2022

This has been a year of two steps forward and three steps back.

My quality of life is headed down the backside of the mountain. My eyes are afflicted with glaucoma and color blindness, things that permanently take away from my ability to see. I stand to lose the ability to draw and paint, to drive a car, to cook my own food, and numerous other things I have taken for granted for a lifetime.

My body is eroding in many other ways too. I have now had osteoarthritis for 48 years since I was diagnosed with it at the age of 18. I can still walk (with a cane) because I have exercised my joints repeatedly and daily in order to keep my joints flexible and workable, in spite of the pain that has cut into my quality of sleep more this year than any previous year. I have had diabetes since 2020 and still am not on insulin because of carefully monitoring my diet and the exercise that keeps my arthritis at bay.

The only book I managed to publish was The Necromancer’s Apprentice back in February of 2022. It has typos in the final text that I have not yet been able to correct. Most of those occurred during the final proofreading and editing because not only are my arthritic fingers routinely landing wrong, my laptop likes to glitch due to accidentally repurposed keys that teleport letters to pages not on my screen for some obscure reason involving the ctrl and Windows keys being accidentally brushed by arthritic fingers that apparently have more static electricity on them than I would believe is possible. I have had to slowly learn how to undo these things with a brain that is increasingly slowed and forgetful.

My storytelling has slowed to a crawl. I don’t get as many words written in a week. Of course, I have too many projects going at the same time. I have three novels in progress. He Rose on a Golden Wing is a long one that will probably end up being the longest one I have ever written. The Education of Poppensparkle was about three chapters from being a finished novella when I stopped working on it temporarily back in August. I have the AeroQuest novel number 4 in the final proofreading stage but haven’t finished the proofreading because of difficulties of seeing the text and format settings properly. And I started a new obsession project, The Haunted Toy Store.

My blog is headed downhill now too for the first time since it was begun in 2013. The high point last year was 31,106 views and 17,676 visitors. This year, with two days left, I have only 24,346 views and 12,499 visitors. This probably happened because I posted too many nudes in the blog and wrote a novel about nudists and alienated all my fundamentalist Christian readers who see such things as inappropriate rather than innocent or artistic. And the increased interactions with online nudists has probably put me in the disapproving spotlight of the algorithm

Nudists, however, turn out to be good and loyal readers. I have sold more books and made more money from books than any previous year. And not just my nudist stories. My most popopular books are non-nudist stories. Snow Babies, about surviving a blizzard is at the top of the list. My teacher story, Magical Miss Morgan, and my computer-science-fiction book The Wizard in his Keep, are also vying for most read and most positively reviewed.

.And so, I suppose, that it has been a good year after all, though my condition and prospects for the future are possibly at a point of percipitous decline until the end of the road.