So in 2020 I was stuck in North Africa during the pandemic, locked down in some shnazzy city with a laptop and some hard copies of my old manuscripts to my first novel.
I retyped the whole damn thing. All 60,000 plus words. And then my elbows and hands started to go numb, all pins-and-needles no matter the time of day. Doctor said it was a nerve problem, said I might not be able to move my hands later on if it went untreated.
So I came home on a repatriation flight. LOL. And after a month of physical therapy I could type again without trouble. But with that lack of trouble, work returned.
So in 2021, I tried to finish a thesis and then my novel again. My dream publisher needed 80,000 words so I had to keep writing in the story lines I’d cut out years earlier. And on 21 June 2021, I finished it! And I sent it to an editor who misread my publishing goals and dunked the whole thing in red ink and condescension, assuming I wasn’t a native English speaker. What irritated me the most were the cliches, and how she kept trying to bend my creative descriptions back into the bland cliches from which they were birthed.
Nuh uh.
And then work returned. And since I’m good at it, there was a lot of work put on my plate. For months. 😮
2022, its August now. I don’t know how the time flew. Last April and May, I was swaying in a hammock by Manila Bay, typing on this laptop, trying to hammer out a problem chapter. Then time flew again and now I’m on a month of vacation while I recover from surgery, and I’m dead-set to finally, finally, finally ship out my manuscript for Hunting the Remember: Chimera Anamnesis to a publisher and find ways to animate my 2005 script, SCRAMBLE, both set in the same universe at different years.
So that’s the update. I need to explore Patreon. I’ll post it here once its ready. 🙂
Many thanks, y’all!
-I.R. 04 September 2022