[end of Commercial Break, welcome back to the show]
So I stepped out and... never stepped back in? Sorry. No, really, I'm sorry. I don't mean to disappear, but I did. And I admit that I would've kept on disappearing if someone hadn't poked me last week to see if I'm still alive (thank you, by the way).
Speaking of poking, here's a fun fact: I'm such a sound, quiet, still sleeper that my mother used to sneak into my bedroom when I was a kid to stick a mirror under my nose. She did it to make sure I was still breathing, because it freaked her out how I would barely move. Even then, my breathing slows down so much that she had to hold the mirror under my nose for at least a minute in order to be sure that I was actually breathing. On the flipside, I'm also the sort of sleeper who is wide awake on a fucking dime at the slightest disturbance, so I always woke up before my mom could figure out if I was breathing or not. I think I startled her into surprise-screaming more often than she startled me for just being there.
But in all seriousness, what have I been doing since my last post in June?
Quite a lot, actually.
My home life is fine, in case you're wondering/worrying. Currently, the Spouse is downstairs watching -- no, sorry, he's playing video games. I was going to say he's watching yet another old movie from one of the retro channels, which he's taken to doing since it's his ThingTM, now, but he just got the latest God of War. I'm a temporary video game widow until he finishes it. Or he gets hungry and comes in search of food -- whichever comes first.
My health is... okay. With a question mark. For a while, I'd been plagued with insomnia, chronic and recurring migraines, and lower back pain. Lately, I can't get enough sleep, still have those chronic and recurring migraines, and the lower back pain has gotten worse. I'm 99.9% sure that all of that is associated with stress. And the only stress in my life right now? It's work related.
There's probably not a lot that I can actually say about work that I'm allowed to say, but in a nutshell, about the time I disappeared is about the time I got roped into a massive project. I get pulled into projects all the time, mostly because of my specialty, but this year there's a little extra seasoning and several added parameters, because it's sensitive on a political level. So it has to be done right. I've been working on it since, well, slightly before my last post, and it ate all of my free time. It's still eating all of my time, but I should be finished by the end of January. Should be.
Unfortunately, this means that my writing -- in any shape, plot, and rating -- has not been happening. It fought a valiant battle, but in the end it was hauled off the tournament field all bloody and battered, and tossed into the lowest gladiator cell available in punishment for its attempt to assert dominance. You see, as much as I love to write... no actually, as much as I need to write, it's necessary for life, because it's the only thing that keeps the plot bunnies from breeding like, well, bunnies -- nobody's paying me to write.
(as much as I'd like it to)
However.
I can deal with the additional work and the stress that comes with it, but not when it comes with a freaking boatload of absolute bullshit from certain coworkers, or the fact that management is well aware that my workload is ridiculous but can't do anything about it, much less get me the help I need. I think it was sometime in late October or early November where I completely ran out of fucks. I'm still doing my work, because I want to get it done so that I can go back and make some headway with my own (personal) projects. Otherwise, I've pretty much cut out all the other non-essential work (but even that's piling up). I've lost my ability to tolerate people's stupidity, my patience is currently in the Bahamas, and while I wasn't very diplomatic before, sarcasm as a form of verbal bitch-slapping is now my default setting. It's kind of fun, but not very productive.
Which leads me to today.
My direct supervisor reminded me last week that I had X amount of vacation days left that I absolutely had to take, because they won't carry over into the new year. Because of the timing, he's signed off on a roll-over of vacation days into January without them actually being vacation days (so I don't actually lose the time off). I am on mandatory vacation until the second week of January.
I now have three weeks to... well. First of all: not obsess about work. Second: check on the poor gladiator in the lower level cells of the arena, make sure it gets the medical treatment it should've gotten a while ago, and start writing again. So I'm going to write a book in 3 weeks.
No, it won't be the LM-reboot. The LM-reboot is on hold. Sometime back in September I realized that there's no way that I can write one part of it, publish it, then write the second part, and publish that one, ad infinitum, because I don't have a freaking plan. What's most likely to happen with the LM-reboot is that I'm going to sit down, plot out several books, write them all, edit them all, and release them over a series of months. But that's not sometime in the immediate future. It's still in the works, though.
So that's where I am with things right now. Alive, sort-of well, and still relatively human.
How has everyone been?