Well, that was an interesting holiday

I had a choice between getting a booster in January or getting a booster on Christmas eve, and my long-suffering spouse, who does so much and asks for so little, asked me to take the soonest possible shot. To be honest, this surprised me. I was the driving force in our house for vaccinations, and I haunted the Vaccine Hunter discord to find pop-up clinics for second shots, finding pop-up clinics for my two sons before I could sign them up for their shots via our provincial vaccination portal.

But I knew the booster was important to my husband when, on the first day we could make appointments for boosters - they dropped the age to 50 - he came downstairs to tell me the site had gone live early and I should log in. I had been about to take a shower and said I would sign in afterward; he said he was in a queue that estimated a 55 minute wait time, so I could maybe log in and then go shower?

This made clear how important this was to him, so I duly joined the 50k queue and went upstairs to shower. When I got back downstairs, I had eight minutes left to wait, and he came downstairs to tell me when and where he'd made his own booster appointment so we could try to line them up.

I got in.

The server went down for twenty minutes. So when I did get in again--and I tried every two minutes--there were zero appointments for the 17th December, my husband's date, and zero appointments at the location he'd chosen.

In fact, the only appointments in December were: December 24th. Every other day was booked up. There were appointments for early January. Christmas eve is ... not a good time be boosted if you react to the shot at all, so I told my husband what the options were: Christmas eve or early January.

He immediately chose Christmas eve. Well, no, what he said was "get the earliest possible booster available." As I'd told him when "earliest possible" was, I chose the Ehristmas eve shot.

(A word here: there is no decision by fiat in our household; there never has been except in situations that involve safety - and this would of course include parenting decisions. But if we're not a consensus household, we take everyone else's opinions into account. Could I have said No, Bad Idea? Yes. Yes I could. But weighing my discomfort against my husband's, I chose to get the booster Christmas eve.)

I did not have a terrible reaction - the booster was my first Moderna, the previous two shots being Pfizer - by which I mean no fever, no flu symptoms - but I was exhausted for all of Christmas Eve (I fell asleep practically at dinner T_T) and all of Christmas day. Boxing day was better, in that I had a partially functioning brain. But it was only partially functioning, and when I sat down to write actual words, they were ... drivel. Garbage.

Not writing has often built Michelle's internal anxiety - even before Patreon. Like: I'm a writer. I should be writing. When writing does not happen, I start to fill a reservoir of stress and internal criticism, and the only way through that is to write.

Or... make a deliberate decision not to write.

When my kids were in elementary school, I learned early that when there was a school holiday, there was  a writing holiday. I knew that the attempt to write words, broken constantly by perfectly normal young-child interactions would cause a level of frustration and despair that made good parenting hard. When the kids got older, that was no longer necessary.

So the last time I took a writing holiday was when my now-adult sons were in elementary school.

But I chose to take the week between Christmas and New Year's off, in part because my ability to actually write words was in question and the inability was adding to unfortunate stress levels. It wasn't just the brain fog of the booster - that lasted 2.5 days, and I had no fever, no flu symptoms, no joint pain (very sore arm, but that's normal for me). But the background Omicron covid threat had already eaten a large chunk of my brain, as our household navigated the risks we were willing to take, and the risks we shouldn't--in this case there was no complete consensus.

This is ... not what an author is supposed to do during this time period. People do come to check web-sites and social media when they're on holidays, in part looking for good news or new news or any news from the authors they follow, whose books they love. The smart thing to do would not be to go all Oscar the Grouch, sink into the depths of the trash can, and pull the lid on over one's head.

I have not always been accused of being either savvy or smart.

***

Now, it is January 2nd. I am looking back on 2021, and ... it's been a year. Things changed, and I sometimes take a bit of time to land on my feet, to make the mental adjustments change demands. The West novels were dropped by DAW--for reasons that made perfect sense to me--which was a huge change. I started the Patreon holding my breath--and people came.

You're all here with me, transforming perhaps the worst disaster of the year into something unbelievably good. I threw out all of the prior words in the first novel of the final arc in stages as I re-oriented myself with only one goal in mind: let the book breathe. One of my earliest subscribers does all of her reading now by audiobook, and that lead me to contact Eva Wilhelm (the narrator for the West titles), and I now have Sea of Sorrows available in audio - although Audible.com is still forthcoming, sorry >.<. (ACX was bogged down, and when we finally reached the head of the queue, we discovered that the book was "claimed", meaning there would be no Amazon link to the audio book. That's being sorted now.)

I contacted Jody Lee about cover art. I don't have a finished book, but artists are booked well in advance and I wanted to have her do the covers for the last West arc, as she's done almost all of the rest of them. I also wanted to license reprint rights for audiobook covers for the novels that I would be self-publishing.

After hyperventilating for three months in early 2021, I found, to my surprise, that I was actually standing on solid ground. And that's entirely due to Patreon and to all of my patrons; there's a peace of mind that comes from this that I cannot fully put into words.

The year was rough, but it had some shining, good moments, some true positives. My parents were both fully boosted by Christmas day, and remain healthy, as do my husband's parents. Our friends are likewise healthy, as are our sons.

I am sitting, once again, at my writing computer; I have opened my Scrivener files and I am rereading previously written words. I am a bit behind, and I apologize for that--but thank you for allowing me to take my first holiday for well over a decade.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday.

***

This post is mirrored from https://michellewest.ca/

I find it hard to have a conversation on Patreon, and have created a WordPress Patreon only blog to make it easier for me to find new comments and respond to them, sometimes at length.

This post is https://michellewest.ca/2022/01/02/well-that-was-an-interesting-christmas-new-years/; you should be able to hit Login with Patreon, and should be able to read posts there at the same levels you can read them here.

I'll answer comments here as well if this is your preferred format, but probably not as expansively (which might be a good thing!).