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

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.

The (Non)Burning Table

Awake early, but not up then. I set an extra alarm about an hour before get-up time, because I need that hour. I crave the quiet, the solitude, the darkness. When I don’t have that soft, internally focused time, the anxiety mounts daily until I hit the edge of burnout, bare nerves sparking like uninsulated wires.

Now I’m up. I even did the dishes while waiting for the coffee to finish–and I’m already one up on yesterday, because I remembered to put the ground coffee in the Bialetti.

Small mercies.

I need to have a chat with the child who has taken responsibility for cleaning the kitchen, who seems to think I won’t notice if the “cleaning” consists of filling the dishwasher with the least number of bulkiest pans possible and then leaving the rest piled in the sink and on the stove because “it won’t fit.”1 I mean, props for figuring out a way to partially escape the chore, but that’s not how this should be done.

I suppose I’ve put off having that chat for so long because I was beaten as a child if I didn’t clean the kitchen “properly”, including (at intervals best described as “random, and you must be a mind reader to discern them at all”) wrapping a rag around a butterknife to clean carved grooves on the legs and on the border of the dining room table. As you might guess, there are FEELINGS involved with kitchen duty, and I need to be in a place where I’m dealing with what’s actually happening instead of responses to what happened decades ago before I embark on discussing the issue with the young person in question.

…and now I’m thinking about how satisfying it was to “deal with” that table. Before I broke off contact with childhood abusers, they held a “garage sale”, and I ended up taking the table. Guess what I did with it.

Go on, guess.

If you guessed “beat the shit out of it with a hammer, took all the bolts and hardware for scattering alongside a highway, and let it be dumped” you’d be quite right, my friend. My only regret is that I didn’t stage a fiery death for the wooden article in question, but honestly, it was only a table and not responsible for my angst. Not to mention there might have been carcinogens in the varnish, released by hungry flames.

Though dancing in a circle and screaming while it burned would have been intensely therapeutic, cancer chemicals or no.

Anyway, Sir Boxnoggin is almost frantic with desire for a walk, and I think today is the day we start training him for runs. He was too young when we got him2 but now I’m absolutely certain his bones are finished melding and he’s in good shape. Plus, I’m on a program with significant walk breaks while I recover from a few injuries, and there’ll never be a better time to ease him into the manners required. Poor Miss B has become too elderly for even gentle runs; a morning walk tires her out for the entire day.

So that’s my Tuesday, my chickadees. Later this morning a new writing post (three things about characters) will be up on Haggard Feathers, and very soon3 that site will transition to a different model, with one free post a month and other weekly writing posts (as well as a weekly open thread) paid-subscription-only. For right now, though, you can taste-test the NaNoWriMo posts to get an idea.

Off I go. I might even escape the worst of the rain, though honestly, living in the Pacific Northwest, why bother?

Quasi-Surprise Week

Well, this week is… not going the way I thought it would. First there was Quasi-Surprise Jury Duty (not a surprise, but I’d forgotten about it entirely until my phone reminded me, which happens for Certain Things I Don’t Like Thinking About) and then I slept for twelve hours and woke up with body aches, a full nose, and a mild fever.

The cold I’ve been fighting off knows that yesterday was high-stress, and it has chosen to put up its banners and ride to war.

So it’s going to be that kind of week. Of course.

Edits for the second book of the epic fantasy trilogy are underway. Today is for setting up the workspace and cleaning, as well as getting myself back into that headspace. If my language acquires a certain formality, we all know what to blame now.

Of course, I am often a formal creature, when I don’t know someone well. Those manners are built to keep everyone in the room on an equal footing and make sure I don’t overstep; they are a comforting way for me to show respect and be careful of other people. I know manners can be deployed as weapons when punching up, and I like doing that, but I also like using them just as a matter of course.

Anyway. I had plenty of things planned for today, including writing some thoughts about Bede (oh, my GOD, but Christianity is a TRIP) but that’s just… not gonna happen. I’m knocked off-center and hideously out of breath.

I will say, however, that I’m looking at moving away from Twitter. Not entirely, but there was a conversation this morning about deleting tweets past a certain age, and it resonated with me. There were a few options I considered; one was Semipheremal, which needs some programming know-how to deploy, and the other, recommended by a couple fellow authors, was TweetDeleter.

I loved the idea of Twitter when it started, and I’ve made some relationships there I am loath to lose. But… honestly, it’s a hellscape, full of bad-faith actors and unregulated shittery. I’m pretty sure I’m going to set TweetDeleter to erase everything over a year old. Right now I have it set between one and a half to two years, just because I like to ease into things.

The major draw of Semipheremal is that you could choose certain parameters–a tweet with more than a hundred likes, frex–and keep those while deleting other old tweets. But then I started thinking… you know, if a post of mine gets over a hundred likes, it’s a sure bet that the asshats looking to troll, hijack, and harass aren’t far behind. Plus there will inevitably be accusations of “deleting to cover things up”, which are par for the course with Photoshop and screencaps running around nowadays.

And of course I’m only a semi-public person, not a government official whose words and boosts should be recorded for posterity and for the people the government is claiming to serve. So I’m feeling like it’s an ethical choice to use the service in the first place, and to set a time limit on how long those things stay active in the second.

So I’ll probably drop the time limit down to a year. Of course, I’ll keep stuff on my Mastodon, where most of my microblogging goes anyway.

In any case, I should get moving. Waking up full of snot and body aches was not quite optimal, and I’m going to be drinking ginger and lemon in hot water by the bucketful to try to get this crud washed out of my system. Some searing hot curry wouldn’t go amiss, either.

And with that sorted I can step back into a preindustrial society, take a look at the architecture of a book, and start trimming, tweaking, and expanding. thank the gods nobody’s going to be in the office until after New Year’s, that means I have a reasonable amount of time to get this beast into better shape. 150k now, 200k by the time I’m finished, I’m sure.

…even just typing that made me tired. Maybe I should schedule a nap, too.

Monday Plan

Lord Boxnoggin, in protest against winter, has taken to bed. My bed, to be precise, and he isn’t pried loose without a groan or two, even for walkies. I don’t know what he’s complaining about–he’s a different dog than the one we brought home. For one thing, he’s several pounds heavier. He has more than enough insulation now to get through a chilly day, the lovable chonk.

Of course, he is a Dog Not Allowed to Catch Squirls or Even That Cat, which means he is poor and put-upon, and he cannot believe the things I make him endure. Like waiting until dinnertime, only bacon grease on his kibble, and getting out of a warm nest made of my coverlet and down comforter in order to pace the neighborhood and pee in his regular spots.

Even the ham from Thanksgiving hasn’t changed his loud grumbling and groaning. Nothing makes him happy, this dog–or, rather, he groans and grumbles until he gets ear-skritches and cooing who’s a good boy. Then all is right with the world again, until I make him get off my bed.

Miss B would like to complain, I’m sure, but she’s an old dog now and doesn’t have the energy. She settles for waiting until after dinner, then pounces on Boxnoggin for post-prandial playtime. Having a companion keeps her young; having a companion keeps Boxnoggin on his toes. Really, they’re made for each other.

Let’s see, what can I tell you about the long holiday weekend? There was ham, there was dream pie1, there was “window weather”2, and there were 5-6k days trying desperately to finish Finder’s Watcher.

I did clear the 50k NaNo benchmark (easily) but the zero isn’t done yet. I’m probably going to take another week to put it to bed, then it’s into Poison Prince revisions. After all, publishing is shut down until new Year’s, if I turned the latter in during December it would just sit on someone’s desk. Somewhere in there needs to be a weekend of working on a Short Sekrit Projekt, and this is the week I need to go back to running.

In short, the working vacation is over, and now it’s back to just-plain-working. I have Beth Hart playing and a half-full cup of coffee, and this blog post is almost finished. A few hundred words on Finder’s, then the dogs get dragged out on their rounds and the daily stretching has to be performed. I can no longer crouch over a keyboard for ten hours straight without Consequences of the Muscular Sort.

I’d feel bad about not finishing Finder’s on time, but… the guilt would get in the way of actually working, which means I need to pack it away until the zero’s done. Then I could conceivably keep working until I expire, putting off the guilt over and over and finally escaping it when I flee laughing through the portal into What Comes Next.

It’s as good a plan as any, I suppose. Especially for a Monday.

Over and out.

Distinctly Non-Optimal

Woke up with The Sky is Crying inside my head, which is one of the songs I’d play to get reliably into Harmony. For some reason, Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Ray Vaughn were the go-to tunes for that book, along with some Alison Krauss and Joey Fehrenbach’s The Prophet.

I’m kind of sad a YA publisher didn’t pick up Harmony, but then, they would have wanted me to change things so Owen saves Val, and they would have wanted me to make “finding a boy” instead of “survival” the protagonist’s goal. So, it’s not so bad. I would have refused and fought, of course, and that would have taken a lot of energy I didn’t need to spend.

Anyway. Yesterday was distinctly non-optimal. I thought I was recovered from the food poisoning over the weekend, but on my way up the stairs with a huge load of laundry I felt like the DVD of my life started skipping in the player. I came back to myself half-lying on the stairs, clutching the laundry basket and distinctly woozy. I had to go up one stair at a time without standing, hauling the laundry basket up with me. Fortunately there were only about five stairs left, then the dog-gate at the top, at which both Boxnoggin and B were anxiously awaiting my return.

Once on level ground I managed to get the laundry into the living room and toddle to bed, where I passed out until the Little Prince texted to say he was on his way to a D&D session hours later.

Needless to say, dinner was leftovers. I just didn’t have the strength, and only stayed awake long enough afterward that I wouldn’t be up at 4am. Then it was back to bed with a raging headache, and I remember nothing until waking up this morning.

It’s funny, how when you get physically miserable you can forget what health feels like. I’m ever so much better today. Those salad rolls packed a wallop; I wonder what contaminated them? I probably don’t want to know. In this singular case, I can let ignorance be bliss.

I don’t think I’m too far behind. My Week Three of NaNo post will drop on the Substack today, so that’ll be good. I had thought to prep Week Four yesterday, but it looks like that’ll be today’s task. If, of course, taking the dogs on their daily ramble doesn’t wipe me out. I have high hopes, but apparently recovering from anything takes me three times as long as I think it might. No matter how I pad out recovery time, it’s never enough. The body takes what it takes, I suppose, and the mind’s not far behind.

The dogs are overjoyed that I’m back up and moving around. They spent yesterday attending me closely, and I still have somewhat of a crick in my neck from being wedged between them most of the afternoon and all night, too. Little furry stoves, helping me sweat out the illness. Boxnoggin in particular is very solicitous, probably because he likes salt; he was licking my forehead at intervals yesterday. No doubt I was producing enough good ol’ NaCl to season his dinner.

Today’s going to be better than yesterday. Once I finish this coffee, no power in the ‘verse will be able to stop me.

Or so I keep telling myself…