Status: 19 Feb 2023

I didn’t feel sick for much of the last week, but my contact time with the keyboard dropped from 40+ hours a week to a little under 10. The week consisted of doing what needed to be done — getting my spouse to work, meeting with mentees who’d booked meetings — then collapsing in a heap and racking up an extra eight or nine hours of sleep. Odds are, I’d picked up some dread sleeping lurgy, although the RATs suggest it wasn’t the obvious culprit.

Either way, I’m now behind on all the things and my Omnifocus list is screaming a daily alarm about balls dropped.

NEW WORK

The early reader version of the short story I’m Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf went live over on Patreon yesterday. Final version will appear in an issue of Eclectic Projects in the second half of the year. It’s a story inspired by the Mark of Cain’s cover of Degenerate Boy, made popular back in late nineties Australia when it appeared on the soundtrack of Idiot Box. I wrote a good chunk of this story back in 2009, left it to sit fallow for the rest of a decade, and wrote the second half while half-delirious from exhaustion this week, and it gets another file out of my seemingly endless folder of half-finished stories.

ON THE TO-DO LIST TODAY

1. Head out to play in our weekly Pulp Cthulhu game!
2. Write 700+ words on the next Eclectic Projects short story.
3. Enter the long-overdue copy edit notes on Eclectic Projects 002.
4. Edit the essay for Eclectic Projects 003.
5. Run an overdue weekly review.

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 35

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 23

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 15

READING

Read R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War this week, picked up on the strength of a seemingly endless stream of folks who post about it on Booktok and its presence as a Prime Read. It starts incredibly strong, but it the momentum seemed to flag as I hit the second act and I wasn’t sure if that was the writing, concentration issues stemming from this week’s ongoing exhaustion, or just a general ennui around 600 page epic fantasy volumes. I probably would have kept reading if the second book had been available as a Prime read download, but I wasn’t committed enough to buy the second book.

Started on Fonda Lee’s Jade City right after closing the file on Kuang’s book, and holy shit, it’s good.