Here everyone’s probably going to talk about Valentine’s Day today, and I’m just doing a day-late, dollar-short Monday Morning Reset Post. It’s been a while since I’ve done one. Because the Crazy Work Schedule was messing me up big time, I thought, “Maybe they’re unnecessary, maybe I don’t need to do them.” And, in a way, that’s probably true. I can’t imagine they’re the most interesting posts, but after a few weeks without them, I’m realizing that they really do ground me and help me to maintain my focus. I’ve been feeling really untethered lately, so hopefully this gets me back on track.
But, since it’s Valentine’s Day, I will mention that both me and my valentine are working tonight, so we haven’t got anything planned for today other than making some sweet, sweet money. But he has tomorrow off, so the plan is that he’ll pick up some Chinese take-out to have waiting for me when I get home that night. This time last year, we’d just moved into a new apartment that drained our resources, and we didn’t even have a working fridge, so we just got Chinese and pigged out, and I would be 100% okay with this becoming our tradition. In a few weeks is our anniversary, and a few weeks after that is my birthday, so we’ve got oodles of stuff going on, and I’d rather just do dorky little things rather than big blow-out things anyway.
Enough of that schmoopiness. I’ve got a lot of reset to mention.
Reading: I still haven’t finished any new books for 2017, and this is a big problem that I’m hoping to fix soon. Eating Animals is almost there. Something Wicked This Way Comes is not too far behind. In the meantime, I’ve started up four other books. Three of them, Dune, Carpe Jugulum, and Catopolis I’ve read before, while the third book, Missing People, is a new one and kind of special. Brandon Graham is actually a customer at my coffee shop! He’s usually a morning customer, so I don’t personally see him often, but my supervisor was chatting him up and it came up that he was an author, and she was all, “No way, so is one of my baristas!” And so he came in one night to introduce himself, and now we’re signing each other’s books, and it’s just really neat. Meeting other writers in the wild is just bizarre and beautiful.
(His book is super nice and professional, and his small publishing house just got bought out by Simon & Schuster, so I’m trying not to flail at how amateur all my stuff looks compared to his, holy crap, existential crisis alert!)
Writing: I’m still plugging away at Fearless which keeps meandering horribly, so I’m in for quite a momentous editing phase, I feel. My story, “Late Night Snack,” was released by Dark Fuse Magazine last week, but, unfortunately, you need to be a subscriber to enjoy it. But they produce a fantastic amount of horror fiction, making a subscription really worth it if you dig that kind of thing. Since I’m a contributor, I got hooked up with a free account, so that’s pretty sweet.
I haven’t had any new acceptances for a while, so that’s been a little rough on the ego, but, hey, at least I’ve reached the quarter-mark point on my goal to 100 rejections, so that’s encouraging in a way. I’ve got a lot of things that should be decided on in March, so it’s just more of the good old waiting game.
‘Rithmatic: I’ve started working out a little bit more here and there to hopefully help with my weight loss. No weight dropped, but I definitely feel better. What’s driving me nuts, though, is that I have to change up my routine, because I guess I was doing too many sit-ups and not giving my muscles enough time to recover. I like order; I like repetition. I’m worried that if I do give a day or two off to let the muscles heal, then I’ll get lazy and not get back into it. So I’m doing push-ups on those days. I have not done push-ups in a long time. I never realized how much I’m lifting things at work until I started doing push-ups. OHGOD. It hurts so good.
Not a whole lot more exciting thing have been happening. I’m going to start really focusing on getting cosplay stuff ready for this year’s C2E2 soon, as well as planning a trip back home to Michigan in the summer. I’m getting a couch soon for the apartment, too, which is a big deal, believe me, and we still have our Christmas tree up, ha! So, yeah, that’s about it.
Happy writing, everyone!
L.S. Engler 