arthritis

2021: Recovery

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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.

2020: Arthritis

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After a few bad years when I couldn’t get much done, I’d hoped for a quieter year to sort things out before Brexit hit in 2021. Instead, everyone had a bad year, and I got very little done.

In February, my family had a bad illness which we now think was COVID-19. The initial illness barely affected me, but in the weeks after, I developed severe reactive arthritis (I’ve had it mildly before after viruses, but not like this). This was also during lockdown, so it wasn’t really possible to see a doctor. I had to figure out a home treatment.

One good thing is I got to go out for my birthday, as it was before walking became difficult and before lockdown. My previous birthday was a funeral, so this was an improvement.

I spent most of the year managing the arthritis and sorting things like food orders. I couldn’t do much typing or thinking, so I mostly focused on doing stuff in Second Life and other distractions from the pain.

At the end of the year, I still have arthritis. It’s a lot better than it was and I can think clearly again, though my free time is still limited.

 

Novels / Novellas

One of the issues I’ve faced as an author is a lack of charisma. People are not going to give me money for a crowdfunded campaign. They’re not going to buy birthday presents from a wishlist. If I reach out for help, I might as well have said nothing, as nothing much happens. My value to the majority of people in the reading/writing community is only in the products I can produce.

The next issue being a run of bad years, so I have a lack of new products. This is how it had to be for my health, but it doesn’t make it a good situation.

So this year, I tried a more roundabout solution: I made my products more expensive.

Back when I started, people complained if a self-published novel was more than $0.99 and never mind novellas. My old price point of $0.99 for a novella and $2.99 for a novel was tolerable, but as high as people would go. There have been changes in the industry since then, including bigger publishers taking on more novellas and charging very high prices for them. So I went up a modest amount, taking my novella to $2.99 and the longer works to $4.99.

As well as an overall potential increase in profit, it’d mean novellas make income in their own right, rather than being sold at a loss to promote longer work… because frankly, it didn’t happen. People liked my novella Werecockroach, but it didn’t encourage most readers to try something else.

The first month I did this, sales were about the same. I sold one $4.99 book and multiple copies of Werecockroach at $2.99. I just made more money than usual. November and December weren’t as good, but I suspect sales would have been bad regardless as a lot was going on. Not as good still meant I made more money overall compared to the old prices. I tried a brief advertising campaign in November, but it didn’t get the sales of previous campaigns, so I ended it early.

I’ll continue to monitor the situation and see if sales go back up again as the year settles. If they do, this will give me a bit of space to finish something else. It’ll also mean that something else can be a novella.

 

Short Stories

Last year, I said I wanted to find more projects to submit short stories to. Most of the year was a bust, with nothing likely appearing. There are a few possible projects at the end of the year, so I’ll aim to submit a few things next year for these.

Both of the anthologies I’m involved with ended up delayed due to the pandemic. Common Bonds has now sent out backer reward copies and contributor copies. Early reviews seem to like my story. Both that anthology and Rosalind’s Siblings have been rescheduled for 2021.

In final short story stuff, I put out a temporary short story collection called Patchwork in March 2020. It’s now been removed as 2020 has ended. This had a number of my previously published stories, including ones that had only been on Patreon. It was free and was just to do something nice for people for the year. So if anyone sees a reference to it and is confused, that’s what went on. The stories will all be back again for the next proper collection.

 

Zazzle / Art

I have no complaints about Zazzle this year. They reacted quickly to pandemic sales issues by putting out face masks. I sold some of these (and got some for me). I also saw much higher sales (of everything) in the last quarter. I suspect because people were stuck at home, so those with money found fun things to buy. I continue to be glad I got all this set up as passive income.

I had issues producing art for most of the year, as my hands consisted of sausage fingers and joints that couldn’t take any pressure. I regained the ability to hold tools later in the year, so got back into it by doing Botober. The pieces were posted on this Twitter thread. I’ll likely work a few of them into Zazzle designs, but it was just good to get drawing again.

I will note that doing the art challenge didn’t get a lot of engagement in the sense of new followers or the like. It’s a thing to do for fun.

 

YouTube

I planned to produce a video a week for a year for my YouTube channel. My last video was in March. During this video, I already had early signs of arthritis in my fingers and arms, but hadn’t realised what was happening. It’s why I’m smudging charcoal with the backs of my hands, because bending the wrist too much was starting to get painful. I’d had conjunctivitis too badly the week before to use the first draft of the video, which is also a reactive arthritis symptom. Shortly afterwards, I stopped being able to lift a camera and that was that.

The bad news is it means the channel stalled before I got very far. The good news is the channel didn’t see an overall loss in subscribers and views. A few videos have seen a continual rise in views as they get picked up by the algorithm.

I know people panic about small breaks ruining their chances forever, but this wasn’t my experience. A channel is unlikely to grow during an absence, but it doesn’t mean it sinks either. It’s waiting there for when I can film again, at whatever frequency that turns out to be.

 

Reviews

I was getting sorted to start reviewing again towards the end of the year. I selected a few books, created a schedule and started reading one of them. Then I got an email from Amazon terminating my Amazon Associates account. I always knew this could happen, as Amazon is known for doing this. In theory, people can appeal, but it’s hard to appeal when you’re guessing exactly what happened. Amazon gives basic categories, but no details. The result of the appeal was just a resend of the original email.

I looked around for other larger affiliate schemes, but I didn’t see anything likely to actually make money. The only bigger one I found was Barnes and Noble, who rejected my application.

I will review a few things here and there as I feel like it, but mostly my reviewing is over. I’ve closed my review requests for the foreseeable future. I don’t think there’s a big demand for detailed text reviews anyway these days, so this was going to happen at some point even without the loss of Amazon Associates.

 

TL;DR

I’ve had reactive arthritis for most of the year, following probable exposure to COVID-19. I didn’t do a whole lot of creative stuff, but I did put out a temporary free collection, raised my book prices and started drawing again towards the end of the year. I have no firm plans for the future.