(Personal) A Different Kind of Work

Now that the month is almost over, I think it’s safe to say that February wasn’t nearly as quiet as I hoped it would be.

The day job has continued to be incredibly demanding; five of the most senior members of my team were shipped off to Europe for training and integration with the company we’ve merged with. It’s a big blow to lose five members of your team to begin with, but to have your most senior colleagues out of pocket for two whole weeks is a tremendous drain of knowledge and resources. Those of us who were left in the trenches have been scrambling almost non-stop to deal with the workload.

That isn’t to say the work hasn’t been engaging, even exciting — I’m learning a lot of new things and it’s forcing me to push myself further outside of my comfort zone faster than I would have preferred it. Given the naturally timid nature of rabbits and their cousins, that’s not a bad thing. I’m pleased to have been able to step up into a more active role, honing my communication skills with our customers, practicing my troubleshooting skills and learning the skeleton and muscle of our system. But it has been exhausting, and it’s left little room for anything else.

I managed to finish the first draft of “A Stable Love” at the beginning of the month, but since then writing has all but stalled. I’ve managed to be reasonably current with my Patreon serial, but that’s still a struggle — I always feel behind, and I’d like very much to have enough space to start organizing the story a bit better but that might be a ways off. And I wasn’t able to get it together at all for my People of Color Destroy Science Fiction story, so “The Tourist” remains an unwritten dream. That’s the thing that sucks the most, and I feel is my biggest failure this month. Not only did I miss the boat on an anthology I really believed in, I also dropped the ball with helping another writer workshop her story for it. She submitted a couple of pieces without me, and I’m proud of her! But it’s still a bummer.

The Writing Desk has been bare this month while I struggle to deal with the demands of the day job, a Project Management class I’ve been taking for a couple of months, and other things that need to be done. I’ll be trying to check in with small updates and shorter posts for a while, just to get back into the habit; but I’m not sure how long it will be before I can get ahead with the blog as well.

It’s not ALL doom and gloom; reading has been wonderful. Steppenwolf has been a lovely surprise, mostly due to the wonderfully flowery language of its translation and the fact that I forgot just how “furry” this novel really is. It’ll be interesting to talk about with a few other folks later. I’m slowly but surely catching up to my comics reading list, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the Project Management textbook for class. I can practically feel myself becoming more banal with that statement, trust me.

I’m working on a few guests posts for Claw & Quill and [adjective][species], both excellent blogs in their own right. I’m trying to organize my to-do list for the publication of New Fables this year, and restarting my Pathfinder game sometime in the next three months. And of course, there’s that pipe dream of eventually starting up a mental health for geeks podcast that seems so far off right now.

For now, though, the big focus is the day job, the night class and the Patreon. It looks like making sure that’s taken care of will take me through the rest of February.