Day 17: These Damn Hands

Well, this one is gonna be real short because my right hand is about to fall off. I have some kind of problem with them that produces arthritis-like symptoms and that a team of specialists has utterly failed to diagnose over the past year.  My neurologist thinks that it might be repetitive stress-related, or that if it isn’t, the amount of time I spend typing certainly doesn’t help.  I’m hoping to buy a new stick of RAM and a copy of Dragon soon, as I’ve been advised multiple times to switch to dictation.  Here I am, going on about how much my hands hurt and making them worse.  Umm, promotion stuff…

I did a bunch of stickering today!  All totally legal, of course, thank you.  I’ve started distributing the beautiful stickers to friends to help me beautify Philly.  Most of my writer work today has actually gone not to promotion but to writing, or rather, proofreading and revising the first draft of the sequel to Mutt. I’m hoping the book will surpass Mutt in precisely the ways a should, retaining the good elements from the first while expanding the world, raising the stakes, and delving far deeper into the core characters.  There are some exciting new additions to the cast as well, which I’ll be teasing in the months to come.  I’ll hopefully have these revisions done and the draft, which is now something between a first and a second draft, will finally be going out to my beta readers tomorrow.  Hopefully they strike that right balance of constructive criticism and stroking my ego enough to keep me going.