Some stuff has been brewing that I’d like to mention, but they don’t merit their own individual posts, so I thought I’d just randomly ramble here.

The Step and the Walk news

A cover has been made and it works well with The Name and the Key. It features a mirror and Erina’s gift to Andresh, an amulet of cinnabar. A back cover/description has also been generated (I submitted one but it wasn’t up to par, so my publisher once again wrote something beautiful). I’m not able to share these things with you yet, but given how fast everything has been going, I probably will be able to soon. I’m mostly curious about when the release date is going to be!

Money/job news

It is not definite if I’ll be teaching in the Fall. ZSC talked about possibly giving me online courses only, but that hasn’t been explored yet, and NCSC put me officially on the books for an online course and an in-person course, but those courses haven’t met their enrollment goals, so they might be cancelled. I have been applying for remote part-time jobs to balance things out, only to get ghosted or rejected. I looked at my funds and I made a little over $6500 total last year according to my taxes. No one can live off of this. So, I just applied to work at a grocery store part time. I’m a little worried about work-life balance if I get hired, but the question is, will I get hired at all?

Health stuff

I was recently diagnosed with severe sleep apnea and will be getting a BIPAP machine next week. This was really freaky because my sleep test showed that my oxygen went down to 75% at night when I slept, which is quite dangerous. I hope my Medicaid can cover the BIPAP as I don’t have thousands of dollars (or even hundreds).

I decided to drop Tai Chi classes. I got partially overwhelmed by stuff I want to work on, but also realized it’s not quite the thing for me. I need to substitute the loss of this exercise with something else, though, so I don’t get lazy.

Matsuricon

I have already finished my FANFIC INTO FICTION presentation. I made a ton of slides, and we might run out of time if I didn’t allot enough time for audience participation again. Since the PowerPoint is done, all I need to do is work on my cosplay. I started sewing a little bit, but I need to jump into that more.

The Name and the Key

My ARC readers have started to get their swag in the mail, and people have started following me on social media and making little reels and videos of what I sent them. It’s so great.

…The book comes out next month!