Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought, “Oh, I’m so much better, tomorrow I am going to get back to work. And I’m going to take Sophie on a really long walk, and I’m going to eat healthy foods, maybe cook myself something interesting, and I’ll do a bunch of writing…”

And then I woke up this morning and realized all that enthusiasm was just because I took an oxycodone and an ibuprofen before going to sleep and once they wore off… yeah, not so much.

That said, the good(-ish) news is that I have no more looming dental issues hanging over me. I need to heal from this week’s gum surgery, go back for a check-up, and then… and wow, I’m seriously anxious that I might jinx myself here. Okay, so let’s just say that I’m going to heal from this week’s surgery beautifully and leave it at that. I’m manifesting that healing!

My oral surgeon actually told me that I was a great patient, which I felt very validated by. I did not tell him that it was because I pretending to be a Special Forces operative being tortured by the enemy and using box breathing and disassociation to survive. I’m gonna say that it worked quite well. Not so well that I wasn’t happy to have painkillers available once I got home, though.

In other purely good news, the first reviews on Cici2 have been so nice. I did realize that I’ve screwed up by using two pen names: neither Bookbub nor Amazon told my followers at their respective places that I had a new book out, because Sarah is the one with followers; SJ has none. Alas. I did want to keep the romance titles a little separated from the fantasy/science-fiction — didn’t want to disappoint romance readers! — but that was probably a mistake. Oh, well, live and learn. I can’t change the author names now, so it’ll be what it is. Meanwhile, I have 5 reviews, so I will stop hovering over the book page, anxiously awaiting the 1-star review from the person who thinks there’s too many dogs in the book.

And I went looking for the blog post where I wrote about the guy who gave me a one star review on Practicing Happiness because I wrote about my dogs too much, then came to the blog and left a nasty comment to the same effect, but I was so vague about that experience in that post that I deemed it unnecessary to share again. Plus… well, I’m not going to unpack it all. But wow, the post about that troll has a lot of emotional heft, on a lot of different levels. I leave the link there for my own future reference, and move back to my appreciation of yay, nice reviews, with some specific lines that just warm my heart and make me grateful to do what I do.

This –> “I feel happier just reading them” <– is one true goal as a writer. Let other authors make you cry, make you think, make you scared to turn off the lights at night, I’m just about the happy, and so glad that I accomplished it for jkuci.

Somewhat unrelated, I was talking about editing the other day, and I do a lot of editing passes. But I’d love to come up with a catchy name for the one that I privately think of as the ABC pass. Hmm, maybe that is the catchy name? It’s the pass where I look at every paragraph and consider:

1. Does this advance the plot? (that’s the A.)
2. Does it establish character? (that’s the C.)
3. Does it reveal a relationship? (alas, that is not a B, and it’s always third, anyway. I’ve thought I could make it develop a relationship, except reveal is more accurate. This question doesn’t mean that the relationship is changing/developing, it just means the reader is learning something about the relationship.)
4. Does it set the stage? (Not as important to me as the first three, but an essential ingredient in grounding the reader, and also in providing important props, if you will. Ie, if you’re going to use a gun in the last act, you need to put it on stage in the first act, and that would count as setting the stage. But so also would be a nice description of a sunset or a fancy embassy bathroom or a beautiful park, depending on why they mattered to your story.)
5. Does it make me laugh? Not the reader, because I have no way of knowing what a reader will think. But if it makes me laugh, it gets to stay.

This is derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic writing advice, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” Technically, I suppose, a lot of things that make me laugh do also reveal character and one could also argue that everything that reveals relationship also reveals character and if you’re in a single POV, then obviously setting the stage also reveals character in a way… but at a certain point, namely that one, “reveal character” just gets too over-stuffed. Anything can reveal character. When the character says, “How do you do? I am so pleased to meet you,” they’ve technically revealed that they’re very boring and maybe that’s what you want in your story. (It’s probably not a good thing to want in your story, though.)

Anyway, I detect the ramblings of a person who’s under the influence of pain meds, so I think I will stop rambling now. Poor Sophie is giving me the stare. Let’s see if I can find a picture to go with this meandering post. Oh, here’s one that I like a lot.