
I swapped shifts at the fireworks stand with Middle Son, because he’s driving up to Ohio to visit Number Three Son for a few days. That means I’m writing part of this post very late Friday night and very early Saturday morning. I’ve written quite a few posts like that, mostly back in some dark days.

Oklahoma had a series of bad storms roll through late last week, and I mentioned that one stand like ours had flipped. Here’s the photo our sales director sent out. I still can’t imagine the windspeed it took to knock that over.
Sales are a little slow so far, but we’ve still got a week to go. We’ve sold two of our $800 assortments though, so that’s a plus. Those things are kind of a pain to load back up at the end of the season.
Anniversaries
Ten years ago, I was in ICU at the VA.
I suppose things are better for me these days. My kidneys didn’t really recover from the way they got abused during my stay. They gave me lots of fluids, then pulled those fluids off pretty quickly, and that caused my kidney function to tank, badly. It’s recovered some, but not to where I was.

My blood sugars are doing a lot better. My HbA1c at the time was 10.8, or an average of 263. These days I’m down to about 6.0/126. I’ll take it.
I’ve regained most of the weight I lost back then. Such is life.
And nine years ago this week, Lady Sif joined our family. She’s doing alright these days, though she seems to be missing Youngest Daughter, who’s long been her favorite human. Sif would spend hours on YD’s bed with her, but now doesn’t like to hang out in there. On previous occasions when YD would be gone for a few days, Sif would still paw and scratch at the door to be let in, and we’d do that. But she seems to understand that YD won’t be home any time soon, so there’s no point in going in there.
YD finishes camp in four weeks or so and comes home for a bit, but then heads off to college soon after. I’ll be curious to see how Sif handles that.
Writing
One of the hard things for a lot of self-published writers is dealing with promotion. It’s not unusual for a writer to be an introvert, and to have a lot of trouble promoting our work. You’ll find a lot of new authors flooding social media with “Buy My Book!” posts, which generally don’t work as well as we’d like. I used to do that a lot, but I finally learned my lesson, thanks in no small part to Rachel Thompson’s material. I’m a bit more eclectic in my SM posts these days, and the only real promotion I do is for After, my free serial novel.
Then again, I haven’t had anything new to promote in far too long. I’m working on that, honest.
I have long had unreasonable expectations about how quickly things should happen. In my younger years when I took piano lessons, I wanted to be able to play like Billy Joel or Elton John right away, without putting the practice in. I got frustrated that thirty minutes of practice didn’t let me play things perfectly.
That’s continued into my adult years, unfortunately. I’ll try one promotional thing or another a couple of times, then throw up my hands in despair when it doesn’t create hundreds of sales. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t want to try anything new because I’m convinced that it won’t work, so why should I put in the effort to start it in the first place?
Case in point: TikTok and YouTube. I’ve got a nice webcam and microphone on my big laptop, even if one of the fans does make a terribly loud noise all the time. I’ve replaced it at least half a dozen times in the seven years that I’ve owned that machine. Each time the new one seems to last a couple of months before it starts rattling to beat all hell. But I use that noise as justification to not do any videos from that computer.
I’ve got a nice phone though, and I could probably make decent videos from it. But I tell myself that I don’t think I can get good audio out of it without using a separate mic. And given my track record, I don’t want to spend money on a device that I’ll only use a couple of times. I’ve done that way too often already.
But even if I had the equipment, I’m not sure what kind of content to generate. I’m not an expert in any field these days, so at best, all I’d be doing is talking for 30 seconds or so about the new blog post or the newest chapter of After because I’m not really writing anything else.
And I’m pretty self-conscious about my looks. Always have been. It’s not that I think I’m ugly. I just don’t think I’m handsome. So if I don’t put my face up on the screen, I’m forced to find or shoot some short video clips to talk over. That’s more work for the video stuff when I should be writing. Though let’s be honest: I’m not doing much of that as it is.
Sigh. This has turned into a much whinier post than I’d intended. That’s probably what I get for blogging at 0215.
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