Nothing Under Control

I lost a week. I lost a filling Monday night and was able to make an emergency appointment with a dentist in our new city on Tuesday. I thought I was going in for a new filling. I ended up staying for a tooth extraction. Apparently, I waited too long between dental visits, and there was more rot than tooth after all the other fillings already in that tooth were taken into account. It was then a several-hour-long odyssey to make sure the entire tooth left its life-long home. I’m not sure if it’s a fiction author thing, or just a crazy me thing, but I was having conversations with that tooth as the dentist paused to try to let enough numbing agent settle into the nerves so I wasn’t actually crying while he was digging, tugging, scraping, and yanking, thanking it for its service and pleading with it to let go easily so I didn’t have to suffer much more of this torture.

In the end, the torture continued over the course of days. I popped a suture and was back in the dentist’s chair on Thursday. I don’t handle any of the strongest pain relievers well, so I don’t take them, which meant I didn’t sleep for several days either.

Finally, enough time has passed that I’m mostly back to the land of the living, but it’s odd to have missed out on a week’s worth of reading think-pieces. Or much reading at all, though Refused to Reign came out as the latest in The Hotel Paranormal series. I finally read that today and enjoyed the different take on wolf pack politics, as well as further insight into how the other authors in the series are treating The Hotel as a character.

The week wasn’t a completely lost cause, though. For those who’ve been tracking my progress bar widget, I wrote 7,496 words on my novella for the Hotel Paranormal series. I’m so glad to be getting back into the flow of quick drafting, and actually have some hope that with this exercise I will have knocked loose any remaining cobwebs for how to finish the trilogy that is supposed to end before this book comes out. We’ll see.

Given my convalescence, there wasn’t much walking either; my phone shows an average of 1,767 steps for the week, probably because of the long walk I got to take on Monday.

I hope getting back into the swing of things at work–and especially since I’ll be in Maryland on Wednesday for a very long day–won’t derail my writing jag, but I’ll be back next week to report on my progress either way.