Okay, okay, I know, I keep promising I’m gonna get back on here, and then I keep not doing it. Commissions are crazy! I think I mentioned I got 3 new ones last Sunday. Well, I’m revising the last of those, and then those three will be done.

But…

The one who commissioned the third one also wants me to do ten more short stories, all between 2.5K and 5K words, so I’m going to have at least a week’s worth of work to do for that one.

Plus!

I’m sorely behind on my 50K-word commission. This coming week is going to be dedicated to finishing it. I hate having things hanging over my head, and this one has gone on for about a month already. I’m just…not as inspired on it as I have been on the others. It’s no excuse—I know—but I gotta get it done. I’ll feel so much better when it’s done and off my plate.

And then 10 commissions.

And there’s more….

One of my prior commissioners (I’ve done two commissions for him already) wants to do round 3 once my queue opens up a bit, and my very first commissioner has been hinting for weeks that he wants to do another one as soon as he gets a decent paycheck. (Priorities, people! Hehe.) So, after these ten, plus the 50K, I’ve got potentially two more, and the one whose commission I’m revising right now seems very pleased with my work (yay!), and while I never want to count my chickens before they hatch, I suspect that this particularly commissioner may bring even more work.

*pants*

So, I’m not dead, I’m just ridiculously busy. And it’s great! But I’m sorry I haven’t gotten some stories out for you guys. Geez, it feels like it’s been months since I posted anything story-wise on here. Oh, wait…it has… I’ll try to work it in sometime, but no promises…paying customers first and all, you know?

Oh! That reminds me, I recently added a link to my InkBunny account to the Books & Links page. Apparently I’m making a name for myself as “that author who will write anything, no matter how nasty it is.” It’s a…lukewarm feeling…kind of like my career. I mean, it’s good to be a jack-of-all-trades—it ensures that work will always be readily available—but on the other hand, I don’t want to only get commissioned to write nasty stories (happy stories are nice, too!), and I don’t want people to think that’s all I can write. (Most would probably never have read Shane and Colton or Human-Centaur Relations, so it’s a legitimate concern.)

But I digress…a lot. The nasty stories tend to go against FurAffinity’s Terms of Service, but InkBunny seems to have few compunctions against such things, and so I’ve been posting the things I can’t post on FA to IB instead. I’m also posting everything from FA to IB, too, so if you want to see what I’ve been working on, head over to my IB profile, but be warned: some of it is stuff that grosses me out to write, let alone to read.

I do have to admit, though, re-reading the stuff I’ve written that is gross and that does make me feel grossed out…kinda fills me with a sense of pride. Not because it’s gross, but because I was able to write something that made me feel something—especially a feeling as strong as revulsion! My day job is very logical and (nominally) unemotional. Being able to tap into emotions during story-writing is…kinda nice. 🙂

For those who have read my recent posts, this post must seem like I’m flying sky-high by comparison. And I am! I’m in a much better mood. The reason? I actually slept! For…months, now….geez, since before Christmas, I’ve been doing commissions feverishly. I think I’ve had one week without commissions in that time, and I’ve just been going and going. I’d go to bed late, tell myself I’d sleep in on the weekend, and then be up at 7:30 (I blame the herd, since they really want to be fed!). And then I’d be writing all day (when I wasn’t doing weekend chores) and wouldn’t take a nap, would be up late Saturday night, and it’d continue Sunday. I’d be exhausted Monday, but every week night, I had moar commissions to do, and so I wrote some more, sometimes staying up until 3:30…with an alarm at 7:30… So, yeah, this has gone on a long time.

I finally started noticing a problem this week at work, though. I was trying to write a report for a very boring test protocol and found it taking me all day. Normally I can churn that kind of stuff out in a couple of hours, tops. And I was making stupid mistakes—embarrassing stupid mistakes, like sending a revised version of a document to a customer, only to get feedback that I hadn’t caught all the errors the customer had pointed out. And with respect to my commissions, I found myself really getting sluggish on them and it taking me hours to do what I could usually do in minutes.

So, it was time for a day off. I took Thursday off, forced myself to stay in bed until 10:00, fed and loved on the herd, wrote a bit, went to the grocery store, and then went back to bed at 17:30. Slept until 23:30, checked on the herd, and went back to bed, slept until 7:30. In all, 21 glorious hours of sleep, and I feel so much better! So…word to the wise, don’t make the same mistake I did and let it get that far. Man, I was productive Friday morning! I ran out of things to do by 11:00, and my writing started happening really fast! So, yay! Rested and high-energy!

Also, I got to ride my neighbor’s tractor today. Mine is a little 28-HP tractor. It’s enough for moving tools back and forth, mowing the acreage, doing a little bit of box-blading here and there…but it’s kind of undersized for my property. It’s great—don’t get me wrong—it’s way better than not having one, but I got to ride around on a real tractor today (okay, okay, it was only about 50 HP, but still, almost twice as big as mine). But I’m really digressing again: long story short, my neighbor had back surgery and couldn’t put his hay out for his cattle and horses, so he asked me to do it and gave me a hay bale in exchange for the work. Yay! An online friend of mine is fond of saying, “make hay while there’s daylight” and is always delighted when I tell him about the stories I’m writing (and the money / “hay” that comes with them), so today I got to tell a pun: I (figuratively) made hay (wrote), (literally) moved hay (helped my neighbor), and (figuratively) saved hay (saved myself the money I would have paid my neighbor for a hay bale). Yay, puns!

I gotta go. I’m rambling (geez, almost 1200 words’ worth!), and I still want to finish revising this commission, go to the bar for karaoke night, and maybe poke at the 50K-word story a bit before bed.

Also, my back hurts! Yay! Oh, wait…