And we all know what that means: saddle sores and aching hips!

No, seriously though, I’m really looking for things the be excited about, because last year was not good in so many ways. Not just because of the medical issues and the general state of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in the world. I also lost all of my girls (my pet chickens) to a nasty virus. It’s called Marek’s Disease, and it’s transmitted through feathers.

There is no cure, and the “vaccine” is actually just a guarantee that your chickens will be infected and infectious to other birds. The vaccinated bird will be saved from the tumors, but will be Patient Zero their whole life, spreading painful, slow death with their thousands and thousands of feathers.

All that aside, it’s now 2020, and I’m on the third month of recovery from my surgery, so I decided to do something I haven’t done in a long while; I did a book cover painting. (Digitally, coz shaky hands, but still…)

It took me a day, mostly because I spent a lot of time zooming in and zooming out, and fussing with the same 26 pixels – like I do – but it came out pretty much exactly like it looked in my brain. Which is good! And satisfying! And yay!

Then it occurred to me: I really used to enjoy drawing. Back before it became my job. Back before Antarctic Press sucked the fun out of it. It was something I had to work hard to teach myself, because my natural talent isn’t for visual mediums. I needed to learn to draw and paint because being a writer is a hard sell, and creating my stories in sequential art gave me a two-pronged attack to launch at publishers.

Now I potentially have an eighteen pronged attack, but that’s not the way the book publishing labyrinth is laid out. The gatekeepers are all in a neat, narrow, linear row… so what I need is a very powerful laser, that can burn right through to the center… I need a DEATH STAR!

…no. I’m not going to build a death star. It’s been done. And redone.

But the eighteen prongs does give me idea™. Stay tuned! – K

I am a glutton for self-inflicted punishment. I’m sure there’s probably a specific medical term for that, but if there is, I don’t know if I want to add that into my brain storage as well. “Masochist” isn’t quite right, as I don’t enjoy pain… Pain-Free Masochism? Is that a thing?

Anyway, I finished another novel. 70,000 words in 13 days, and my seventh title this year. Also, I have three titanium rings in my neck. (Possibly related…) This isn’t an Egodrive book, but it is a prequel of the world that came before.

As we are now halfway through November, it is time to switch gears again, back to production for the Etsy stores. We’ve had customers begging for polyhedral versions of our dice designs all year, so I guess I should probably sit down and do those. Maybe I’ll eat breakfast at some point too, but I don’t want to over-schedule myself. – K