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Month: January 2018

New Year, New Filing System

I’ve been editing forever. Seriously. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t editing. So when I finally sent the last of Hiro II off to the marvelous Erin Zarro for copyediting? It was time for a celebration. It was time for some fun, and time to accomplish some of the stuff I’ve been putting off while editing forever. So I did some dishes. Enforced the taking down of the Christmas tree. Took a friend to lunch. Rearranged my files. I’ve been meaning to do it for YEARS. Why Sunday was finally the day? I couldn’t tell you. But I did it. I already had five different colors of file folders. I also had the same five colors of hanging files, coincidentally enough! So I dove in. Stuff that’s personal to me, I filed in blue folders. “Certificates.” “School Stuff.” “TDP.” For my daughter (who creates a TON of paperwork with every step, holy smokes) red. Labels include “Health,” “School,” and “Trouble.” Things owned like the car, the house, appliance manuals, receipts–those are in yellow. Pet paperwork, general family stuff, that’s orange. Then the financial stuff, naturally, is in green. Taxes, pay stubs, aaaallll that stuff that comes up… At the very front of the top drawer, in easy reach from my desk, I have six files labeled for the months. January/July, February/August, and so on. Those are my “I don’t know what to do with this, do I need to do anything with it?” files. So instead of letting…

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Trigeminal Neuralgia: 5-Year Update

Technically, February 3rd is the actual five-year anniversary, but close enough. When I first began talking about my mysterious eye pain, I couldn’t handle the idea of having it for a month, let alone years. But apparently, fate had a different idea. It’s been five very long years. So…after a year pain free, I was plunged right back into my nightmare again. My neurologist and I are still trying to get a handle on the pain. It’s not constant anymore, which is a good thing, but I still have horrible pain attacks. I’ve had to spend less time on the computer, doing things I love, because the screen does make it worse sometimes. But one good thing has come of this. I have been able to tackle my extensive paperback/hardcover To Be Read pile. Unfortunately, other things, like Guild Wars, have gone by the wayside. I am still hoping to get back into it at some point. Writing-wise, I’m doing well. I can’t not write, pain or no pain. Been trying to get up the energy to dictate/transcribe so I don’t have to look at a screen all the time. There may be a visit to a neurosurgeon in my future. I am scared, and worried, and not wanting to have surgery. There’s Gamma Knife, which isn’t invasive and uses radiation, but I’ve read that some people have worse pain afterward. Some are helped, but not forever. The pain always returns as the nerve regenerates. So…I just don’t know. I’ve…

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Don’t Rely on the New Year

Happy January, friends! I have yet to buy a 2018 calendar, so I feel awash in time, like I’m unmoored just past the last buoy. In early January, it always seems like everything is new, untouched, wide open with possibility. New Year’s resolutions have yet to be broken, the whole year looms ahead, and you can do anything you put your mind to! Or can you? The radio said something like 95% of New Year resolutions are broken before the end of January. I forget the exact psychology, but I read something once that said you should never try a new habit at an expected time, i.e., you shouldn’t say “I’ll start this in the new year” or even on a Monday. Something about giving yourself too much time to talk yourself out of it (or talk yourself into how you’ll fail again). Something about how it becomes too easy to give up the first time you fail. I dunno. Not my area of expertise. I’m not one for resolutions, which in some ways is a good thing. Because it seems like every few years, something comes along right at the new year that makes it hard to turn over new leaves. This year I’m sick. And I’ve been sick for about three weeks now. Not dangerously sick, but lingering sick. I lost my voice for a week, which was not awesome, and rehearsal for a musical I’m supposed to be doing started this past Saturday, but I cannot currently…

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Writing Cycles

Happy 2018! I know a lot of you have had a tough year for various reasons. Here’s hoping that the new year will treat you, and the world in general, a million times better. Personally, I think the best word for my 2017 was “hopeful”‘… In May I wrote here about how I had beaten my months-long writer’s block. Points 4 and 5 were about two flash fiction pieces I’d written. Several months later, both of those pieces sold–my first sales to markets outside of our co-op publishing venture here at Turtleduck Press. Score! I started a cycle: keep an eye on upcoming themed calls for submission (anthologies and the like), use the themes as inspiration, write a story, submit just before deadline, repeat. It worked really well for generating stories (though somewhat less well for selling them), and for a while I was on a roll. In September I decided to finally see a health professional about wrist pain I’d been struggling with on and off for years. (Don’t shoot me! I kept thinking that I’d be fine if only I could do more exercise on my own, or find the right stretches…or if I did see someone, they might tell me to STOP WRITING.) I now have a diagnosis and exercises I would never have thought of on my own. Things aren’t at 100% yet, and they may never be–I’m still working on the right combination and frequency–but they are much better. At the same time, I decided…

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