It seems like a year since I posted last, even though I know it hasn’t been so long. But it HAS been a rough year. Not terrible–just a little rough.
After the most productive writing year of my life, during which I completed two novels (2015), I had the LEAST productive writing year of my life. I blame insomnia for making me just tired enough to make writing (including blogs and submitting said books to agents) a chore rather than a pleasure.
Chores are no fun.
My insomnia seems to stem from persistent intestinal gas that strikes at about 4:00 AM every night. No matter what I eat. I don’t like to go to bed particularly early, since I like to squeeze as much living into my life as possible, but when I am up at 4, it makes it difficult to function when I don’t go to bed until 11. When I went to bed earlier, the gas would merely strike earlier. I’d still be awake for about two hours, resulting in oversleeping, getting into work later than I wanted, and therefore working later into the evening than I wanted, resulting in a vicious cycle.
The good news is that melatonin seems to be helping. I still wake up with the gas, but the melatonin makes me sleepy enough most nights to be able to get back to sleep without lying there for hours. I am still working on getting a solid week of at least 6.5 hours of sleep. I’m not there yet, but I’m closer.
So that’s all.
I’m thinking about renaming my blog to something like Life, Writing, and Stuff. Yeah, I know that name sucks. I may play with formats and titles over the next few weeks. I also need to figure out if I want to move this blog out of wordpress.com and into a self-hosted site. I meant to do it last year (and the year before, and the year before), but I had that terrible infection. Yeah, yeah, excuses. And–oh, yeah–I did say that was all, didn’t I? One more thing …
What I’m Reading Now
I am slowly reading The Dreaming Hunt by Cindy Dees, which is the sequel to The Sleeping King. I meant to review The Sleeping King last year, but see above. I’m almost done with it and it has been pretty entertaining because it is much like reading the adventures of a RPG group going through a long-term campaign. Five adventurers (or maybe six) fighting their way through battles with all kinds of fantasy races, while constantly being healed and even resurrected when necessary. Maybe I’ll review both books together when I’m done. (However, any such review will be WAY more informal than those I used to write. I am still not considering myself a book reviewer. It’s just stuff I’m reading.)
That really is it, this time. What have you been up to? Any good fantasy book recommendations?
I hear you on the rough effects of bad sleep. Sigh.
So sorry you’ve had a rough year. Insomnia isn’t fun. As to reading, I’ve been reading some of Melanie Dickerson’s Christian historical fiction fairy-tail retellings; namely
Golden Braid' andThe Beautiful Pretender.’ I’ve also been reading Marshall Ryan Maresca’s two fantasy/mystery series. I’m loving everything he’s written so far. The one series, starts withThe Thorn of Dentonhill' and is about a student at a magic collage who goes out at night in disguise and fights crime, and the other series, which starts withA Murder of Mages’ is about a pair of police detectives in the same magic filled city, though their beat is on the opposite side of the river. I’m enjoying them all a lot.I’m going to look into these. Thanks! I need to read something a little different.