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I've not been very active here lately
Oct. 12th, 2023 11:31 ambecause I've been incredibly busy the last few weeks. Thor Daily relaunched at its new home last week, which took a lot of work to get set up, both in moving it over from Substack to my website, and the general housekeeping that goes into setting up a daily newsletter. I've wrestled with setting up a tip jar for it, but I think I'm going to wait until it's better established and has a more solid following to do that, and then set it up when I'm ready to move it to its own custom domain instead of a subdomain of my website. Doing that is going to take some extra cash, so a tip jar would be a good use for that, I think. I also still need to move the reading list over to the Thor Daily part of the site, which is a lot of work I need to find time for, since it involves not only mucking about with plugins and uploading about a dozen spreadsheets, but updating the spreadsheets as well. Which I don't think I've done since February. So much fell off my priority list in March it's not even funny.
We also had a houseguest over last weekend, and that always exhausts me to my core. I only got back on track with anything yesterday, because I spent all of Monday and Tuesday in bed reading. Now this weekend I may or may not be going to visit my uncle, but he hasn't got back to me so idk what that situation is. I haven't had many opportunities to get down there this year, because we're all old and have been riddled with doctor's appointments that conflict with one another. This weekend is the last weekend we had available before the show later this month, which I'll still be going down there for, but we wanted to have a visit that was just a visit and not for any other purpose. His wife and I like to go see shows together, and this time it's Eddie Izzard, which is no doubt going to be a lot of fun, and a large part of why I bought my new camera.
On top of this, I've also been writing more, which I've not been able to do at all this year. This has been much less about time, and has been more about mental block. I'm someone who, under typical conditions, don't usually believe in "writer's block." I think what most people refer to as writer's block is almost always a fear of bad writing. Under normal, non-stress conditions. Nearly getting murdered in your own apartment? That is something else entirely, and led to me not being able to make a single word happen for months. I couldn't fucking focus on anything, and it became clear that nothing I did would make it better, so I didn't even try for ages. But suddenly, I want to write again. And it's been working. So any time I have that bug up my ass to get words down, I drop whatever I'm doing and get the ideas down. Even if they're terrible and don't make sense, because bad writing is better than no writing. Mostly, my main newsletter has been focusing on republishing older fic while I work on new stuff, just so I don't totally overwhelm myself, and over there I've made the decision to totally lock everything out just so I don't get overly anxious for no damn reason again. On top of that, I've decided that some fics aren't even going to be announced in the newsletter at all, so if you're into the really weird stuff, you're going to have to keep an eye on the fic site for anything you might be interested in. I'll only be giving out passwords to people who have a history of interaction though, because giving it out to totally random strangers seems like a good way to go right back to the situation that caused me to lock everything down in the first place.
I'm still aiming for a December release for Malapropism as well, though that's still nebulous and may change. I have a release date pencilled into my calendar, but I'm not going to say it out loud yet until I know I can actually make it. Especially since I feel like I may wind up pushing the release into next year, with some of the changes I've been making in the early draft. Over the weekend, we were laughing about facecasting it, which genuinely may actually help me with some of the bits I've been stuck on. I'm not going to share those decisions we made, even though they are all perfect, because I think it would colour the characters in the story a bit too much. Either way, I intend to post a preview of the first chapter to my main newsletter at some point, and I'll let you all know when that happens.
We also had a houseguest over last weekend, and that always exhausts me to my core. I only got back on track with anything yesterday, because I spent all of Monday and Tuesday in bed reading. Now this weekend I may or may not be going to visit my uncle, but he hasn't got back to me so idk what that situation is. I haven't had many opportunities to get down there this year, because we're all old and have been riddled with doctor's appointments that conflict with one another. This weekend is the last weekend we had available before the show later this month, which I'll still be going down there for, but we wanted to have a visit that was just a visit and not for any other purpose. His wife and I like to go see shows together, and this time it's Eddie Izzard, which is no doubt going to be a lot of fun, and a large part of why I bought my new camera.
On top of this, I've also been writing more, which I've not been able to do at all this year. This has been much less about time, and has been more about mental block. I'm someone who, under typical conditions, don't usually believe in "writer's block." I think what most people refer to as writer's block is almost always a fear of bad writing. Under normal, non-stress conditions. Nearly getting murdered in your own apartment? That is something else entirely, and led to me not being able to make a single word happen for months. I couldn't fucking focus on anything, and it became clear that nothing I did would make it better, so I didn't even try for ages. But suddenly, I want to write again. And it's been working. So any time I have that bug up my ass to get words down, I drop whatever I'm doing and get the ideas down. Even if they're terrible and don't make sense, because bad writing is better than no writing. Mostly, my main newsletter has been focusing on republishing older fic while I work on new stuff, just so I don't totally overwhelm myself, and over there I've made the decision to totally lock everything out just so I don't get overly anxious for no damn reason again. On top of that, I've decided that some fics aren't even going to be announced in the newsletter at all, so if you're into the really weird stuff, you're going to have to keep an eye on the fic site for anything you might be interested in. I'll only be giving out passwords to people who have a history of interaction though, because giving it out to totally random strangers seems like a good way to go right back to the situation that caused me to lock everything down in the first place.
I'm still aiming for a December release for Malapropism as well, though that's still nebulous and may change. I have a release date pencilled into my calendar, but I'm not going to say it out loud yet until I know I can actually make it. Especially since I feel like I may wind up pushing the release into next year, with some of the changes I've been making in the early draft. Over the weekend, we were laughing about facecasting it, which genuinely may actually help me with some of the bits I've been stuck on. I'm not going to share those decisions we made, even though they are all perfect, because I think it would colour the characters in the story a bit too much. Either way, I intend to post a preview of the first chapter to my main newsletter at some point, and I'll let you all know when that happens.
