Things have been… well, you can read previous blags yourself if you fancy a cocktail of bloody-minded rage and intense self pity, but add in a tooth that has been broken for over a year getting infected, and some other stuff. Mostly the tooth. Holy shit, that was painful. It did not help that I was encouraged to medicate with whiskey “because stronger painkillers can be addictive”, as if I didn’t spend 9 months up to my eyeballs on oxycodone just so I was able to sleep without waking up screaming about my spine.
I’m down 2 bottles of EXTREMELY fine duty-free because of that. I’m going to miss the Venezuelan rum particularly.
I suppose, at least, it did mean I got to visit an actual dentist. I have been trying to get the tooth seen since it broke but dental appointments are rarer than a Fine Gaeler with a conscience since at least the start of the pandemic. It’s not the dentist’s fault, either. Just another failure of the system to throw on the pile with the others. Fucking Stephen Donnelly. A useless haunted thumb in a suit.
Anyway, writing. It’s been bloody difficult of late. Haven’t been able to do any non-contracted writing, and even the contract stuff has been like pulling, ahem, teeth. I like writing dystopian fiction as long as the world isn’t itself a nightmare dystopia, and that has not been going so well, has it?
I may (he said extremely cautiously) be climbing out of that benighted pit a little in the last few days. I had to go a little over deadline for the last chapter I was contracted for, which is a source of shame, but I finished it at the start of this month. And now I have another chapter in 2 different projects to work on, with perhaps a month and a half to sort them out. Meanwhile, that previous chapter was pointed to as an example of what the editor would like to see in some of these new projects, which is a little gfratifying.
And I’m not panicking. That’s usually a good sign. They are both very exciting to me, for all that they’re hugely different in style and tone. I can’t talk about any of it yet.
But soon.
