Things and Stuff

It’s been a strange week. Not a bad week. Just a strange one. Not as many words as I’d have liked, but that’s largely because of the strangeness. I don’t normally feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for no reason, but there you are. And it’s not the “I’m sick” truck. More like “I’ve been hit by a pillow and must now nap” truck. I’m tired. Which makes it awfully hard to focus on making words.

It doesn’t help that yesterday, on what was supposed to be my rest day from exercise, we had to move our compost bin because the HOA is cleaning and painting the wall that runs behind our property. Compost bin was against the wall, so it needed to be moved. Which meant emptying the compost bin And also meant clearing half of the weedy bed where the pineapples have taken over, and where we’ll be moving the compost bin so we don’t have to do this again the NEXT time the HOA decides to maintain their bloody wall (seriously, the last time was over five years ago, and was before we had the bin.)

Thank goodness we saved the old kitty litter buckets. Five of them were filled with compost which was then spread into the vegetable garden. Six more are full and waiting to be returned to the bin once the bin is settled into its new home after the wall is painted.

On the upside, we’ve got the best turned compost in the state.

Once the wall is painted, we’re going to redo that entire bed, and the only reason we only cleared half the bed is because we have ANOTHER pineapple fruiting in the middle of the summer. About half of the pineapples we grow never make it into the house, because raccoons love them some pineapple. With the last one, they must have heard  M thinking “That needs to come into the house,” because it was fine when he was out there mowing the lawn, but an hour later when he went to pick it, it was half eaten in the middle of the mowed lawn.

Raccoons are passive-aggressive goth corgis.

I have been writing, and I did get words in last week. I’m almost done with the synopsis for John Zebedee Meets the Witch-Queen of Elfland — I just figured out how to resolve a corner I backed myself into. Work proceeds on Monstrous Town, and on Wings of Air.  Which, if you look at the numbers up on the tracker, is going to be a monster of a book. I really am thinking that there might be a book five in there. We’ll see what happens.

The first newsletter went out last week. I’m going to keep it to once a month for now, so the next one will be sometime the first week of October. Plenty of time to jump in and see what shenanigans I’m up to. (There will be a recipe in the next one!)

Necronomicon (or NecroNOTacon!) is coming up in two weeks. I’ll be on a few panels (Steampunk and Writing Sex on Saturday, and moderating The Best Advice on Sunday. I will also be part of the annual Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me game on Sunday.) The fun is going to be that the first RWA Board meeting of the new board is the same weekend.

And that’s about all, I think. Back to making words!