June 25, 2013

Writer Fail, Lion's Club BBQ Recount, and a Rebirth

Yes, I know. I promised I'd have Right of Succession published at the end of last week. Sorry folks, I wasn't expecting the events of last week.

First, I threw my hip out of socket somehow on Wednesday morning. I couldn't sit at the desk, and it's next to impossible to type while lying flat.

I recovered from that just in time to set up for the Lion's Club BBQ Cook Off. I normally don't work events this late in the year. But it was a free booth, and I thought a tent would be enough to keep myself and the soaps from damage. I was wrong. I lost about thirty to forty sample soaps, even in the shade, and I wound up with heat stroke.

New policy: no outdoor events between mid-May and the very end of September. It's just too hot and humid here in the Tennessee Valley for items that start melting at 90 degrees.

I've finally recovered, and I am still chipping away on the last third of the novel rewrites. It's been slower going than I would like both because of the factors listed here and various other issues that seem to be coming up daily this month.

I am progressing by anywhere from one to three chapters a day right now, and I'm formatting the novel as I go. I will upload it and hit publish as soon as the text is approved and I've managed to put together a decent cover. I hope this will be sometime over the weekend, but I'm not making any more promises. Doing so just seems to invite life to start pounding us into the dust.

One thing I have promised myself, however. From this point on, I will make it a habit to write each and every day. It could be a blog post. It could be a chapter for whatever novel I'm working on, or it could be something for one of the several unfinished fan fictions I have floating out there if I'm in the prewriting phase of a new novel. 

The thing is, I wouldn't be in this position now if I'd developed this habit before. It wouldn't have taken me nineteen and a half years to get ready to hit publish on Right of Succession. I'd have a fair dent made in the backlog of something like twenty novel ideas I have waiting in line to be written, and I would have published something other than blog posts and a few unfinished fan fics these past seven years.

I'm sick of it. 

This year's booth at Con Kasterborous.
Here I am at thirty-two, and in many ways, I feel like I'm just now starting to come into who I am. I chose writing as a career twenty-two years ago. Soaping and perfuming caught me by surprise, but I love them. The two are an unlikely duo, though they compliment each other. I create geek inspired perfumes and colognes using the character building skills I learned as a writer, and I suspect the bath and body products will factor into marketing my books. Both, and more importantly, the people whom I've met and in some cases befriended through this journey with Contented Comfort, have given me the resent nudge to find my own sense of style again after years of not caring.

I will still be mostly absent the next few days or a couple of weeks, however long it takes to finish and publish Right of Succession. When I do return, it'll likely be to announce the publication. I may still linger around Facebook, Instagram, and Tumbler if I have something short and sweet to post, but I make no promises.

You hear me Murphy?

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