This month of dread, this month of doom

Not really that bad, just me being melodramatic. Rereading Silver Age comics en masse can have that effect.

Not as bad as Sgt. Rock on the Joe Kubert cover above, either, though earlier in the week I did feel that exhausted.

First, Sunday night: TYG came home from a social event in the early morning. I would probably have gone back to sleep except she dragged me to see Wisp, thinking something was wrong. It probably was: she was reluctant to be touched, reluctant to move … but after 20 minutes examining her I couldn’t get back to sleep. Fortunately by Monday she’d recovered from whatever it was so we didn’t have to take her to the vet.

Then Monday night Plushie had a freakout over a thunderstorm and climbed on top of me. We’d doped him up earlier and it kicked in after around an hour of trying to comfort him. Wide-awake again, couldn’t get back to sleep. Same thing happened Tuesday night.

Oh, and I’d noticed some sensitivity to pressure on my upper-right molars so Tuesday I took time out to go to the dentist. Tooth under my filling had cracked so I came home with a temporary crown. Added to lack of sleep my productivity went down.

And to top it off, Snowdrop has some odd sores on his ears. We moved up his annual vet appointment to yesterday. He came in for breakfast, TYG shut the door and then it was three hours of repeated pleading to go out. After that he went in the cage and TYG took him to the vet. Good news: the sores are just mosquito bites and he’s otherwise healthy. And I did get some cute photos of him in the morning.

Needless to say, three hours of plaintive meows put me off my game the rest of the day, which I’d anticipated. But that didn’t make me like it any better.

And I took Plushie in today for a “just in case” checkup — looks like it’s nothing but TYG suspects a problem (not a major one, thank goodness) and her instincts are good.

Like last week, my output was sub-par. A Local Reporter article on a candidate for Carrboro city council. Atomic Junk Shop articles on some Marvel stories from ’68 and why the next couple of years are a blank spot in my comics-reading history. Various odds and ends, contractor appointments and so on.

On the plus side, I got some good work done on Southern Discomfort. First I went over the book and made sure all the streets I used made sense. A couple of times they didn’t — the Peachtree/Douglass intersection in one scene is the King Street intersection in another — but that’s now fixed. I did the same with the layout of Gwalchmai’s home. That was more complicated as I have to have Joan and Maria steal something from one of the rooms. The original location of the room didn’t work for that so I moved things around.

And then I ran it through Draft2Digital‘s bookmaking process, then took the PDF and ran it through Amazon’s hard-copy printing process. I don’t have a cover yet but as with past books, I simply snatched one off Amazon’s covers on offer. What I want is to have the finished book so I can give it one final edit.

Also I read a couple of key scenes from the book to the writing group Tuesday night. They gave them big thumbs up, which is good. I also got an invite for a final beta-reading which I accepted — I think I have time to make any last-minute changes if need be.

So that was good but between our pets’ issues, the dentist and exhaustion, I’ve underperformed as a writer this month. Better than a year ago when we were caring for Wisp after she tore her tendon.

Let’s hope August gets back in the swing of things.

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