Workplace Injuries

I suffered a terrible writing-related workplace injury yesterday. I'm doing some preliminary research reading and apparently spent too long sitting in the wrong position. As a result, I've got a kink on one side of my neck/shoulder. This seems to happen to me about once a year. Last night after children's choir I sat with a heat wrap around my neck, and I think I'm about to break out the electric neck massager. This afternoon will be swimming pool time. It's not as bad as it usually tends to be. It's not actually painful, just a little stiff so that I can't turn my head as far on that side. I'll have to break out my reading back support pillow that forces me to sit straight instead of curled slightly to the side. Though it's also possible that this comes from sneezing violently at a bad angle (ragweed season is upon us).

The book I'm reading is one on history that I grabbed from the new books shelf at the library because I had this vague sense that it might give me ideas for the sequel to the steampunk book. Then I started reading it and thought I might be wrong. And now I've had a couple of good plot-shaping ideas and some sense of some of the character types I want to deal with. I actually think that the book that this one is a follow-up to would be even more relevant to this project, but of course my library doesn't have it. I'll have to check Interlibrary Loan, or maybe suggest it for purchase because there's little point in having the part 2 without the part 1.

But it looks like I have plenty of time to work on this book because it seems the first book is going to be a summer release. That's probably good because it's during the summer when teens will be out of school, and it falls during convention season, but I'm still impatient, since I started work on this book in 2010. I was hoping to have a sense of sales results on that book before I start house hunting, but this way, it's possible that I could be moved before I have to deal with a book release. This just means I have to work harder on my other books.

So I should probably start brainstorming the next book in the new contemporary fantasy series, which is currently scheduled to launch in October. I can get a couple more books done before the steampunk book is published.

I have this grand plan of trying to achieve a reasonable work/life balance in the fall, getting in my writing time but still making time to do the fall stuff I love to do. We'll see how that goes because I think I've said this for the past several years. I have pages of plans for this sort of thing in my planning notebook, and none of them have come about. Maybe this year! But first fall has to actually get here. In the meantime, I will enjoy the remaining days of swimming pool weather.