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Exploring My Limits
Jun. 2nd, 2026 02:35 pmThe Bay Area Book Festival was enjoyable and productive on Sunday, though also exhausting. I sold enough books to make it financially worthwhile, though I really need to have more realistic expectations of how many copies of Daughter of Mystery to bring versus later books in the series. I have fantasies of people buying the whole set, or already having the first book and coming back for more, but realistically that's not the way to bet. I was delighted to sell several copies of Skin-Singer and people seem to be very attracted to the cover art. Also had a number of people take my cards to follow up on the blog and podcast.
But by four in the afternoon I was thoroughly done and packed up an hour before actual closing. Crowds happened out by then so I don't think I missed anything serious. It was amusing that when I was packing up and my booth mates offered to help I had to work hard at saying yes and pointed out that I could, of course, do it all myself if I had to. One of my friends at the booth did a hands on her hips-type gesture and said, "You know that's a trauma response, right?" Yeah, I've had that pointed out before. And I'm still not quite sure how I acquired it, but I'll own it.
Several friends dropped by the booth either previously arranged or just by chance. So that was nice.
Monday I pretty much decided to vegetate. I've been able to cut back the pain meds to just Tylenol and have a couple of the oxycodone left over that I didn't need. But everything is just more tiring than usual and the most relaxing position for my arm is resting on the arm of my recliner, slightly elevated and on a padded surface. Most of the initial pain seems to be due to bruising from the operation and that is definitely going down consistently.
The one work-around that is actually going very well is using longhand plus speech-to-text to get Lesbian Historic Motif Project blogs written up. In fact, it's going so well that I need to remind myself to use this method all the time.
I have added one more bit of historic trivia to The History of Related-ivity which required consulting with the author of the source material as to how they wanted to be cited. The next serious task for that project is to come up with cover art for the book. Otherwise it's pretty much ready to go except for assigning ISBNs and maybe soliciting a couple of cover blurbs. I think I'm aiming for a August 1 publication date or thereabouts.
But by four in the afternoon I was thoroughly done and packed up an hour before actual closing. Crowds happened out by then so I don't think I missed anything serious. It was amusing that when I was packing up and my booth mates offered to help I had to work hard at saying yes and pointed out that I could, of course, do it all myself if I had to. One of my friends at the booth did a hands on her hips-type gesture and said, "You know that's a trauma response, right?" Yeah, I've had that pointed out before. And I'm still not quite sure how I acquired it, but I'll own it.
Several friends dropped by the booth either previously arranged or just by chance. So that was nice.
Monday I pretty much decided to vegetate. I've been able to cut back the pain meds to just Tylenol and have a couple of the oxycodone left over that I didn't need. But everything is just more tiring than usual and the most relaxing position for my arm is resting on the arm of my recliner, slightly elevated and on a padded surface. Most of the initial pain seems to be due to bruising from the operation and that is definitely going down consistently.
The one work-around that is actually going very well is using longhand plus speech-to-text to get Lesbian Historic Motif Project blogs written up. In fact, it's going so well that I need to remind myself to use this method all the time.
I have added one more bit of historic trivia to The History of Related-ivity which required consulting with the author of the source material as to how they wanted to be cited. The next serious task for that project is to come up with cover art for the book. Otherwise it's pretty much ready to go except for assigning ISBNs and maybe soliciting a couple of cover blurbs. I think I'm aiming for a August 1 publication date or thereabouts.
