As usual, I’m not sure where to start.  My anxiety has been really bad, so things were moving slow.  That means no writing or editing or even future blog post scheduling.  I had to use what energy I had for other things.  I’ll just categorize here and see how it goes:

Teaching Assistant Quest

I’ve done all I can here. I’m submitting to all of the schools that have openings, but I don’t have the certification yet.  Everything is in, but my college transcript and the ATAS exam need to be processed.  The test score isn’t going to be released until the 17th and I was told that there is a 2 week backlog with the transcript processing.  Not even getting call backs and it doesn’t look like anyone will take me until I have that certification.  I’m still hoping that I can get a job as a school monitor to get my foot in the door, but I haven’t heard about that either.  This is making me fear that I’m going to spend months job hunting with very little luck.  Sacrificing or pausing my writing momentum (which is now dead) for such a fate would be painful, especially if it leads to other events happening.  Can’t go into detail in public there.  I’m trying to stay hopeful because it’s out of my hands and all I can do is submit and call.

Charles the Chauffeur

A week ago, my wife’s car had problems and it was worse than we thought.  So, I’ve been the only driver here for the week.  We’re hoping she gets the car back by Tuesday.  This isn’t really a new thing either since I was the driver when her wrist was broken and when her car was out of commission for nearly a month.  Still, it means I’m getting up and running around more than I expected.  This is another reason my anxiety is running high because I’m not getting a moment to rest.  When I do have time to myself, I don’t know what to do and my mind starts overthinking things that are going on my life.  Seems not writing or working means my imagination has decided to entertain itself with running wild with real life issues.

‘Venom’

For my wife’s birthday, we went to see ‘Venom’.  This was a really fun movie.  It was simple and straightforward like the older superhero movies.  I’ve heard people call it a throwback to the Raimi Spider-Man and original X-Men movie era.  Not sure why that’s a bad thing since that includes Spider-Man 2.  My favorite part of ‘Venom’ was the interaction between Eddie Brock and the Symbiote.  There was a good amount of humor here, but it also gave you a sense that he’s wearing a living creature with thoughts and desires of its own.  Was it identical to comic book Venom?  No, but I found it very enjoyable and worth watching because it was respectful to the source material.  Keep in mind that my first set of comics was the ‘Maximum Carnage’ storyline in the Spider-Man comics  So, my introduction to the scene was Venom and his son Carnage, who is my favorite super-villain and set to debut in the sequel.

Twitter, Sales, & Writing

I’ll just do a catchall here.  I noticed that I was getting a lot of retweets on Twitter, but none of them turned into sales.  In fact, only Beginning of  Hero seems to be moving and that’s the free one.  Other authors have told me that they’re not seeing much activity regardless of their social media presence too.  Has anybody read about what’s going on or is this just the nature of the beast?  It does feel like everyone who can’t afford expensive promos are dropping out, so the game is now going to whoever has the most money instead of the better story.  Feels like it wasn’t too long ago that the indie author stuff seemed so promising even as a supplemental income.  Now, it’s like a ghost town for some authors or that there are only a handful sitting on the top.

In regards to writing, I’ve been told that I need to get back into it.  It’s been pointed out that I don’t do anything for myself and writing was one of the few things that was for me.  I dropped that and now I’m just . . . here.  It’s even reached a point where people can tell that I’m not sure how to do things that are for me.  So, I’m going to start editing Derailing Bedlam to get the rust off and prepare it to start going live on the blog in November.  I wish I could publish it officially, but I lack the money for that and I think more people will read it off the blog than if they had pay even 99 cents.  I’ll save up my promo and cover art money for War of Nytefall.  I know I scheduled a post for late December about this, but I might be putting Ichabod Brooks on the blog after Bedlam is done.  That’s not going to be for a long time, so maybe things will change and he can return to Amazon with a new collection.  Either way, I’m going to be trying to revive parts of myself this week.

Goals of the week:

1. Start editing Derailing Bedlam.
2. Civil service test next Saturday.
3. Driving, cooking, cleaning, etc.
4. Get back into biking once mornings calm down.
5. Mow the lawn.
6. Do whatever I forgot about while writing this post.