Non-Fiction For The Fading

The numbers have gone from single digit to triple in about a week, and I imagine it's going to get worse considering how small of a population we have in my province. My anxiety is at a near-permanent nine (it's been higher before and seeing as it has yet to impact my sleep, I'm considering it bad and high but not that bad, in other words, under ten on a scale), I am forcing myself to try to get stuff done, but it's hard to these days. I think it's hard for everyone these days. We just don't know when the other shoe is about to drop and how it's going to get worse (because you know that it's going to get worse somehow).

It's been a long month, hasn't it? Things shifted really fast to the point that I can barely keep up with them. My province is locking everything down. I suppose it's because we're half an island and with an ageing population, so the virus will take down a huge percentage of the population if we don't do something about it. Our health care was already being pushed to its limits before the virus reached us, now it's worse.We're still in the single digits when it comes to confirmed cases, but we're all supposed to act like there are much more and behave accordingly. So yeah, basically we're all in quarantine (and oh look, I actually spelled quarantine right . That's been the word that I've been struggling with and I've been spelling it wrong for about two weeks now). Not that it's hugely different than how I was living before, but it feels weird to have it mandated by the government. I've been spending a lot of my time reading

I wrote an online serial for three years, and it ended in 2016 (for... various reasons) after three volumes. It was a run of the mill urban fantasy series called The Wake. Here's a few of the lessons that I learned from it: 1) Plan. Seriously, you need to plan these things out before they get away from you -- and they probably will, considering the deadlines that you're trying to keep to. You don't have to have the whole thing planned out, but you do need a general guideline of how the story goes. I did not, and it started to show by halfway through the second volume. 2) Have a buffer. Because life is going to get away from you and you should have at least a couple of weeks worth of updates ready to go. I also did not, and spent some -- okay, a lot of -- weeks scrambling to get something up. The writing suffered because of this. 3) If something big in your life happens and you think you should probably take a break, then take a break. My dad died only a few weeks a