Weekend Report

Saturday went better than expected. I managed a (slow) walk in the heat of the day, which was no small feat given that it's August in June around these parts. I'm having some issues with lack of appetite that concern me, at it's often a bad sign, and there's still some limb weakness as well, but, overall, the day was good.

Still steroid free.

When I stop falling asleep in the afternoon, I'll be convinced the worst is over. That almost happened today, but then I zonked out against my will. Don't worry, the toddler did a cannonball into my stomach and woke me up.

The writing has been hard again. I had three stories, all pretty much at the mid-point and I had to drop everything in May as I was too sick to work. Coming back to the murky middle of three stories has sucked.

One I worked on for a while, got irritated and called it done. About the best I can say is the story structure is in place (i.e. beginning, middle, end), but it will need a lot of editing and plot hole fixing. About 60% done.

The second, I think is going better. I just finished condensing the story elements and now just need to finish the end. It will still require edits, but the more cosmetic ones, not heavy structural edits. It's more like 80% done.

The third should be easy peasy. But no, it's not. It's been giving me fits. That one is like -500% not done. And it's pissing me off because it's a good story that shouldn't be that hard to finish.

On the up side, I have multiple five star reviews on a short I released before I got sick. From people I don't know. (This is kind of remarkable because it's more common to get either no reviews or bad ones than anyone saying anything nice.) People really like that story and let me just take a moment to say 'neener-neener' to the anthology that passed on it.

Is it selling any books? No, of course not, that would be too easy. But any time I don't think I can write, I go back and look at all those five star reviews from complete strangers who have no obligation to say the nice things they are saying.

And then I go beat my head against the three stories in process some more. If it stays this hard, I'll be scrapping them all and just start something completely new. It's not like I don't have ideas.