Well, very little writing of any kind got done in September and October. There are many and various reasons, but the big two are these:
(1) Towards the end of August my desktop computer began to show signs of possible hard drive failure. In the second week of September they became pervasive enough that I decided my hard drive was going out and that I needed a replacement. What followed was four weeks of me futzing with the machine trying, and failing, to clone the old hard drive to the new computer by one means and another... and eventually figuring out it was the SATA part of the computer's motherboard, not the hard drive itself, going bad. After delays caused by three consecutive weekends on the road, I finally got a replacement machine with a new hard drive containing copies of my old operating system and all my old programs. Total cost: six weeks of lost productivity, $160 for various parts, $400 for the replacement computer, and $95 for a repairman to do in five minutes what I couldn't do in five weeks.
(2) No sooner was the last glitch solved in my replacement desktop than I traveled to FangCon in Birmingham, AL. That convention would have lost money in any case, but my transmission decided to break slightly while in Alabama- right AFTER I'd had work done to prevent such. I coaxed the van home, handed it over to my preferred transmission shop, and waited, waited, and waited... and I'm still waiting. I had to rent a U-Haul to get to OniCon in Galveston, and I ended up canceling out of BanzaiCon altogether (and losing my $300 booth fee). Total expenses caused by the transmission issue are approaching $3,000.
Those two things are the main reasons, aside from travel fatigue between conventions, why I haven't felt creative the last couple months.
But since I ended up with a weekend off (unplanned and unwanted), I'm going to try to get productive. (Especially since I NEED to get money coming in urgently- I have only four other conventions, all expensive and untried, before the end of the year and my seven weeks of downtime.)
So I'm going to experiment again with live-writing via Google Docs.
Here's the link: docs.google.com/document/d/1gn…
Every night from tonight through Tuesday night, from 7 PM until bed, I will write SOMETHING. Tonight I'll work on more Changeling Space Program, but after that it'll be requests. Patrons and donors to my transmission GoFundMe will get preference, of course!
Sorry I couldn't make it to South Carolina this weekend, but I hope the writing makes up for it!