I’m well into my second year of post-COVID arthritis. The good news is that I am slowly recovering. The fatigue went away early in the year. The arthritis improved greatly after I was vaccinated. This doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. Walking is difficult. I still have to spend time managing joint function and pain. I don’t know if there will be permanent damage. But I can do a lot more than I could this time last year, so that’s a good thing.
One of the family has just retired. I knew this was coming, which is why I’ve been especially concerned about wanting to get new projects out in the last few years… and not being able to do so because of health and other disasters.
Art
Zazzle was my first project after I started to improve. My aim was to add 1000 products to my store, for a total of about 3000 public products. The new designs were things like basic patterns. The idea was to add generic stuff that tends to sell and worry about more creative things some other time.
I didn’t quite get to the total because Zazzle was also doing some cleaning. They removed products that weren’t selling or had been out of stock for a long time. Overall, I did add a lot of stuff, and sales were reasonable.
Publications
I had two stories in anthologies that were supposed to come out this year. “Busy Little Bees” was released in Common Bonds. Rosalind’s Siblings was cancelled. I didn’t sell any new stories this year.
Writing
Getting back into writing has been difficult. I did write two stories for Second Life hunts, though they were both ones with more random and strange structures. One was articles and journal entries and the like. The other described various species of spider. When I attempted to write things with more regular story structures, I completely failed. I have a lot of notes for a sequel to Werecockroach, but I struggled to actually write it.
Late in the year, I decided the best thing would be to write whatever worked. Random and strange worked for the short stories, so I picked something in my pending ideas which fitted that. The winner was Void Stew, which I’ve been tweeting about as the vegetable growing story. It’s all about people trapped in an endless void, who grow vegetables to survive.
There will be future issues with marketing this book. There’s some market for quieter slice-of-life stories, which this does come under. Though it’s also got random second person bits, one character with verse chapters, and a lot of stuff that can be harder to sell. I hadn’t intended to write it right now because of the potential difficulties.
But anyway, here I am. I need to finish something and I’ll just have to hope I find an audience. I’m hoping that getting something finished will mean I will be able to write the Werecockroach sequel, which I think does have an audience.
Other Things
I managed to post a few YouTube videos, including a brand new ASMR one with keyboard typing. I did a few of the new shorts as well, which was a nice way to ease back into it. I have no plans or schedule for my channel. I’ll just upload things as I get an urge to make a video.
I want to get back into reading now that my brain functions again. I have a few books in mind and was given a few recommendations. I don’t know if I’ll end up reviewing them or not.
TL;DR
My health is improving. I added a lot of basic patterns to Zazzle and started writing a book about growing vegetables in an endless void.