I don’t know if this is classical writer’s block or if it’s because I’m under the weather. Maybe I’m just out of practice.
It could very well be all three.
At first, I thought that my under-the-weatherness was due to Sarahan dust. God knows that interferes with my respiration. But on Sunday, I felt like death warmed over. I tested for COVID, which was negative, and took my temperature, which was normal. Since I wasn’t feverish and it wasn’t COVID, and I didn’t know how I could mix around the schedule to get coverage, I went in.
I figured I’d just do the stuff that I wouldn’t have to move around for — phone calls and data entry and things. And I did. I put back the returned scripts that hadn’t been picked up that week. I did the filing. I also called my telemedicine company and got a script for prednisone. The prednisone made me feel a lot better, but once it wore off, I couldn’t sleep because I felt lousy again.
And that’s part of why I’m up at 3 am on Tuesday morning typing a blog post. My prednisone has worn off again. And I was developing a headache. I basically spent all day yesterday (I had the day off! Yay!) in bed and so I’m not actually sleep deprived. But I’m trying to get my brain to sleep at regular times and this has messed it all up.
Hopefully whatever is going on will pass soon (I have three more days of prednisone) and I’ll be able to sleep better.
I am working on my novel. I have spent the time lying awake linking up the pieces of book that I have decided on so that I tell a coherent, or somewhat coherent, narrative. I might have to give my protagonist a procrastination problem.
Maybe with daily practice, like I’m doing now, and like I’m doing while I try to sleep, the words will one day come more easily.
Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for The Mark of the Dragonfly, the first book of the World of Solace trilogy by Jaleigh Johnson. And by trilogy, well, it’s three separate stories set in the same world. I’ve read the first two and ended up buying the third as an ebook because when I tried to buy it in hard copy it was *very* expensive.
Anyway, capsule review: Piper is an orphan living in a town on the edge of a meteorite field. Periodically, big clumps of garbage from somewhere else come hurtling out of the sky and the “scrappers” go out into the field and try to find usable things among the junk. Selling the usable things is how scrappers make their living .
Piper’s good at fixing things, so she looks for mechanical items that she can repair. One day she ends up outside during the meteor storm and finds an unconscious girl. The girl has the titular “mark of the dragonfly” which marks her as belonging to the household of the neighboring king, so Piper decides to return her home, in hopes of getting a reward.