Thursday, and my last day in the office for the week. I am feeling so much better than I did over the weekend and the first few days of this work week and also am feeling a bit more centered than I have since that morning last Monday when there was no water pressure and we were in a boil water advisory. I wound up spending all of last week off-balance, got sick over the weekend (I was coming down with it on Friday evening, and it peaked on Sunday and Monday, with some left over on Tuesday when I went back to the office), and now I finally feel more like myself. Thank God, right? It was so lovely waking up this morning without a head full of snot and a sore throat and post-nasal drip *shudder*. Tomorrow morning I have a meeting in the morning and then have doctors’ appointments in the afternoon, and we do need to go to Costco. I’m not sure how this weekend will turn out–productive or restful, or some combination of the two. I’ve not done any chores these past couple of days, and I really should take care of them tonight so I don’t have to come down to a messy kitchen/office space again, and there’s some laundry I should also get done. It’s always so tempting to sit in my chair and catch up on the news before watching more of The Traitors (yes I am obsessed with that show, and I am revisiting things that spark joy in me–anything Alysa Liu or Amber Glenn related, anything Heated Rivalry, anything Ilia Malinin and US women’s hockey, too) with Sparky not helping matters any by sleeping in my lap.
Obviously, it doesn’t take much to kick me off-track, does it? It was lovely to finally feel good again yesterday, and I feel like I should point out that my Achilles tendons are doing much better. The left is fine, but the right is still a bit tender and tight, so will ice it again thoroughly tonight and periodically over the weekend. I want to start stretching again too. The Achilles tendon issue has delayed my return to working out and exercise, but there’s no reason I can’t start stretching again before I feel up to returning to the gym.
I remembered something over the weekend that I’d completely forgotten about, and once I did, I stewed about it for a few days before deciding what I wanted to do. If you will recall, my close friend Victoria died about a year ago, and she left me a gift in her will, which was an absolute shock. I signed the letter from the probate attorney and forgot about it. His office contacted me on Friday that the estate has been probated and I would be getting the gift in a short amount of time, which was a lovely surprise. But this weekend when I was moving things around I came across copies of a book I wrote that I completely forgot about, which is wild to me. In 2009 or 2010, Victoria decided she wanted to start a small press for diverse children’s and young adult fiction. I wasn’t sure it was a great idea–2009 and 2010 weren’t a good time in publishing; this was during the indy/trad author wars, when ebooks were really changing the entire industry–but she knew I had written a couple of young adult manuscript in the earl 1990s and they were collecting dust in a drawer (we’d talked about this when I met the y/a editor from a major press who was familiar with my work and wanted me to submit a manuscript–but Katrina happened and I let that opportunity slip through my grasp), and she wanted to publish one of them (the other two were Sleeping Angel and Sara, which I sold to Bold Strokes). They weren’t doing anything and I wasn’t doing anything with any of them, so I thought, knowing the odds of me making any money off it were slim to none, but…she was my friend and I wanted to help her out, so I let her publish Sorceress. Like I said, though, it wasn’t a good time to be launching a traditional publishing company (she hated ebooks), and I didn’t worry about it. I promoted the book the best I could, but have no idea how well it sold, if it sold at all, because I never got a sales statement or a royalty check–but I want to be very clear about this: I loved Victoria and I didn’t care. She had wanted me to write a sequel, which I did a first draft of, but never revised or anything. I never brought it up, she never brought it up, and I had no desire to make her feel bad or guilty about it, so why bring it up? People I know who did read it liked it–it was my first real stab at writing Gothic suspense/horror–but like I said, I gave it to her freely with the full expectation of never seeing a cent.
But now that she’s no longer with us (at least once a day I miss her still) I kind of would like to have the rights to it back, and maybe revise it and put it up as an indy book. (I know, I have to get Jackson Square Jazz up and going, too.) And since she left me a gift, why not use that gift to get these two books–and my next short story collection–up independently? But what about the sequel? It’s not necessarily tied to the first book–different characters, for one–but the same California mountain town (same as Sleeping Angel, too). Anyway, it’s something to ponder.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Thursday, and I’ll be back in the morning yet again!
Queer and Loathing in America 