Ten days ago, I came down with COVID. I might have been showing symptoms the day before I got really sick, as I had something of a sore throat. That also might have been psychosomatic. We knew that my husband had it, and so I kept imagining symptoms.
My husband was exposed on a Wednesday. Unfortunately for him, he then got his latest COVID booster and the flu shot on Friday morning. He was sick all weekend. We blamed it on the shots. We didn’t learn until Monday that it was COVID.
I’m recovering, but I’m not well yet. Because my husband got his booster while he was coming down with COVID, I’m better than he is at this point. I’m starting to walk again, at least 250 steps every hour. He’s still sitting all day when he’s at the computer, then taking naps on the couch.
As mentioned in the title, this is a black swan event, basically something that no one could have predicted but can have far-reaching consequences.
My husband and I are my publishing company. I may tease him about merely being “the talent” but in many ways, we run it together.
Yesterday was the first day I had any sort of brain and could start thinking about the business again, actually doing work.
The good news is that there’s very little that needs to be done immediately. I believe in planning ahead. This means that the preorders for November and December are already published. I needed to start working on the January and February titles. I’d like to get all of those up before the end of November. If we hadn’t gotten sick, they’d already be up.
We were planning on doing a Kickstarter at the end of November, starting on Cyber Monday. We can’t do that now. We’re rescheduling it for January, I believe, though the actual date is TBD.
We already have much of next year’s publishing schedule already planned out, including the other Kickstarters and the Storybundle that I want to do. That schedule needs to be adjusted. The original plan was to release the Kickstarter novel four months after the Kickstarter. All the titles need to be rearranged now to take that into account.
So while both of us being so sick for a couple of weeks is an event that we couldn’t have planned on, because everything is already planned, it’s merely a matter of rearranging things instead of the world coming to an end.
Imagine if you were trying to finish a novel because you had a preorder set up and got sick as we have. That might be disastrous, particularly if you missed your deadline and couldn’t get your preorder date changed.
I’m sure that there will be additional ramifications of not being able to work for a couple of weeks that haven’t caught up and bit me yet. But because we plan, we’ve been able to weather this pretty well.
I hope that you are able to manage whatever life throws at you.
# # # # # # # # # # #
Thank you so much for being a patron of mine! I truly appreciate you.
If you’re reading the free version of this, posted two weeks after the Patreon essay gets put up, maybe think about supporting me for as little as $1 a month.