Rant Rant Rave

Gotta Run, Gotta Dance

This morning’s walk was sunny, and full of other dogs–thankfully all leashed, and all moving away from us. Boxnoggin is slowly coming to the realization that he doesn’t get what he wants when he lunges to the end of the leash and sings The Song of His People to strange dogs.

Slowly. It hasn’t fully sunk in yet, but I have hope.

It was also highly fragrant. Most of the fir pollen has been washed out of the air, so it’s not difficult to breathe anymore. The dogwoods are blooming, the gallery of chestnut trees smells like pipe tobacco, the lilacs have come out in force, and dandelions with their bitter greenness have reappeared. In the park behind the elementary school, English daisies are going great guns, some with that pink halo to their petals.

It irks me to be upping my running mileage so slowly, but pushing it will only lead to injury. I’ll run for longer if I slow down now. Boxnoggin didn’t come with me today, because I’m staggering his runs–training him will go even more slowly than retraining myself. I’ll risk my own health, but not his.

A five-book series appeared in my head over the weekend, and wouldn’t go away until I’d written down the skeleton. Ideas are cheap and easy, you can find them in every junk drawer. They crowd the air like dust, or like that fir pollen collecting in golden drifts. What’s rare is the time and effort spent to bring them to fruition. So I might not ever write this series, but it’s there, and accreting. I’ve gone so far as to pick out a couple songs for the book soundtrack, but that’s more in the nature of procrastination than real work.

Also, copyedits for The Poison Prince have landed, so there’s that to look at. I suppose “vomiting from stress and running through the house screaming” isn’t a good way to handle ongoing work, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m awful tempted.

Another paid Haggard Feathers post drops today, about how to deal with burnout. Last month was Marketing March, this month is Self-Care April. I’m not quite sure what to do for May yet. Of course, not every month needs a theme. I could just hop around and do what seems juicy on any given week.

Today’s office jam is Portugal. The Man’s Feel It Still. Super kicky and catchy, and if I don’t listen to the lyrics I can bounce around the office without guilt. Dancing represses the urge to stress-vomit, at least while I’m moving. You’d think the running would work off all the stress chemicals, but these are extraordinary times we’re living in and I’d probably have to do a couple marathons to get it all out of my system, right before dropping dead at the finish line. Which, while it might be amusing, is not how I want to go out.

So it’s tea and deep breathing, maybe a few rounds with Latin to sharpen my brain (such as it is), and a to-do list, because otherwise nothing will get done today.

What a week, and it’s only Tuesday. I hope you’re well, chickadees, and that you and your loved ones remain that way.

Over and out.

Brooding, Adapting

I’m spending Monday mornings getting subscription and Haggard Feathers stuff ready for the week–mostly just editing and scheduling, since I’m trying to work so far ahead.

The “far ahead” part isn’t working, but the “work” part is definitely happening. So much so I feel like I’m running in circles with my hair afire, but even more than usual.

Miss B’s health isn’t doing so good. She is an elderly statesdog by now, and has very definite ideas about what Should and Shouldn’t Happen. Which isn’t a problem, gods know everything in this damn house has an opinion and never hesitates to voice it, including inanimate objects. (You guys should hear Shirley the Penguin bitch. Fishbreath and Fury, that’s her.) But her eyesight is going, she’s cranky, and there’s some arthritis going on too. Each new sign of her bodily systems slipping is, I suspect, more upsetting to me than her.

She’s a Zen creature of the Now, my dog, but I am looking forward to the moment I lose her and it’s not a comfortable thought. I always expected to lose Odd Trundles; every day with him was a gift. Every day with B is a likewise gift, though there’s a bitter undercurrent now that I realize just how little time we might have left. It’s going to devastate me when she has to go.

Cheerful thoughts on a Monday, huh? I know the world is on fire, I’ve adapted to Stay At Home and Wear Masks in Public, but what I’m really brooding about is my dog’s health and how wrenching it will be when she’s too tired and has to go.

I could be selfish, of course. I could focus on extending time, completely disregarding quality-of-life. But that would be a betrayal, even though she wouldn’t blame me.

Sometimes I hate being the one in charge. It means I can arrange things to suit myself, mostly, but the price is steep. Some days, it’s nothing but the price.

At least I have the gift of knowing. Meaning I can focus on making the end of her time with us, however long that takes, as comfortable as possible. She’s more than earned it. I suppose when it comes Boxnoggin will be the most inconsolable, since I suspect he’s managed to forget there was ever anything other than our chez, our family, and the playmate who chose him out of all the other dogs at the shelter. He’s going to need a lot of cuddling when it happens, and go figure, I will too.

But until then, life continues as usual, only with a few small additions for Miss B’s comfort. And I never miss a chance to tell either dog how good, how beautiful, how wonderful they are.

I’m bracing for the inevitable in more ways than one. And, to top it all off, it’s a Monday.

The world keeps on turning, like the moving finger on the wall. Best to take a deep breath and focus on what must be done now. Brooding over the future, while a fun party game and necessary in some amounts, threatens to vapor-lock me today.

Head down, machete out, boots on. Onward and upward. And all that.

Perception, Proportion

I may have wildly overestimated my ability to keep up with the firehose of bad news.

Of course, I am ambitious when it comes to seeing how much punishment I can absorb, a habit left over from childhood when it became a point of pride to disassociate during bad events so I wouldn’t cry or give any sign of weakness.

It’s only taken me decades to realize this is perhaps just the slightest, the very tiniest bit unhealthy.

Anyway, I spent yesterday getting the week’s subscription stuff edited and scheduled, as well as hopping out to the grocer’s. I made it between two waves–retail and food service taught me the magic of “dead times”–and was pleased that most people were wearing snotcatchers (i.e., masks) but not so pleased at the visible signs that most of them also considered the worst to be past.

It’s not. Even I can tell as much. I’m not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but I am possessed of a professional imagination, and predicting is somewhat of a hobby. Of course, every human being is somewhat of an expert in predicting human behavior–we do it all day, every day, and our survival depends upon it. The trick is to trust your own perceptions while simultaneously checking them against trusted external sources for a sense of proportion.

So here I am on a Tuesday, feeling pummeled even though I’ve barely been out of bed for two hours. At least there’s coffee. Both dogs are all but prancing with eagerness to get out the door. I should spend some time deciding the next Quarantine Edition–Jozzie & Sugar Belle is pay-what-you-want until tomorrow; after that, it’ll probably be something else.

On the bright side, that leaves most of the day for actual wordcount. I just want to crawl into a book and forget everything going on outside my four walls. Anxiety is eating the energy I desperately need to get Season Three of HOOD and The Bloody Throne out. I’m trying to moonlight with a trunk novel and The Black God’s Heart, but making books jealous by working on other books requires the wherewithal to work in the first place.

I also have to stop reading The Body Keeps the Score until things calm down a little. There’s a whole lot of useful in that book, but underlining bits that resonate on almost every page is bringing up a whole lot of things I don’t have the bandwidth to process or think about right now. I should probably shift back to The Sailor From Gibraltar even though the narrator is a complete asshole1, because piercing nostalgia is better than quivering from remembered disaster.

So. Today at 11am the latest Haggard Feathers will drop; last month we talked about marketing, this month we’re talking about self-care. We’ve covered physical and emotional self-care, this week we’re talking about what burnout is, and next week we’ll go over strategies to ameliorate said burnout.

Regular readers will notice I’m blogging less; I have a few more balls in the air than I used to and the global situation has robbed me of a lot of the energy that went into the usual Daily Grind schedule. Right now I only have the spoons for Tuesday-Thursday updates; Haggard Feathers and the fiction subscriptions are eating up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday’s energy quota. If we ever get back to non-apocalyptic times, I’ll be back on my bullshit pronto.

It feels weird not to be blogging all the time. Peering back through the archives, I can see I’ve been at this for years. It’s a lot of content, and a lot of history. Reading some posts from years ago reminds me of things that didn’t make it into the daily updates, and sometimes those are pleasant. Other times… not so much.

I wish you a serene Tuesday, my chickadees. Remember to be gentle with yourself so you can be gentle with others–at least, the others who warrant it. I’m just ill-tempered enough today to bite back when That Fucking Guy shows up on my feeds.

I don’t know who made this, but I love it and use it all the time.

Off I go to walk a pair of Very Excited Dogs. See you in a few, dear ones.

Staying Calm, Carrying On

I dropped the Princess off at work this morning (of course, since she works for a large service corporation, sick leave isn’t an option, GO ‘MURICA) and decided to do the usual weekly grocery shopping. It wasn’t until I actually got to the store that I realized…

…well, I’m beginning to think we’re doomed. At least, a certain slice of America is.

I did my best to stay six feet away from everyone else. The store was doing its best by allowing people through the door in five-person groups. Unfortunately the herd was fear-crazed and rampaging. Elderly white people were doing their level best to run me over and breathe in my face. The younger people I saw were all attempting, like me, to allow everyone space and wait turns.

Every single person who cut in line, attempted to breathe on me, hip-checked and barged past me, or who was being nasty to a grocery worker was white and over 60. I am absolutely not joking. It was horrifying to see, and I hope I never witness anything like it ever again.

Unfortunately, I suspect that hope is vain indeed. It was like those videos of young people determined to Spring Break on Florida beaches yesterday, a display of selfishness almost unequalled in my experience.

Almost.

I did my best to slow everything around me down, and moved at a snail’s pace. And of course the writer in me was taking notes; all things serve the work. I’m shaking now that I’m safely home, but I wonder how many of the people absolutely determined to be assholes this morning were already carrying COVID-19 and spreading it with abandon in order to get their aloe vera juice and complain at top, spittle-laced volume about the store being out of flour.

Normally we’re pretty well stocked here at the Chez, so I might have skipped the regular weekly trip to the grocers if I’d known it was going to be like this. But once I was there, I figured going through was better than leaving, and since my online groups and IRL neighbors have all been so amazing I trusted naively that everyone involved would be a reasonable adult.

I’ve been wrong before in my life, though seldom to this degree. May the gods have mercy upon us, because white Americans (of any age) seemingly won’t.

Now I’ve got to take the dogs for a walk and do my best to avoid other people during that, too. I knocked off 200 pages’ worth of revisions yesterday; there’s another 280 left in this epic fantasy. Either I’m going down, or this book is.

At least I can work at home. Silver linings, and all that.

Please be kind to each other out there, folks. I’m sorry this is happening; hopefully we can all work together to at least not make it worse.

Welcome to Chez Quarantine

Well. This all seems… rather difficult, doesn’t it.

Chez Saintcrow is in quarantine, at least as far as we can be with one of us working retail. The Princess’s job is pretty important in the current situation–after all, people have to eat. And plenty of big corporations aren’t doing the right thing by their workers because it might impact profits, forsooth. Certain governmental parties beholden to corporations instead of constituents are allowing–nay, even encouraging–such behavior.

Simply put, it’s a mess.

The entire household was stricken by an unusual illness over the past week. I can’t tell if it’s a very bad spring cold (sort of unusual for us), a type of flu the vaccine and earlier flu this season didn’t give immunity for (extremely unusual), or the current plague (the timeline fits, but the symptoms are slightly different in each of us).

Sure would be nice to have some tests available to know for sure, wouldn’t it.

In the meantime we’re quarantining as much as possible. The worst thing about it isn’t being immured in the house–that part’s damn near a vacation–but the idea that we might be carriers so I can’t be of service elsewhere. A lot of people are scared and I long to help, but I can’t take the risk of infecting anyone, no matter what this bug is.

On the bright side, the Princess has a day or so off. Fluids, rest, and yet more rest are called for. We’re lucky none of us have developed deeper symptoms; a single trip to the ER would wipe us out.

Small mercies.

I spent a restless night, but none of the nightmares were of the type I could turn into books or even short stories. For some reason, that felt like the final insult. I can’t even make a damn story out of it; I don’t like it. Not one bit.

Anyway, I’m considering what in my Gumroad store I could make free or pay-what-you-want to give people something to read during all this, and though I intended to take next week off (since Season Two of HOOD is a wrap and the book is up for preorder) I’ll be dropping fiction for all my subscribers anyway.

I can’t do much, but at least I can tell stories and try to spread a little joy.

The dogs need walking, and maybe if I get out the door early enough nobody will attempt to stop us and chat me up. Some people in the neighborhood (there’s always a few) don’t care that one visibly wants to be left alone or that we need to flatten the curve.

All my social media and other feeds are full of people offering support, checking in on the vulnerable, making arrangements, and pulling together. It’s a glorious thing; I just wish the situation didn’t have to be so dire before we all, well, did it. But I’ll take where I can get. As Mr Rogers always said, look for the helpers.

Time to get the dogs buckled in. It’s sunny, so the bees will be out. They don’t care about all this; they’ll probably try to crawl into my hair and nose just as usual.

It’s nice to know some things will stay the same.

It’s Tuesday, which means a new paid-subscriber Haggard Feathers post! This month is Marketing March, and today’s post is on newsletters–deceptively simple, but not easy. It’ll drop at 11am PST, so be ready!

Off My Glass Menagerie

Lock, Rain Drop, After Rain, Drops
© | Dreamstime Stock Photos

It might be time to retreat to a cave for a while. The world’s on fire, and the stress is very bad this month for other reasons. It takes a concerted mental effort to keep repeating “this is just a professional change and could indeed work out very well in the long run” while most of me is running in circles screaming, hair afire and pants smoldering. (Or is it pants afire and hair smoldering? Either way, it’s not comfortable.)

So I’ve been eating ice cream, crying (sometimes from stress, sometimes from sheer rage, other times because I might explode otherwise) and dumping out reams of a vampire pr0n trunk novel loosely based on Eugene Onegin. (At least, the story starts near Onegin… but then it gets weird.) It’s probably the healthiest response given the size and scope of the problem, but Lord if it doesn’t make me feel a bit like I’ve gone off my glass menagerie.

Not that I was ever very secure upon that perch, indeed. We’re all mad in publishing.

Anyway, it’s a sunny Thursday morning. I had the windows open a bit to change out the air in the house, and the dogs are very interested in the prospect of walkies. Boxnoggin suspects there might be a run later, too, and that excites him. We’re upping our frequency but not our duration or intensity, and I’ll go far more slowly, push much less, when he’s trotting alongside me. I’ll shove myself right over the edge and into meltdown, certainly, but I wouldn’t dream of asking that of him.

Dogs. They save us without even trying to.

Today I have decided I must absolutely get back into the swing on the paying projects. The trunk novel will have to wait. I can even use it to make the paying concerns jealous, so to speak. I seek solace in work far more than is probably healthy, but it’s served to keep food on the table so I suppose I can’t complain.

So, my chickadees, I’m off to the races. (Or the walkies, and the gentle run with a bouncy, fuzzy primo uomo, as the case may be.) Be kind to yourselves, please. If your March is anything like mine, we both need a little tenderness.

Today’s subscription day, and there’ll be the open thread over at Haggard Feathers. Ah, Thursdays–never a dull moment.

Cosmic Two by Four

Spring tree flowers
© Starush | Dreamstime Stock Photos

March promises to be a stressful month. Even the tarot cards are in on the action, and to top it all off, the to-do list involves Leaving the House when really I want to be stress-procrastinating with a trunk novel.

And watching the final duet from Eugene Onegin on repeat, because apparently something in it is scratching the Muse hard enough to draw blood. I kind of want Eugene to go off to the wars and come back to find Gremin dead and Tatiana free.

…I am a hopeless, hopeless romantic. There, my secret is out. It’s known.

I suppose one can’t survive in this industry without being one. The eternal Gatsby-esque optimism of “maybe that’s Daisy calling now” can pick one up off the floor numerous times, bruised and battered but still smiling.

Of course, sheer spite works better for me. You think I can’t do this? Well, to hell with you, I’m going to SHOW I can. Spite takes over when optimism fails.

The optimism is nice while it lasts, though. It’s a gentler fuel than spite, and I like it better.

I have a run scheduled today to burn off the cortisol and other stress hormones. Boxnoggin will be more than happy to accommodate, I suspect; he’s prancing around my office trying to interest Miss B in a morning game of grab-n-growl. Miss B is having very little of it, but of course that’s part of the game, too.

So. The Leap Year is over, spring is here, things are changing. I’m in the position of having to activate some parts of my personal support net, which is anxiety-making. I feel great giving help, but asking for it so fraught because I was raised and trained to serve others, not to worry about things like my own needs. Maybe I can get through this by reminding myself it’s good therapy, and that my support net is full of people who will be thrilled to be of help the way I am when they reach out.

It’s selfish of me to keep the good feeling of helping someone else solely for my own gratification. And, true to form, the Universe is applying that lesson with a cosmic 2×4.

I know it’s the only way it’ll get through my thick skull, so I can’t blame the teacher. But still, ow.

Anyway, hang on to your tights, my friends. Things do seem to be moving and shaking this spring.

Over and out.