Dire Need

Allergy season struck with a vengeance last week. Tonight, I’m listening to the wind howl through the trees outside my window and am wondering if I’ll “breathe loud and proud” (as hubs described it one morning after listening to my night of snorting and sniffling) again tonight. Or if I’ll get the kind of decent night’s sleep that came last night after hubs gave me an acupuncture treatment.

So when I saw this week’s image in my Facebook stream, I couldn’t help but share it. And start to consider all the other ways we can be tired.

A few days ago I was notified that I’ve been accepted into Blasty‘s service. For those of you who haven’t heard of it previously, it’s an anti-piracy tool for authors. Bookworks reviewed it a little over a year ago, and I don’t even remember how I got hooked in to the system, except that I’d apparently registered The Builders, so I must’ve started the wheels turning about a year ago. It’s specifically designed to work in the Chrome browser, which I don’t use all that often, so it wasn’t until tonight that I installed their plugin and started looking at their tools. And now, I have 101 blasts in progress.

What this means in layman’s terms: There were 101 sites that pirated my books and Blasty is working to get the content removed in accordance with my wishes as the copyright owner.

That’s a special kind of tired, right there.

It’s a perennial conversation within my author circle: How much do we lose by letting pirates steal our content? How much time should we spend defending our copyright? There are as many takes on it as authors. For me, it comes down to the legal point that if I don’t do what I can to protect my copyright, I can lose the copyright. (According to Jux Lawfirm, Abandonment of Copyright, in which I fail to enforce my copyright, is a defense against copyright infringement.)

Also, given the amount of money I invest in editing, cover art, and marketing, I do apparently hope someday to recoup my investment in my art. This may be a pipe dream, but it’s certainly spiked every time someone steals something I’m selling. The final question turns on whether this exposure can have a positive impact on sales. Some authors I know see that relationship. I don’t. YMMV.

On the editing front, still no news. Turns out there’s more work headed my way at the day job, so my mental bandwidth when I get home in the evening has been accordingly reduced. Luckily, one of my colleagues made a deal with me to have our daily stand-up be a daily walk. So this week, my average steps jumped back up to 5,239 per day. Tashie also seems to be fast-tracking her healing, since she’s back to pulling me along on our walks at home.

In one small way, my mental fog makes hubs happy, since it means we’re staying on top of the few TV shows we’ve committed to, like Ghosted and Star Trek: Discovery and The Gifted. We’re also still on track with cooking at home at least six nights a week, so it’s really nice to see more of him than I had while I was head-down in writing and editing earlier this year. We also got to mark off a bucket-list item for hubs this week: We saw King Crimson in concert, and got to hear such great songs as “Epitaph,” “Court of the Crimson King,” and “Starless” live and in person.

Of course having found a home rhythm means I’ll be breaking up our routine in a little over a week. I found out I had the unexpected option to go visit Gayla for her birthday, so I’ll be making the pilgrimage out to nowhere, Texas once more. I’m hoping the change in scenery will jostle me out of my writing funk.

Until next week, then, check out how my ROW80 buddies are doing with their goals.