Not a very clever title, is it? But it’s Monday morning and I’m sick. The dog has been trying plaintively for two hours to get me to take her for a walk and I’m just not up to it. My muscles hurt, my chest is heavy, my throat itches, oxygen isn’t making it through my sinuses… so I have to type. Zelda is smart enough to know that when I’m engaged in any other activity, I *might* be willing to take her for a walk, but when my hands are on the keyboard, I’m working and it’s not going to happen. So writing is, at the moment, a self-defense against a dog who doesn’t understand the difference between a human with a cold and a human who’s being lazy.

I really resent this cold. I’m three plus weeks into the 30-day autoimmune protocol diet, and I have been so, so good. I haven’t cheated once. To the best of my knowledge, not a single bit of any of the forbidden foods has crossed my lips. I say “to the best of my knowledge” because a couple times I used something, then later looked at the ingredient list. Green ginger tea apparently has “natural flavors” in it. I have no idea what those natural flavors might be so maybe they’re okay and maybe they’re not. I stopped drinking ginger tea after I figured that out.

I figured it out because eh. Even before the cold, I wasn’t feeling as good as I had hoped I would. So maybe I need to stick with it longer or maybe I need to up my doses of fermented foods and organ meats or maybe I need to try the FODMAP version… but at the moment, I’m not convinced it’s worth it. On the other hand, I have a cold. I feel like crap. So possibly now is not the best time to be making this call.

The good news of having a cold: I binge-watched Once Upon A Time over the weekend. Just the first season. I don’t think I would have gotten into that show without a need for sleepy sick television, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have stuck with it–it gets quite slow during the middle of the season–but I’m happy I did if only for the sake of the story of Red Riding Hood. What a great twist on a fairy tale! I won’t provide spoilers, but watching the whole season was worth it just for the development of that character.

The bad news of having a cold: well, it’s a cold. Sufficient bad news, yeah? But writing just hasn’t been going well at all. I’m not finding Fen’s voice again. I’m going to go back and start the first chapter over–I think it’s the right time, the right place, the right overall experience, but there’s something wrong with it and I think it might be Fen. But I suspect that’s probably not going to happen today. Today feels an awful lot like a lie in front of the television drinking green tea and piling up tissues sort of day, and good news for me, I still have two more seasons of Once Upon a Time to watch.

As for my website redesign… well, I changed the site. But I realized as I spent hour upon hour trying to create materials that would be my “landing page” on the Web, my “portal” to selling my books to new readers, that I really just don’t want to turn my blog into that sort of space. I’ve been posting here off-and-on for eight years and it’s personal, not professional. Changing it, fine. Making it a “sales tool”–nope, not okay with me. So I’ll have to think about that some more, I guess. Maybe I can optimize the Rozelle Press site so that it becomes top of the search results for my author name and then it can be the professional marketing space and this can stay my nice little casual, low-tech, unprofessional corner of the internet.