Bat-Shawn, and a Preorder

Yes, I got him batwings. I am easily influenced by algorithms.

I wouldn’t say he loves them but he too is easily influenced–by treats, specifically.

He goes for his dental surgery Thursday morning, which is probably about 70% of my mental stress right now. There’s a reason “Future Days” is his song–if I ever were to lose him, I’d surely lose myself. That little monster is one of a kind, and I’m wavering between “go home when you drop him off and wait for them to call you” and “just find a park to sit at for five hours and wait in case there’s an emergency”. Gus went into heart failure literally overnight; I live in perpetual fear that if I look away for even a second, I’ll lose Shawn too.

So that worry is not helping the chronic headaches that have taken up again, which I strongly suspect is a medication side effect with the increased dosage. They’re constant, and wake me when I’m trying to sleep–the only thing that helps is ibuprofen, which I’m not supposed to take. So. Yeah. It’s making everything, including having to look at screens all day, very difficult. My tablets can be halved, so I’m going back a step for a few weeks again before trying to increase it to what it should be.

I was discussing this with a friend, how absolutely wild it is that the world is centered around the expectation that no one working has health problems. People balk at mandating just ten sick days but if you’re diagnosed with a health problem and your medication has a few weeks of side effects? It’s all designed to push people who need the bare minimum of accommodations out of the workforce so everyone can turn around and complain about people on disability or unemployment. Accommodations–be it medical ones, WFH, etc–could keep so many more people working and independent, but we’re in a late-stage capitalistic hellscape, so of course we don’t do that.

I am so, so fortunate to set my own schedule, but I have nothing to fall back on, which means I can’t just sit and wait a few weeks for side effects to subside. So back to baby steps.

Despite knowing what the problems are with the WIP, as mentioned previously, I’m still not sure how to fix it. It might require gutting the whole thing and starting a new book to weave things in properly. Or it might require setting it aside and writing something else (also known as Making the Book Jealous, which I swear does work). Or I might just have to plow through to the end and figure out if I can fix it in the next draft. It’s one of those things where I really wish I could talk issues out with someone, but Shawn is not super helpful with these things.

But, Waverly Jones Mysteries #2, A Wild Kind of Darkness, is officially up for preorder everywhere.

This one is very special to me as it’s based on the murder of my late friend’s aunt, some sixty years ago, which has never been solved. I take the basic crime and what little is known about it now and spin it off wildly different direction that fits into the overall series’ themes. I hope Judy would’ve been pleased with it.

Kindle | Kobo | iBooks | Nook

I’ll probably update on Friday with how Shawnie is doing. Please cross your fingers for my little guy.