Weekly Accountability
Hi, everyone! It’s that time again! Weekly updates delivered every Saturday! Actually on a Saturday!
Completed Projects
None! (It’s the first week of January and it’s been… a week. Already.)
Goal Updates
- 0%/Finish Kel section of essays of DOOM
- 2/14 books
Writing Updates
lolno (see below)
Life And Other Such Important Matters
CW: pet illness, discussions of pet euthanasia
January actually started off on a positive note for me in that I have a (temporary but largely full-time) job to go to! YAY! The downside is it the commute is a total of 3 hours back and forth, so it’s more like a 12 hour day and I’ve had to spend the week trying to adjust to that and that just takes me a while, so this first week was largely a bust. I managed to read two shorter things and… that is is it. I’m writing this today wanting to curl up back in bed and sleep. For the entire day. Next week will be better because now that it’s weekend I’ll have actual time to work out how to make the hours work without overtaxing myself. And because it’s temp work on a flex basis, I can actually just leave whenever. (This is useful because it’s work that definitely requires you to be awake and able to pay attention.) It’s really interesting, though, and not one I can say too much about because it deals with people’s private details. Beyond just having trouble adjusting to the workday, though — and, ngl, I feel like the main reason I need adjusting is because COVID means I can’t get any dinner on the go, so I get home after what is effectively a 12-hour intense day and still need to sort food — I’m really enjoying it. Also, yes, it is the kind of work that absolutely cannot be done from home. It’s… very surreal if I pause to let myself think of it. The trains I take should be packed full with people because rush-hour and they’re virtually empty. People largely wear their masks properly. The social distancing is harder because you’re all moving through small aisles and, frankly, while there have been plenty of changes to make travel as safe as possible, “Give people more time to get on/off so they can keep their distance” was not one of those changes. Presumably it’s because I’ve seen, at most, five people exit or enter a rush-hour train in one go. It just feels strange.
And then the day before yesterday we took Twi to the vet and got confirmation that her ear is infected and, well, the world is what is it in general. Twi, you may recall, is my remaining elderly kitty. She’s going on 19 this year and she already had a health condition. They are now doing the thing where they make each other worse. According to the vet, we’re not at the threshold of “Consider what is best for her” yet, but I want to have that discussion sooner rather than later given the likelihood that these conditions don’t play nice together and… yeah. I was a ball of useless this week. I may be a ball of useless next week too. I just want this cat to have as much quality life as I can give her for as long as I can, that’s all.
In… somewhat brighter news. I have two awesome covers for short story collections made by the Amazing Sarah from The Illustrated Page Book Design, that I’m really looking forward to sharing with you all when the actual collections are ready and I can start thinking about promo. One is the collection of (almost) all the shorts I’ve been posting monthly since I started Patreon, so this year in lieu of a yearly collection of pieces, patrons will be getting an ebook copy of that when it’s all done and finished. (I have one story left to write that’s exclusive to the collection and I can dive into formatting etc, so I’m aiming to have it ready for patrons by February and out and available in general by the end of March.) The other is for a collection that… I need to write from scratch first. Well, rewrite from very old drafts the ideas of which are worth salvaging even if little else is anyway. So that one will be a while yet, I’m afraid. And then I have a third cover for the Covenant stories I’ve been sharing last year and aimed to have a collection of published, er, already, but wow cosy fiction is hard to write when your life is a trashfire. Who knew. That one’s my own design and I finalised it… last weekend? Very recently anyway. So at least the cover for it is all done and ready. It just needs something like 5-7 more stories to go with it.
So. You know. We’re making slow progress and this year may see more than one release. Gasp! (If I get really well-organised and find a way to handle the part where I just want to fall asleep foreever, I may actually finish a novel on top of all of that!)
Stand-out Positive Moment
[points at temp job] Definitely that.
How about you? What have you been up to lately? Has anything awesome happened? (Please say yes. I would love some good news.)