This summer has been a complete wasteland for productivity. Everything has been affected by my Long COVID. For me, the most odious symptoms have been brain fog, fatigue, lack of stamina, increased depression, anxiety, constant illness, and deteriorated vision. Actually, that's all of my symptoms, and they are, indeed, odious. Any one of those symptoms would be disruptive, but together they've interrupted my life like a flat tire on a roadtrip.
This doesn't mean I haven't been working on WaiMin. I've been productively thinking about it quite a lot. Why do I hate it? Why does it hate me? Should we break up? You know, productive thinking like that. I'm months behind schedule, but after a brief romance with health in February, it was the dog house for me again in March. Whatever the heck I had caught matched COVID-19 and RSV with its intensity—even making me bedridden for several weeks. When I came out of it finally in April, I was this new, sickly, tired, emaciated man. I've been working on rebuilding my stamina since then. I have never been so weak in my adult life.
But I'm feeling slightly better this week, so I re-read WaiMin and marked all the passages that I wanted to toss into a wood chipper. I've also been setting up the web server for this blog. It's just about ready to go live. I've been struggling with port blockages and config errors. It's so much better than writing about an anthropomorphic cow. Who wants to write about that when you can edit apache2 configs? You just don't understand how much fun I'm having over here.
At any rate, the blog will go live just as soon as the domain is registered. Then I can sit back, bask in the glory of my efforts, and watch nobody read it.
As I mentioned above, I've been rethinking this story. WaiMin's first seven chapters have undergone hardcore editing. I didn't like how they flowed. I didn't like how realistic the IT aspects where. In my opinion, I had given my story cement shoes and pushed it off the wharf. Watching it struggle to stay afloat these past few months has given me ideas. I'll start over and make Sharp a mermaid from a dimensional rift in the Salt Lake. Water is now pouring into the lake from another reality, solving Utah's decade long water table depletion, but now Utah has the opposite problem. Will Salt Lake City be submerged as Lake Bonneville resurrects from the dead? Will Sharp get together with the hot marine biologist who keeps trying to catch him with a net?
Perhaps I'll just stay with editing what I've already written instead.
—Dash