We Interrupt This Broadcast...

 ...To announce, with some regret, that this blog will be on a bit of a hiatus for a period yet to be determined. Somehow, in the midst of a pandemic in which we've been urged to stay at home and I have been doing a whole lot of very little...

...I have somehow managed to tear the cartilage in a knee.*

The injury happened, readers will be astonished to learn, about a week before the time of the previous post here. For the past three weeks I have been waiting, per my GP's instructions, to see if this injury wasn't just a ligament strain. It wasn't a ligament strain.

Some people, my GP assures me, can tear cartilage and go on to lead perfectly normal lives. Some, apparently, don't even know they've injured themselves.

I am not one of those lucky people.

Instead I am experiencing pain sufficient to make me nauseated. I am in sufficient pain that even mild exercise isn't possible at the moment. And more to the point where this blog is concerned, I haven't been able to think clearly enough to write anything of use for posting here. Or to write anything at all, really. It took a couple of hours to write this. Oh, and did I mention that pain-killers don't work very well for me?

I'm supposed to be having an MRI at some point in the immediate future. I suspect the best outcome of that procedure will be surgery and rehab. Wish me luck.

*As near as I can tell, I inflicted this on myself while making the bed. Doesn't make for a very exciting story, I'm afraid.

Happy 2021?

Hey, 2021 is going to have to work really hard to suck more than 2020 did. With any luck at least some of my readers will have been vaccinated against The Plague within the next 200 days. Rather looking forward to being jabbed myself.

Merry Plaguemas

From all of us to all of you. Because we are Canadian this blog's Xmas Holiday encompasses Boxing Day as well; the tally of Books Read in 2020 will take a few days off, returning on Monday 28 December. Looking forward to cooking a larger-than-usual holiday feast, beginning on the 24th and providing sufficient leftovers to feed us until 2021.

Christmas dinner (appropriately boozy) by Anthony DeLorenzo of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory
Image from Wikimedia Commons (licensed under Creative Commons, cc-by-2.0)

So Now What?

Some of you may have noticed there was no novel post today. There's a good and simple reason for this:

I got nothin'.

Photo by Arnold Reinhold, by way of
Wikimedia Commons

When I first started Quipu a couple of years ago now (!!) my intent was to publish, online, those of my novels I hadn't been able to publish in the more traditional fashion. In other words, to give them away to anyone who was interested.*

I was writing, at that time, with a fair amount of energy and enthusiasm, and was confident I'd have new material to post here well before I ran out of novels in the desk drawers. After all, I had, what, a half-dozen of those? That's what I thought, at the time.

What I didn't think about—because who did?—was the impact a worldwide pandemic might have on my ability to write. Hell, on my mental health in general.† So when the big novel I was working on suddenly fell apart, and then my publisher went out of business before I could deliver a third French Intrigues novel, I found myself with no more fiction ready for posting. Unless I wanted to start posting unfinished novels and hope the potential for embarrassment if I didn't finish would be enough to get me writing again. Which, no, wasn't something I wanted to use as an approach. Not right now.

So for the time being I haven't any more fiction to share with you out there in Vacuum Land. And who knows when I'll feel like writing again? (Nice to know I'm not the only one in this position, but not all that nice since you ask.) I figure I'll be able to manage a dozen or so posts to fill out the rest of the year, but come January your guess, gentle reader, is as good as mine.

*I was never convinced I'd be able to make a living writing fiction, because almost nobody I knew did. I am even less interested in publishing now than I ever was before, though I hope to eventually regain my interest in writing as an activity.

†I've been fortunate: at least five members of my immediate family have been diagnosed with Covid-19 but none has been seriously affected.

D (500)

We interrupt the current stream of sengoku jidai posts to announce that with this interruption Quipu reaches 500 posts. This isn't a huge number when set against some of the blogs I follow, but it's approximately 490 posts more than I was expecting to put up.

And no, I didn't know that "D" was Latin for 500 until I looked it up.

What Day Is This, Again?

Once more, dear readers, there is going to be a brief delay in the serialization of Sowing Ghosts. (Yes, I know: just when it was getting all exciting, too... well, maybe.)

Blame the aging corpus again. I had oral surgery last week (no, you don't want to know the details, you filthy ghouls you) and while everything seems to have gone well, the aftermath includes, among less-describable (because eww) conditions, a more or less constant state of drug-induced haze. I am assured this won't continue for long, but Prudence (damn her eyes) suggests there's wisdom in not trying to do too much just now.

In the meantime, the drugs are lending an interesting effect to the reading with which I am filling my days. (Tolkien has never seemed so entertaining.) And this is all over-the-counter stuff. Imagine what I could be getting up to if only they still prescribed laudanum...