Not sure why I expected this week to be smooth sailing.  It was a crazy double-header of 1) the first full week of the second quarter of school and 2) the last full week before Thanksgiving.  This meant my time as a TA and as the father of a high school student took priority.  Man, did it every take priority.

As you can tell, most of my time this week was spent helping my son with homework.  We got a few Pokemon Go outings in, but it was mostly homework and, if he was with me at night, some cartoons.  He was more amped up than usual, so getting him to bed took extra time.  This meant, I only had 30 minutes to get myself ready for bed and pass out in order to use my CPAP machine for a good amount of time.  Some mild nocturnal anxiety attacks turned up because of certain negative encounters too.  All of that combined to leave me fairly exhausted by Wednesday.

Actually, the busy time at work was another factor.  Can’t really explain why it was so busy though.  The days were kind of normal, but there was this odd energy and speed to the whole week.  I mean, it felt like time was going slow even though I also felt like I was rushing everywhere.  Yesterday was a big field trip too, which always saps the last of my strength.  Not as bad as when I wasn’t sleeping well, but it was enough to have me crawling into the weekend.

Can’t report much on the writing front.  Darwin & the Beast Collector is 1.33 chapters away from being finished.  Strange number, but a few obstacles cropped up last Saturday and I didn’t get to use the full day to my advantage.  So, I came one chapter section short of my goal.  It’s for the best though because I kind of wrote myself into a position where the penultimate chapter can’t end the way I planned.  Things aren’t fitting into place like I expected, so I took time to reimagine the scene. This resulted in Darwin asking questions and suggesting a path that I didn’t think about.  So, it will probably take next week for me to tinker enough to make it work.  Not a problem since I’ll have 3 days to finish the book next weekend, so it’s as good as done.

This brings me to the Amazon publishing change I stumbled into this week.  Apparently, they made it so that books now get 3 category tags and that’s it.  This supposedly stops people from gaming the system and putting their books in unassociated categories because the system checks.  Not sure I believe that, but I ended up doing it for Do I Need to Use a Dragon? and Bestiary of Blatherhorn Vale.  The latter came up as needing a new price and that’s where I discovered the change.  Decided to try it for my newest release since I was curious.  Now, do I take time one weekend to go through all of my books to make these changes?  Has anybody else tinkered with this new system?

This coming week is going to be rather crazy.  There’s a lot going on for the first three days and then Thanksgiving.  I don’t think I’ll get any writing done until Friday afternoon.  So, I’m going to be focused mostly on maintaining my energy and strength.  The CPAP machine requires that I go to bed around 10:15 the latest to make sure I use it for long enough on school nights.  I’ll have to make sure I do that, which means I might only be able to do the last of the January blog posts.  That’s an easy month since most of it is putting up stuff I already wrote.  Speaking of posts, tomorrow is going to be . . . really strange, but I couldn’t resist.

Honestly, 2023 decided to hit the gas for some reason.  Next week has so much packed into 3 days and the following week looks to be just as hectic.  Hanukkah starts the week after that too.  This is why I don’t plan on starting Darwin & the Joy Path until Christmas time or after the 31st.  Leaning towards the latter or a combo.  Depends on what I do with the December weekends.  Maybe I’ll be able to finish off the ‘Phi Beta Files’ outlines after I rewrite the one for Darwin’s next adventure, which is oddly more linear than his usual antics.  Wonder if that would be easier or harder for him since he tends to wander away from plans, but doesn’t like being surprised.  Guess I’ll figure it out during the outlining stage.

So, what are the goals of the week?

1. Help son study for tests and quiz on Monday.
2. Pokemon Go when not studying.
3. Thanksgiving!
4. Watch the parade with my son.
5. Sleep well.
6. Beat the Water Temple in ‘Ocarina of Time’.
7. Figure out what to watch after I finish ‘Lupin’.
8. Finish January blog posts.
9. Try to finish some ‘Phi Beta Files’ characters during free periods.