to lay back down after I finish typing this paragraph. No prediction on the rest of the day, much less the rest of the week. I do have more Sad Puppy Book Review posts queued up for the rest of the week here.

The Daily Report

Last year, I finally gave up on what had previously been my main criteria in a cell phone: a physical keyboard. As a result, I got a newer and spiffier phone than I’ve ever had before, and one of the things I noticed when playing around with it was that it made for a far better recording device than the headsets or built-in mics I’d used before.

I quickly tried to make use of this with a few small, side projects that I used as incentives for miscellaneous crowdfunding, but I started to run into a snag pretty early on that has just gotten worse: while it performed flawlessly in my initial tests, it seemed like the more I tried to rely on it, the more it would tend to skip and distort the recording at odd moments.

The problem has only been getting more pronounced. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s really affected my Tales of MU worldbuilding podcasts, which were supposed to be a quick and easy thing that would answer some reader demand and then move on from. Because I can’t tell when and where it skips until I play it back, I often have to throw out entire takes as unusable.

Well, the good news is that I don’t have to wrestle with this anymore. Through an act of reader generosity, I now have a decent USB condenser microphone. I’ve been testing it this early afternoon, figuring out things like optimal distance and speaking volume. I haven’t quite worked out how the accompany mic stand is supposed to work, as there are no instructions for its assembly/deployment and I’m a bit reluctant to just force it. I’ll probably look for any demo videos/reviews on YouTube after this that might show it in action.

This is going to be a huge deal in getting more worldbuilding podcasts up, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a number of things I started last summer when it seemed like my phone was going to be a serviceable recording solution which I left off in the middle due to frustration (and then forgot about the frustration and committed to doing the worldbuilding podcasts).

So, in the near future, expect more of the MU podcasts. In the slightly beyond that future, expect more filk, satirical relaxation tracks, et cetera.

The State of the Me

Doing well. In addition to the gift of a microphone and webcam, I also was gifted some art supplies  and vitamin supplements yesterday. In addition to the practical value of these gifts, it just makes me feel good about myself that people cared enough to do this.

Plans For Today

Man, you have no idea how much I want to say “play around with microphone”, but I have a bunch of writing I need to do.

The Daily Report

Yesterday had a good start, but a weird finish. I just hit a wall in the afternoon and shut down. Too much bad news, too much danger to people I care about.

That aside, things are still generally looking up. I’m on a much more financially secure footing than I’m used to. I’ve just converted a lot of monthly subscription expenses to annual ones, which is both so much cheaper and so much easier to keep track of.

My first major publishing project, Angels of the Meanwhile, started as something I threw together in a hurry to help a friend in need but it has turned into something incredible, both in terms of the content and the caliber of contributors and the support and attention it’s been garnering. Seriously, this is an awesome book, and… I think I’ve got the bug. I have an idea for a more… sedately paced… anthology I’d like to do once the smoke has settled and the dust has cleared on this, as a commercial project. But that’s getting ahead of things.

Today I had a call for submissions for flash stories about weird plants pointed out to me. I don’t have anything on deck for it yet, but I’ve certainly done my share of flash fiction about dangerous and menacing plants. In fact, just glancing at Fantasy In Miniature to refresh myself on what ideas I’ve already worked over, I’ve realized I have no less than three flash stories about forests menacing mankind.  My favorite weird plant story, though, is this one.

The State of the Me

One thing I’ve been doing differently here is trying to get outside of the house more. Since spring first sprang, we’ve been taking a walk around the neighborhood every day that the weather allows. I’ve also been making a point to get out and do things outside the house more often, with people. I think both of these things have been helping a lot.

Plans For Today

I’m going to be focusing on Tales of MU in the afternoon.

The Daily Report

My watchword (watchphrase?) for the day is “Make the most of it.” Fittingly, I woke up this morning and wrote 2,200 words on a project I’ve had burbling in the background that I’m probably going to be announcing sometime this summer… this depends on more external factors, which is why I haven’t been talking about it. It’s hard to imagine a better start to the day than that

Only about half of what I wrote is actually usable prose. The rest is basically brainstorming to get the character’s voice and some details of her life and the world-building down, but that’s still useful.

Still, though, even if that half had wound up being pure garbage… man, there is some serious utility in not being afraid to sit down and write some garbage. The fear of writing garbage is what keeps us from writing anything.

I’m going to be pushing Angels of the Meanwhile pretty heavily from here on out. We’ve extended things another month, in part because of the very exciting new additions to the table of contents (including Ellen Kushner!). Reserve your copy for $1, $5, whatever price you want. A nautical ton of brilliant poetry and prose, all to benefit a good cause.

The State of the Me

Had a busy, tiring weekend that I was still bouncing back from yesterday. Feeling much better today.

Plans For Today

As I said: “make the most of it”. I’ve already written on the new upcoming project. Today I’m also going to be writing on 50 Grades, and of course Tales of MU.

The Daily Report

Today’s top story is: I have a new blog.

After a long period of depression and creative doldrums, I am feeling revitalized, and I’ve been taking stock about what works in my life and what doesn’t. A lot of what doesn’t is stuff I’ve held onto because it’s been there forever, not because it was useful or necessary.

Livejournal was kind of a foundational element in the fields of both blogging and social media, and so at the outset, it was the blogging site with the best social media presence/integration. That’s why I started Tales of MU there, and why I did most of my blogging there for so many years. But it hasn’t been true for a long time. And the person I was when I started on Livejournal… well, I wouldn’t disown her. But maybe I have outgrown her.

So, here we are.

You might notice there are some snazzy features I’ve enabled on this blog that aren’t yet present on the Tales of MU site, also powered by WordPress. Things like liking posts, commenting through Facebook, and better integrated social media sharing. I’m going to use this site as a test bed of sorts for these things, before deciding whether to enable them over there, rather than messing with my primary source of income.

The State of the Me

I had a lower back pain last night that kept me up until the wee hours, hence a slow start today. I slept well enough once I was comfortable enough to lay down. I’ve been sleeping fairly well in general lately.

Plans For Today

I’m going to be focusing on this blog throughout most of the day, including making some infrastructure improvements and customizations. I also have what you might call a backlog of thoughts to get out, and some general informational posts I know I will need to make. So, my focus is going to be pretty strongly over here until the late afternoon, when I’ll switch to fiction.