Maybe fall will be better…

As much as I was looking forward to it months ago, it looks like the best thing for me to do is bow out of the August session of Camp NaNoWriMo, that I was planning on participating in. It’s been a difficult summer real-life-wise, and issues with our mortgage (namely, attempting to refinance it) that I thought were going to be resolved by now most definitely aren’t. Given the stress I’m already under, I’ve realized that I really don’t need to add more to it, even for something positive — and I already have enough works in progress to finish, without putting them all on hold for another month so I can just add another project to the pile.

I considered still participating, but just doing what I can and accepting that I won’t cross the 50K word mark to win, but… well, I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times now and camp once, and won every time, and I hate the thought of just setting myself up to fail — or worse, winding up determined not to fail whatever the cost to my emotional, mental, and/or physical health.

At this point, I think what I’ll do is wait for the original NaNoWriMo in November and try again. By that time, I should be able to have a better idea of what the novel is supposed to be and what’s supposed to happen, anyway, since I never had enough time or energy this month to work on brainstorming and outlining the way I wanted to. And by that time, something has to have been figured out that lets us keep the house.

So, apologies to my cabin mates, but maybe I’ll see some of you in November…

Black Static #29 now available

Issue #29 of the UK horror magazine Black Static is now available, which includes my short story “Horseman”:

http://ttapress.com/blackstatic/currentissue/

It’s a print publication which can be ordered direct from the publisher, but it should also be available soon in electronic format from Amazon and Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ttapress

Just a general update…

…now that the power’s back on. We got hit by the derecho in the midwest/mid-Atlantic Friday night, so our power (and then the phone/Internet) was down until yesterday afternoon. Living without power (read: air conditioning) wasn’t much fun, but the worst part is that since we have a well (and our generator isn’t powerful enough to run the well pump), being without power also meant being without running water for more than 72 hours. >_< Yeah. That was lovely. Normally I fill up the bathtub when I see storms coming in, but this one took me by surprise, so instead we kept our dehumidifer running with the generator, and used that water to flush with. Water drained from the coolers (that were holding the stuff from the fridge) became water for washing, and bottled water took care of drinking and brushing teeth. All in all, I have a new appreciation for the blessing it is to be able to turn on a faucet and have essentially an endless supply of clean, drinkable water.

As far as creative exploits go, the other irritant is that thanks to the combination of my procrastination and the outage, I missed sending in an entry to Writers of the Future this quarter, and I also never finished what was going to be a last-minute submission to the Rocky Mountain Fur Con conbook. Oh, well. For WotF, at least, there's always next quarter…