I know I haven’t posted anything since January 20th, but it’s kind of hard to put a primal scream into words. We all know what’s going on so I won’t rant about it here. Instead, I will talk about what I’ve been doing to stay as balanced as possible.

One, I’m still writing. Seeing as it’s been so long since I started the book I’m going back and rereading what I have of Typhoon Warning so far in order to continue without screwing up continuity. And I may be editing a little along the way (don’t @ me, I need to do this). I also really, really need to get A Court of Green Clover finished so that I can release it on St. Patrick’s Day next month as planned.

Two, we bit the bullet and bought a Bambu Lab A1 Mini 3D printer for my office after Ramón showed me how I could print miniature furniture to stop me from tearing my hair out after the election. This little machine rules, people. It’s simple to set up and use, it’s remarkably quiet, and it’s fun. So far I’ve used it to print a toilet with a working lid and some tea canisters.

In fact the only problem is that the aftermarket .02mm nozzle we’d bought clogged (and I’m seeing some damage around the port). We’re getting a proper Bambu .02 nozzle sometime this month, as they were sold out when we bought the printer and we had to wait for them to restock. I’m holding off on printing any more miniatures until that arrives. Although the .04 nozzle is good enough where I may take a crack at designing some architectural elements for the dollhouse.

In the meantime I’ve been practicing with printing other stuff, like a filament spool and printing some super cute gaming boxes by FatesEnd at My Mini Factory. These are designed to look like intricately tooled little books, and the “pages” slide out from the top to reveal a storage tray for dice, miniatures, and cards.

The Lovecraftian Tome at left will be painted in brown and copper with a colorshift green Cthulhu, and the Artificer Tome at right will be a deep blue with gears and other decorations picked out in copper, silver, and brass. And yes, I know I can print them out in colored filament but engineering buff and white is what we had on hand so that’s what I printed them in. Ramón has already called dibs on the Lovecraftian, and he wants a custom insert so that he can use it to store his gaming minis. I’m not quite sure what I’ll keep in the Artificer but I’m definitely keeping something—jewelry odds and ends, possibly.

Three, the weather has finally improved to the point where I start working on the yard. The recent freeze claimed the lantana, boo, so I need to go out and trim that all back (it’s all well established enough that it’ll regrow). Once that’s done I have to trim back the zebra grass and cut down the poorly positioned crepe myrtles out front (whoever planted them right next to our front door so that the roots would grow under the slab, thanks a lot). I keep telling myself that sunshine and physical labor are good for me.

Despite the situation with the AC and all the running around that entails I’m still working on High Tide. I’m also editing Crystal Blade at the same time so that I can get it off to the editor next week in time to upload it to Amazon on 8/25 for my 8/29 release.

High Tide has not gotten a lot of interest on Vella, however, so I’m musing about jump-starting the Hidden Empire novella Goddess of the Nile and posting that on Vella as well. I could do a M-W-F release schedule for High Tide and a T-Th release for Goddess (and yes, I can write both at the same time. I’ve done it before, and it actually helps with output because if I’m not in the mood to work on one story I can work on the other one).

The reason why I’m eager to get reads on Vella is that I make seriously decent income there. What with gum treatment and household bills right now I need to follow the money. Of course, if any rich patron ever wishes to subsidize my work I ain’t gonna say no.

Despite what I said yesterday, I was working on formatting Lady of Thorns today when it occurred to me to check the outside temps.

83°F. And tomorrow was supposed to be back in the nineties. I dropped what I was doing and headed out to the garage to do battle.

See, I’ve had a long-term problem with the driver’s side front door on my Mazda 3. I suspect it’s due to the fact that the driver’s side is the one that catches the full Texas sun in the afternoon, and that heat is degrading or damaging components. As a result the central locking button doesn’t always work, I can’t manually lock the door from the inside, and my Door Ajar light will come on and stay on no matter how hard I slam the door. I would have to manually lock the door from the outside to get the light to go off, and recently that hasn’t been working unless I stand there for a minute and lock/unlock/lock/unlock the door until the light finally goes off. I don’t want to leave the light on because that drains the battery over time, damaging it, so I’ve been putting the car in the garage where the driver’s side wouldn’t get roasted every afternoon.

Being my grandfather’s granddaughter, I looked up reasons for what was going on and found a couple of possible solutions. The easiest was to spray contact cleaner inside the little clamping mechanism that holds the door closed because the grease in it may be gooked up, stopping it from making contact when it closes and fooling the car’s computer into thinking that the door isn’t closed properly. So I did this (I also need to add some white lithium grease when I can find the tube of it, which is SITH), cleaned away the gunk that indeed came out of the mechanism, then got in the car and closed the door. The Door Ajar light stayed on, but when I hit the central locking button the door locks clunked solidly and the light went off.

That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s more of a bodge than a fix. So I got out my tools and carefully started taking off the door interior panel (there’s a recessed panel behind the handle that hides a screw. Wanna know the perfect tool for popping it off? A curved sculpting tool. You’re welcome). Got that off and various wires disconnected, then checked all of the wiring I could see. There were no obvious worn/melted parts, which was reassuring.

Then I followed a set of wires down to the side of the door near the clamping mechanism. The wires plugged into a round outlet that I assumed controlled the mechanism based on its location. I unplugged the wires, hit the outlet with more contact cleaner, then plugged the wires back in. Next I went around the door, found every contact I could find and cleaned them all with contact cleaner, then put the door back together.

Got in the car and closed the door gently. The Door Ajar light went off. I’m not absolutely sure that I fixed the problem and I still want to give that clamping mechanism a good coating of white lithium grease, but so far it’s holding. If I can nurse it through to this fall I’ll buy a new clamping mechanism and install that when it’s not quite so warm outside (even at 83°F I was dripping with sweat by the time I went back inside, and that was with the garage door open).

Crystal Blade Episode 34: Oh, Oh, Oh, It’s Magic and Episode 35: Coda are now live on Kindle Vella.

Yeah, I know—two eps in one day? It’s because my publishing schedule has been thrown off this week. Normally I do M-W-F, but Ep 33 was published on Tuesday and I didn’t have Ep 34 ready by Wednesday, so you get a twofer today. You’re welcome.

Much as I would love to get the Two Thrones books hammered out this weekend and set live, I also have a buttload of cleaning that I really have to do now that the temps have dropped, plus I need to try and fix my driver’s side car door while the air is still tolerable in the garage. It’s times like these that I really wish I had the money to hire a PA and have them help me out with the formatting et al, but that is an achievement for another day.

Smashwords finally approved all of the Olympic Cove books so they’re being sent out to B&N, Apple, Kobo, et al. I’ll give it a few days for all the systems to update, then I’ll update my universal links to reflect the new data.

I’m currently working on formatting the Two Thrones books and I hope to have them all finished and uploaded to Smashwords and Google Play by next week. After that I just have the standalones (Behind the Iron Cross, Trickster, Stealing Dmitri) to format and upload, and all of my titles will officially be wide.

Then I can start recording the audiobooks. I’m already getting things set up on the laptop so that I can record in my closet (it’s a walk-in with outlets and there’s enough room for a small table, a mike, a chair, and me). I’m going to do the Olympic Cove audiobooks first, then the Two Thrones, Hidden Empire, and Paladins of Crystal books, then all the standalones. I may do the Esposito County Shifters books as well, but since that series just doesn’t do very well it won’t be until everything else is finished.

With the audiobooks the goal is to have everything recorded by the end of the year (considering that the average audiobook is about ten hours, plus all of the editing/formatting/uploading I’ll need to do in addition to the writing work I’m already doing, you can see why it may take six months to finish sixteen novels and a handful of novellas).

Crystal Blade Episode 20: Oh, The Places You’ll Go! is live at Kindle Vella. You know the drill.

And while we are on the topic, I was astounded today to get an email notification that I had earned a Vella bonus for April. I honestly don’t know why—I didn’t start earning money until this month, and of that I’ve made a grand total of $1.08 from my two loyal readers (I know who you are—love you oodles).

I can only assume that the bonus is because of my like-clockwork posting schedule of M-W-F since I started posting Crystal Blade. And considering how much I’ve actually made on the story so far, this is a very, very nice bonus indeed. I’m sortakinda tempted to do the same thing with High Tide and Hurricane Warning, to be honest, but since the books will be the last two books in the Olympic Cove series I worry that readers wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.

But I will think of all that tomorrow at Tara. In the meantime, I’m gonna bask in the glow of my bonus and prep next week’s episodes.

I didn’t mention this before but we had a massive hailstorm roll through my area on Friday. All the weather services had said, “Yeah, you’ll get some rain maybe, maybe a little thunderstorm, no big deal” so I didn’t think anything more about it until I was out in the garage and suddenly it sounded like someone was emptying a rock hopper onto the roof.

I hustled into the house and looked out in astonishment at our apparently boiling pool. We were getting hail the size of quarters, and apparently east of us they were getting hail the size of ping-pong balls.

But the truly astonishing thing? No cracks in either of our windshields. Oh, I mean, our cars are ever so slightly dimpled here and there now, but a lot of that will pop right out with hot temps. No, the thing I was most worried about was taking a big ol’ crack in one of our windshields from a hailstone. But that didn’t happen, and the house roof seems okay from what we were able to see. I’m sure there are dents up there, but we won’t know if there’s a leak until we get a wet spot somewhere on a ceiling. *shrug* Not gonna worry about it right now.

One cool thing about the hailstorm, though; as the hail started melting the surface temps cooled to the dew point, causing the air to saturate, condense, and form one hell of a layer of fog. We had thick sheets of mist covering pretty much every green space in the area. The athletic fields over on McDermott looked like something from Ireland and I half-expected to see the Fellowship strolling out of a cloudbank.

Yesterday it was warm enough for us to turn on the downstairs AC unit so I flipped it on before heading into the garage to finish up a piece. I was in there maybe ten minutes, and when I came back into the house the unit had shut off and the downstairs thermostat was flashing an -AC error.

I informed Ramón who immediately did some research and found out that -AC meant the power had been shut off at the control panel up in the attic, most likely because the float valve (which senses the amount of water in the drip pan under the condenser) had triggered, or a fuse had blown. He went up there today and lo, the drip pan was completely full of water. Since we don’t have the equipment to blow out the drainage system he tried scooping it all out and we let the pan dry out, at which point the thermostat started working again. So we switched the A/C back on. Three minutes later it cut out again with the -AC code.

On one hand, this means we have to call our HVAC company out on Monday to come blow out the drainage system and get it working again, and we really, really didn’t need a major repair bill right now. On the other hand, at least we know what’s wrong and the outside unit is still functional, which is a relief because we were told we’d need to replace it sometime this year. Hopefully the drainage thing won’t be too terribly expensive.

In the meantime we’re letting the cool air drift down from upstairs to cool off the downstairs. It’s more than a bit stuffy down here, but the weather’s only in the mid-80’s at the moment so it’s livable. I grew up in Chicago during summers like this with only a window AC unit in the living room—if I could deal with it then, I can deal with it now.

Weekends are for non-writing chores so yesterday I got out in the back yard and spread a big bag of dirt over the new lantana in the southern flower bed, then covered that with mulch. Today I am once again reminded that I am neither sixteen years old anymore nor am I Xena. Ow. Ow ow ow.

The muscle aches have not been helped by the arrival of joint aches due to a rather large storm system that has caused me to rack the car in the garage and park Ramón’s truck in the garage driveway (we can’t get both vehicles in the garage due to all the Stuff™ in there, and for storms coming from the west the house and garage provide some shelter from hail). Luckily it only dumped a crapload of water on us, which will make the lantana happy, but it did pop up a couple of tornadoes east of the Metroplex which doesn’t bode well for an already hammered Arkansas.

And it’s going to hit 90°F tomorrow before cooling off precipitously, plus the advent of more rain later on this week so my sinuses are already turning into a snot factory as a result. But hey, there’s no such thing as climate change. *pinches bridge of nose, sighs*