This Writer is Broken

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Apparently I am not quite ready for my normal writing/editing schedule.  Or at least I feel dead this morning.  I’ve sat here, waiting for an idea to write, but it’s not there.  Go read the last two posts. https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/04/02/first-blood-free-complete-short-story/

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/04/01/preview-and-pre-order/

I’m alive, just tired.  I’m going to get dressed and help Dan set up his office.  I want to go to the zoo but I don’t think it’s on the program today.

103 thoughts on “This Writer is Broken”

  1. Rest and do whatever the hell you need to recover. Pushing yourself to burnout is NOT the way to prove you are fine.

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    1. What Tom said…!

      I realize sometimes you absolutely have to keep going.

      But other times… it seems that way, but you actually lose more time to inefficiency and/or the ultimate crash than if you stopped to sharpen the ax.

      (This is a problem I manage to be prone to alongside goofing off too much, which is a bit absurd.)

      I respect that I am not in your circumstances and cannot see what you’re doing and what you have to do… nor am I a close enough acquaintance to justifiably offer critiques… and yet… a number of your other posts have given me the notion that you recognize this tendency in yourself, usually after the crash, so I am piggybacking here to reiterate the reminder.

      Please take care of yourself.

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  2. Oh and if going to the zoo is the thing that is tickling your fancy maybe it is just the thing you should do.

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      3. Did that two weeks ago. Am now waiting for the bad news (and for more papers to come in and then get fed-exed to the accountant. Grrrrrrr. What part of “Must be sent by march 1st” do these people not understand?)

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      2. If it even might be the flu, go see your doctor. I became an instant believe in the Power of Tamiflu when it knocked my “fever/chills tested positive for Influenza A” out in a day.

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        1. Tamiflu is great stuff, but it really really needs to be OTC so one can keep it until one starts to feel sick. In my neck of the woods a request for a popup doc visit will likely take longer to find an available appointment slot than the flu will last.

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  5. Take Care Of Your Self!

    Note, if this sounds like an order, please don’t ignore it. :wink:

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  6. Catch up on sleep, walk, read. Veg out. Whatever works.

    I’ve just about decided that all the various things that interfere with my writing, carb ODs, antihistimines, allergies, flu . . . they mostly use the same mechanism of interfering with high quality sleep.

    Chronic lack of sleep turns off the words. Mind you, staying up late when I’m sleeping well boosts the creativity, but . . .

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  7. You’ve given us plenty. Make room for some Sarah (and Dan) time.

    And if you can’t go to the zoo, let the zoo come to you. That’s what you have us for. :-)

    On a more serious note, here is a link to the National Zoo webcam(s):

    https://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/WebCams/

    Lions and Pandas and Pachyderms, oh my!

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      1. With a virtual zoo, one only needs to make room for the pixels, and pixels are very very small.

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        1. We already have Fluffy. And the aardvark (who, I think, thinks of us as the zoo.) And the sea serpent in the minion pool.

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        2. Redecorating while the hostess is busy elsewhere is a time-honored occurrence around here. We generally try to keep the place from folding itself into its own dimensional pocket, though, as it gets a mite tough to untangle it.

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      2. Well, it is spring is some places, so you take down the heavy curtains and put up sheers, dust, scrub the coal dust off of everything (thus the original need for spring cleaning – soot from the winter), put light-colored slip-covers on the chairs and light-colored shams on the pillows, roll up the rugs and put them away until fall, then clean the floor (unless it is one of the rooms with protective wards worked into the floor, in which case just sweep it and close the door again).

        No, I never helped my great-aunt and grandmother clean and get the Houston houses ready for summer. Why do you ask?

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        1. There are icicles forming on the bottom of my porch. We’re getting more snow in April than we got in January.

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          1. Rime of frost on my windshield. The air bites back, the steps are setting traps for the unwary again, and NeighborCat has informed me the drier must run AT ALL TIMES so his warm spot never moves.

            Typical springlike weather in Speck. If you don’t like it, wait a bit- we had temps in the eighties not much more than a week back.

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          2. We saw snow (along with some wild winds – lots of tree limbs down and the old dead oak tree across the street from my house blew over) yesterday, but it was not below freezing, so it didn’t stick.

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              1. I would comment upon my weather, and y’all would take it for a smarmy slap in the face, but do remember… you have a pleasant summer coming, while I will be making remarks such as “We’re on our 40th day of temperatures over 100F.”

                Hope your beautiful warm weather comes and stays soon, and my summer weather holds off just a while longer…

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                1. Eh, for me, it wasn’t so much the cold as the wind. The snow was kind of funny, really. We were watching the horizontally-moving snow, and people were saying, “That’s not snow, that’s just flower petals.” Which would be a reasonable thought this time of year, except that I was standing there watching it melt on my arm.

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                  1. I still remember the January where I was wondering about the fluffy seed pods for minutes before it dawned on me that it was (finally!) snowing.

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        3. The Piedmont of NC is doing one of its seasonal quadrilles. I look around me and I see a glorious looking spring. After a major storm blew through in late February bringing an end to winter we have had some kind of spring. Most of March would have been great weather for, say, any given May. This month it would be quite acceptable weather for April — if it had not been soooo very nice before.

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      3. As long as everyone remembers that you DO NOT go through the doors with an even number of purple stars. Even Fluffy wont’ go after you then.

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      1. One of our friends just recently had to send their pig (named Kevin Bacon, of course) to another farm, because while their enclosure would have been fine for the 40lb pig they were told he would grow up to be, it wasn’t really enough to keep a 200-pounder in.

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      1. So am I. Then I realized that I have to do something official while I am substituting tomorrow (in one of the few classes I cannot teach. I can hand out papers, I can read the key, but there is no way I can teach calculus. And the math teacher knows this.) Lesson planning it shall be.

        And if Sarah is reading this, as soon as I finish supper, I’ll get my page finished with links-n-stuff. Really.

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  9. Sounds like a deep discharge cycle. When that happens, all you can do is plug in and wait.

    If the power outlet is in the zoo, then that is where you need to be…

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    1. Soviet America, huh?

      That explains the news stories we get every year in the Los Angeles area of bears coming down from the hills and going through trash cans. But what about less blue areas?

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      1. They try it in less blue areas too, but they generally don’t get to do it for very long. :) No, we seldom kill them, just trank them and drag them off to state or federal forest or park land.

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                    1. Hrm. Must have misread the Pearl of Heaven stuff. IRL’s been evil and haven’t read as much as I would like

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        2. mountain lion locked down Weatherford High School a few years back. but that is rater outside the metro. Now the feral pigs are an issue in Ft Worth from time to time.
          I think I’d rather meet the cat . . . but both with my 1911 in hand at a minimum.

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            1. Jacksboro?
              Sorry to be moving away from here, but I will still have the cats to deal with, and instead of many pigs, it is wolves (that one is not allowed to shoot … or the cats if I recall, though they claimed there were none to shoot until quite recently) and rats with hooves . . . errr . . . deer (Menominee county has more deer than people)

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              1. That was the nearest town I think. When we were in Jacksboro Dairy Queen, there was a middle aged woman well painted and well dressed looking us over. Took a minute to realize that she was looking at my 25 year old nephew. My friend Bill and I joked about selling him to her for the rest of the trip.

                Got a bunch of hooved rats in my backyard as we speak.

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                1. I was watching a news story earlier this week about how the feral hogs are doing in the deer in Louisiana. Had photos of a large boar with a dead fawn in its jaws. Talk about mixed emotions (Faleen did $4000 damage to my car a decade ago. Deer are hooved rats.)

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                  1. Okay, squirrels are tree rats, pigeons are winged rats, politicians are man rats, rats are rats, and deer are hooved rats. How many other types of rats are there?

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        3. Wait, they do lockouts at Colorado schools when they have a situation nearby? Do they push all the kids out at once and then lock the doors behind them to keep the staff safe, or just one grade at a time to see if the threat takes the bait?

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          2. Send the students out first. Mountain lion eats one, or gets distracted chasing them, and teachers and staff can leave at a slower, more dignified pace. except for the three teachers having a party in the biology room (distillation and fermentation FTW).

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  12. A grand and exciting tale!

    So, are all vampires the same in the Vampire Musketeers or are there more than one kind like Pete Abrams has?

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    3. From my reading of the first book (published earlier), there’s only one type of “vampire” but there is some variations within the type.

      Some of the older Vampires aren’t quite human but then there’s …. :WHACK:

      That’s Not Fair Sarah! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

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  13. I think I know what you need to make you feel better. You need to read an historical fantasy. As it happens, I JUST completed my historical fantasy set in 12th century Japan, and was looking for some people to read and comment on it! What a coincidence!

    Seriously, I am looking for some beta-type readers to tell me if all the work we did was worth the effort. Anyone of the Huns who would like to take a chance on a tome should contact me at djharr@gmail.com with “Beta Reader” in the subject line.

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  14. In Democratick Pipple’s Republic Of Bernericka (or Hillarystan, possibly Trumpovia — is not a decision as has been determined as yet) animals vill run free and pipples will be in cages. You will not go to zoo, zoo will be coning to you.

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  17. I’m back in hospital siotted on IV’s as allergy season has decided to prove my heart can’t keep up with massive coughing spasms. They tell me it’s treatable and copable, though.

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  19. I was having trouble getting my 5k of writing done for the day too. And am on second day of ABO’s. All I can advise is a laptop with no internet access and a place the family cannot easily get to you. Keep after it sarah!

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  20. You know the title of this rouses interesting thoughts when you’ve just be reading Agatha Heterodyne. . . .

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