Song of the Week

Sinéad O’Connor, “Jackie”

Happy Monday.

I am hard at work on rewrites for The Book of the New Moon Door. I was originally trying to keep up with Journey to the Water as well, but I think at this point I need to concede and put Journey on hiatus until New Moon Door is done. Since I have plenty of chapters of New Moon Door, I can post one a week (first on Patreon and then here) for the next month or so.

This is for a number of reasons:

First, rewrites are going to take a lot of my time. The original draft of The Book of the New Moon Door is over 170,000 words long. In order to achieve an October release date, I’ll need to finish the new draft ideally by the end of August.

Second, I’m not going to lie to you: Baldur’s Gate III came out. I’m a fairly disciplined writer, but I’m not that disciplined.

Third is below the cut for medical stuff and complaining about the US healthcare system:

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My husband is starting a new job this school year. This is very good! It’s a great move for his career and life in general! However, his old job’s health insurance coverage ended at the end of June, and the new job’s insurance hasn’t started yet. He’s been told it will go into effect October 1. In the meantime, I’ve run out of one of my medications. It’s not the same one that I had trouble with last year (I take two different meds daily), but I’m now two weeks into withdrawal symptoms for a medicine that I was “on too small of a dose” to withdraw from. Symptoms are much milder than from my other medication, but I’m still struggling with insomnia, lethargy, and depression (the “my brain is slow” kind, at the moment, rather than the “I’m sad all the time” kind). For a while, I was just itchy all over, which was fun, but that seems to have passed. (Fortunately, I have enough of the other medication to last me until October 3. I counted.) I’ll get through it, even if it takes until October to be able to get my meds, but I’m not firing on all the proverbial cylinders. If we had any kind of reasonable healthcare system in this country, this would not be a problem. I am also wondering what would happen if my partner or I needed more life-or-death kinds of medication, like, say, insulin. Do you just… die? Two months into your new job? Especially if your new paychecks don’t come fast enough to pay thousands out of pocket?

Anyway, I’ll be fine, this is just frustrating and slowing down my writing progress. I appreciate your patience.