Well, a few things have changed in three years, for those of you who only read me here and nowhere else.
Since last installment: Kids are all grown up and mostly out of the house. #4 talked me into learning to play hockey her junior and senior years of high school, and I did manage a bit of that (no one is impressed by my skill or athleticism). #2 Got married!
Then late summer 2024 we started a fresh round of Being Sick All The Time, nothing dramatic, just catching everything under the sun and taking a long time to get over it. Hence I’ve gotten aggressive about avoiding sick people and sporting the N95 when that’s not possible, and though it’s annoying, it seems to work.
I may run some product reviews, because the other health change over the past month is SuperHusband and I have been trialing OTC continuous glucose monitors, and it turns out hypoglycemia doesn’t make you feel good. Fixing it feels awesome.
How awesome?
So awesome #3 talked me into joining her on a work trip to an epic destination having unexpectedly low airfares, and honestly I’m flabbergasted this is happening to me.
Meanwhile, work-wise, I’ve been working on getting a novel ready to publish. Previously I had avoided publishing fiction, because I had learned how stressful publishing is with the two major non-fiction projects, and I wanted to preserve a kind of writing that wasn’t work.
I finally discerned to try to publish some of my various novels through the very spiritual process of Every Time I Go to Start A Regular Job, I Immediately Get Sick Again. So I figured if God was not going to accommodate normal career aspirations, I should take the hint.
Don’t know that this first book it will find a traditional publisher, which is fine.
It’s a ton of fun, great story, but the market of “Adult Catholics who believe and practice the Catholic faith, but they are realistic about the contorted lives of the people in the pews, and don’t get the vapors over the existence of certain common but weirdly controversial sins, but also they like something fun and not depressing nor only for English majors, and also it’s a Catholic setting with deeply Catholic characters but not at all a morality tale, at least no more than any other story that involves figuring out a maybe-murder” is a pretty large audience, but not one the industry has tapped yet.
Pretty much those readers are being entirely served by self-published authors, as far as I can tell. So be it.
That’s in edits now (well, waiting for a fresh round of edits); and I’m also working on being more consistent with the writing at the blorg and the stack. Not on social media (much) right now, because my sister tricked me into doing Magnify 90 again. Good program, and our local Bible study ladies are absolutely loving it.
Full disclosure: We are all too old to scruple about it, we adapt generously to fit our various states in life. This is the way.
–> One of my goals for this period of self-examination is to figure out a middle way with social media, neither getting overly sucked into it nor avoiding it entirely. One of these years surely I’ll get the hang of that, right?
So. Summary: All the sudden the holidays are over, the kids have gone back to their various worlds, and I am sitting here a month into the new year a lot astonished at not being sick, and am simultaneously putting back together the bricks of life as best I can, and also sneaking out for some epic adventures.
So grateful.