mostly whining – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I discovered last night that there are some major drawbacks to my CPAP machine; namely, now that I’ve gotten used to the fucking thing I can’t live without it. The power went out last night around 9:00 PM, interrupting a blog post and half a dozen other things because I was not ready for bed at nine. I read for a little while (not a problem, actually, as I generally wear a reading light around my neck and charges last forever) and then tried to go to sleep, only to be met with a dream about not being able to swallow, which … is not the key to a restful night.

And then at about 1:00 in the morning, wham! Every fucking light in the house goes on at once when the power comes back on, including the ones that were off and we accidentally turned on while turning “off” the lights, and including the ones that we didn’t realize were on when the power went out, including every single fucking light in our bedroom for some reason. So I got about four hours out of my CPAP after maybe three hours of massively un-restful sleep and I was a fucking zombie all day as a result.

Every single class today started with me telling my kids that I was half dead and in a tremendously bad mood and that that part was not their fault but how they reacted to it would be, and I got gentler behavior than usual from all but one class. I am still, hours later, a mess, and only a vast amount of work that needed doing has kept me from going to bed early tonight.

Oh, and apparently one of my subs yesterday just, like, passed out in front of the kids. He was back at work today, so I guess he’s okay, but man, everybody wanted to tell me about it. Maybe my room’s cursed? I dunno.

It is not, strictly speaking, especially necessary to take this post terribly seriously. This is one of those “get it out of my head and onto the page” things, and it’s not like I have the sense to make anything private, so y’all get to see it regardless.

I’ve been on a prolonged dry spell, fiction-wise, lately, and it has rolled through my head a few times in the last couple of weeks that it would literally take less than half an hour to utterly eliminate every trace of Luther Siler– remember, it’s a pseudonym– from the internet. It’s basically just a matter of deleting a bunch of social media accounts. I don’t think I’d be able to completely eliminate the books from Amazon since it would continue allowing used sales, but I could stop new sales.

And if I did that, I wouldn’t have to keep worrying about the goddamn sequel to Skylights, now, would I? Or feeling crap about the fact that I haven’t put anything useful on Patreon in weeks and those folks are sending me money.

Again, don’t take this seriously. The punch line is this shit isn’t even true– I wrote Skylights before I’d ever even imagined Luther Siler, and I’d been thinking about the fucking sequel for years before this blog even got started. So this goddamn thing is going to be hovering over my head until I write it or die, whichever comes first. I could 86 my Luther Siler identity tonight and I’d still be kvetching about this damn book in a month.

I dunno. This is how I work; I have prolonged periods of Nothing and then a switch in my brain will flip and I’ll write two books in three months. I was hoping that the pressure of the Patreon would get me better at reliably producing short fiction but apparently ha ha ha I’ll just take your money is winning instead. I mean, there’s a whole book on there, so it’s not like it’s a worthless investment, but I want regular new shit, and right now I’m not producing regular new shit.

Baaah. Need to kick this and get back on the horse. Just gotta figure out how.