The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
So, I thought switching to a certain theme was a temporary thing, only then THERE IT WAS, and now I can’t find the old theme again, so I guess I’ll fuck around until I find one I like.
And to think, I was about to put up a post about how I needed to find better uses of my insane amount of free time!
So it turns out Chatroulette is still a thing. Who knew?
Today was a morning full of errands and minor home improvement tasks, an afternoon of nothing, and then full-time Daddy Duty all evening. I may or may not have mentioned my wife’s new job; I think I have but I can’t remember specifically doing it. At any rate, I have officially ceded the title of Breadwinner; she came close to doubling her salary by changing jobs and even if I still had last year’s job she’d still be like 20% above me.
So this means that when Lord High Muckety-Mucks from her new company are in town, she has to go to Big Fancy Dinners to entertain them. So she’s there, and I’m a househusband today.
(Hey, it’s better than “unemployed.” I did my first job application today where I had to admit that technically I don’t have a job any longer, although I suppose I could put self-employed on there and list Prostetnic. Maybe I should. Hmm.)
(Actually, I really should. Author/Publisher/Marketer/Owner/Technically-can’t-call-myself-a-CEO, dating back to 2013? Hmm.)
Yeah, this post was gonna be about something and now all I can think about is how I should redo my resume. What was I gonna say again? Shit.
…yeah, I lost it. Dammit. 🙂
If we were having coffee, I’d for damn sure be having tea or juice this time. I had a day earlier this week where I was so tired and half-dead that I made a pot of coffee at 11 AM– a full two hours after I’m usually done with coffee for the day– and drank the entire thing myself. You may recall a recent coffee chat we had where I showed you my new Walking Dead mug. One of the things I’ve done a lot of this weekend is home improvement tasks; I hung a new mirror in the bathroom yesterday and we went to my parents’ today and tore out the old toilet and installed a new one. My wife and I were greeted with those two monstrosities above. The coffee cup on the right is a reasonable person’s coffee cup. I can fit two full Walking Dead cups into each of those ridiculous bastards. They aren’t for coffee. That’s, like, a pot each. They have to be for, like, soup or something.
I wouldn’t have a whole lot to talk about, actually; a not-infrequent theme of these posts and the natural consequence of writing about my nonsense life every single day on the blog anyway. I somehow still have not sold an ebook in January, and that issue might come up, because it’s starting to get to me. I did sell one book in print, and I picked up a really nice review of Searching for Malumba today (check the previous post) but I have sold a total of three ebooks on Amazon in the last month, a drought of nearly-unprecedented nature. Please, for the love of God, if you ever read ebooks and have $5 to spare, check something out. My confidence is starting to take a hit here. 🙂
Let’s see. Writing on Sunlight has gone well, although I’ve officially reached the part in the outline where it just goes ??? DRAMA ACTION SCARY STUFF MYSTERY ??? MAYBE A HAMSTER ??? and part of me feels like I’m closer to the end than I really want to be. I wrote 1100 words of something today, unrelated to anything else I’ve done, that popped into my head whole and complete while I was taking a shower and came with such intensity that I rushed through shaving my head so that I didn’t lose anything and ended up cutting the shit out of my scalp.
You would have noticed the Band-Aid already, and so that part might actually come up first. But seriously: I wrote 1100 words of fiction during the time it took my wife to take a shower. If you know anything about my process, you know how ridiculously, insanely fast that is. I don’t know what this thing is yet; I mean, it’s a short story, but I sort of feel like it’s a proof-of-concept for something bigger. You’ll probably hear more about it later.
Maybe I’ll get called for a job interview this week. That would be nice.
How’re you?
So I hit the 50% mark on my targeted 75,000 words for Sunlight today, having a better-than-average day (especially since it’s not even 1:00 yet) in the process of doing so. I am therefore firmly in that stage of writing a book where I am completely convinced that the entire thing sucks and words suck and writing sucks and I suck and did I remember to take my meds this morning? no that’s just what being a writer is like.
The funny thing is the unintentional support I’ve been getting from Twitter all morning; Kevin Hearne and Chuck Wendig are both Real Writers who don’t know me from Adam but judging from their feeds they’re both in exactly the same place in whatever they’re working on at the moment. Apparently the occasional extended burst of self-loathing is just part of the process? I dunno.
I do know that my wife stayed home for a couple of extra hours this morning to avoid the roads (the dusting from yesterday has finally evolved into a legit snowstorm) and I went from complaining to her in the dining room that I’d just written an entire scene and I had no idea why any of the characters in it were acting that way or where the overall narrative was going or why any aspect of the scene made any sense at all and by the time I’d gotten back to my office I’d fixed it all in my head. I’ve said this before; while I champion the “get it on the page, then fix it in second draft” approach to writing all the time, I don’t actually work that way, and it’s very frustrating to me to write something down that I know doesn’t work because generally that bit never makes it to the page. It gets rejected in my head during the long stretches of not-writing that I do in between the actual writing.
Anyway.
Point is, halfway done on wordcount, and while the book feels like it might be a teeny bit farther along than that in terms of the plot it’s close enough. The book is definitely not going to be ready for C2E2. I’m holding out for April at this point; we’ll see.
Hopefully by the time I release it I won’t think it sucks any more. 🙂
Just ignore this part.
Not helping at the moment: I haven’t sold a book since December 29, and while I managed to give away some copies of Benevolence Archives for free this week, all it led to was a two-star review on Goodreads. I have, in general, been pretty lucky with the reviews I’ve gotten– to the best of my knowledge Skylights and BA both have a two-star review with no text appended and everything else has been positive. And it’s January and last January was shit and blah blah blah blah. But god damn it would be nice to get 2016’s first sale out of the way now that it’s the damn twelfth, for crying out loud.
I’m kvetching. Like I said, ignore me.
Well. That didn’t quite work out like I’d intended.
We were supposed to spend yesterday with family up in Michigan, watching my newest semicousin– my actual cousin’s kid; I get hazy on the correct nouns at that point so they’re all semicousins– be baptized. The weather report for yesterday indicated rain turning into freezing rain turning into snow turning into hail turning into wolverines, and since we’d planned on a one-day trip there was some worry that driving back in the dark would probably be a bad idea, so we didn’t go. Everyone already in Michigan was supportive of this decision, so either the weather was shittier up there or they didn’t want us around; who knows.
I woke up this morning to this:
…so, not so much on Snowpocalypse 2016 yet. We’re still supposed to get a couple of inches today, and who knows what should happen if a lake-effect band should happen to park itself over the house, but we totally could have made it to the baptism, which is kind of upsetting.
Speaking of things that didn’t happen yesterday: I, like all of you, failed to win the Powerball, meaning that the motherfucker’s gonna be at something like $1.5 billion come the next drawing on Wednesday, when I will buy more tickets and lose again. I’m fully aware of the math; I just don’t care. Are there people who should never play the lottery? Absolutely, but I’m not gonna point fingers and I’m not one of them. Despite my current out-of-work status the $15 it cost to buy a handful of tickets still counts as no money, and the possible exchange for all the money in the universe was still worth it.
It’s fun to think about what one would do with that level of money. My one resolution whenever I’ve spent time contemplating it is that basically no one I know would have student loans left by the time I was done with them. A slightly bigger house? Sure. The living space in this one is actually fine but I’ve always wanted a good basement and this house doesn’t have that. My car is old enough to drive, so that would end up getting replaced. And at that point I’m kind of out of ideas. If I were to try and upgrade to the Holy Shit Mansion as opposed to “slightly bigger,” I would want an honest-to-goodness library room (bookshelves everywhere, comfy leather furniture, fireplace) and an indoor heated pool that somehow magically required no effort on my part to keep in good working condition. The healthiest I’ve ever been in my entire life was a period of a couple of years in grad school when I realized I could swim every day if I wanted to. That hasn’t been the case for years, though– the gyms around here that have pools are insanely expensive, inconveniently far away, and have shit hours, devoting most of their usage time to free swims or classes and not lap swims, so… yeah.
Hell if I know what I’d do with the other 500 million, though. Buy the zoo, so I could bring the serval home whenever I wanted to. And then probably go slowly crazy after that.
Well. I’m going slowly crazy now. I guess it remains to be seen whether the speed of the ongoing crazy would increase or decrease.
If we were having coffee… that would be really odd, actually, because what I’m supposed to be doing right now is getting ready to head up to Michigan for– wait for it– a baptism. The religious ritual is secondary to finally meeting my new baby semicousin, but y’know. I’ll take what I can get.
We’re doing the back-and-forth in one day and with a four-year-old, so, uh, I probably won’t be around much today. Benevolence Archives is still free, though!
Been thinking about ways to fiddle with the blog, and one thing that keeps persistently coming up is a static (ish) front page that’s more book-focused and authory, with a link from there to the actual blog itself, which would basically look just like it does now. You might remember I did a survey a few weeks ago about how people read the site. I got a decent number of responses to that and discovered that way more people than I would have thought— just over half– of my readers are using WordPress’ reader software to look at the blog. I’ve hardly ever touched the thing and had the idea that most folks thought it was useless, but apparently either I was wrong about that or people think it’s useless and use it anyway due to some deep-seated cultural disgust with bookmarks that I wasn’t aware was out there.
The good news, though, is that those people wouldn’t be inconvenienced by infinitefreetime.com suddenly being pointed somewhere static, because they’re not visiting the site that way anyway. In fact, it looks like if I pointed the domain name at a static site instead of the blog, only about 5% of my readers would need to change their bookmarks.
Anybody wanna suggest a theme that would play nicely with that sort of thing?
Let’s start by ripping the band-aid off: after spending the entire day convinced I was going to throw up at any moment, I went in to school yesterday afternoon after the kids left, resigned, and cleaned out my classroom.
I’m done. It’s over. I’m no longer a teacher.
(Five minutes of staring into space.)
I’m still in much the same emotional place where I was last night: part of me wants to call everyone I know (especially the teachers) and have a huge party, and the rest of me wants to crawl into a corner and cry for a week. I let a lot of people down yesterday. Knowing that didn’t prevent me from doing it, and I don’t precisely feel bad about it, but it’s definitely a thing I did and I’m cognizant of it.
I suspect what I’ve done is gonna hit me really hard sometime next week.
Until I have another job, I’m a full time writer. I’m still looking; nothing has changed since my most recent #Weekendcoffeeshare post except that now it’s Tuesday and I’m really hoping for that phone call.
Anyone wishing to provide me with financial support during my period of unemployment is welcome to buy and/or review a book, obviously. 🙂 I highly recommend the print editions!
(Have I mentioned that The Sanctum of the Sphere is eligible for a Best Novel Hugo this year? No? It is. And Warrior Jayashree and the Young is eligible for Best Short Story! Neither of them have a chance to win but it’s fun to play pretend sometimes.)
But book sales aren’t going to pay the bills– well, maybe they will, but I’m gonna have to abruptly get really lucky. Maybe I’ll get nominated for a Hugo somehow.
But.
Until then: this is a thing now, (he said, burying the lede) as of right now this exact second. The website is still bare-bones, but Prostetnic Editing Services is available for anyone who may happen to desire book, story, or essay editing services. At the moment I’m just offering copy-editing and formatting, but if you need something else, let me know. I work relatively cheaply! And since I don’t have a damn thing to be doing right now, turnaround is pretty quick too!
What major life changes have you made lately?
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