What I do when I'm sick

Honestly, it feels as if the answer is "bugger all". It feels like I've spent most of the last four days sleeping, waking up to pee, cough, take my medicine, drink half a litre of water, and go back to sleep until the water wakes me up for the next cycle.

But in fact, I have been awake, even if for not as long as usual. I just haven't done any work in that time - no teaching on Friday or my Saturday morning creative writing class, no novel writing on Saturday afternoon or Sunday or today. I do take the occasional day or week off when I'm well, but the reality of trying to write full-time and teach part-time is that I'm working almost every day. Time without work stretches.

I have learned, through repeated trial and error and being an idiot about it, that when I am sick, I need to be sick. It is of course heinously irresponsible to work around others when I'm contagious, but trying to work at home when I'm ill is irresponsible to myself. It doesn't produce good writing, or even good admin. I get hazy and grumpy and stay sick for longer. This newsletter is the first work I've felt well enough to attempt, and even then I know a) this isn't my best writing and b) I need to take a coffee break at the end of this sentence.

A cup, patterned with a black and white botanical design, standing on a glass coffee table with a blue vase and two plants grouped behind it.
Proof

But I haven't been quite sick enough to sleep non-stop, so this is what I've done when I couldn't be asleep.

Gaming:

I finished playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a puzzle video game accurately sold to me as "if David Lynch designed an escape room", all about art and time and perception and mysticism. It's strange and wonderful. I filled a notebook with my attempts to decipher puzzles, and went to CyricZ's excellent walkthrough guide whenever I got stuck, which happened more often that it might have if I'd been well.

But I think I did right to play this game while slightly feverish, while I stumbled back to bed to dream of unmappable corridors, while I fought a joystick that kept drifting to the right at uncertain intervals. All of these were additions, not detractions from the experience. Virginia Woolf wrote in "On Being Ill" that "Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow." She never played a video game, but I think she might have enjoyed Lorelei.

Reading:

  • I finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab which I think is probably a great book for people who like to sink deep into layers of unfolding character and emotion. I wanted either fewer pages or more plot in them, though the love triangle was intriguing.
  • I read Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, which was exactly as long as needed to be, a febrile, brilliant novella about violence and girlhood and archeology.
  • I read Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, another short work about dislocation and transformation, which I enjoyed very much, because it's weird nature writing by a narrator who doesn't seem to be aware how strange she is, although it gradually becomes apparent that she knows more than the reader does. I started and bounced off Finch, by the same author, and then started Authority (the book after Annihilation), which I'm also enjoying, partly because the narrator is trying his best, always an endearing characteristic, and partly because this time I know more than he does, which is an interesting reversal.
  • I'm reading, in between all of these, Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad, book by book. For the first time, I forced myself to go through the catalog of ships, name by name, town by town, and I think it had the desired effect, which was to make it depressingly clear just how many men are gathered on the plains of Troy, plundering and killing and raping their way through the surrounding environment, and how many are already "sleeping beneath the earth" that feeds the living. I don't know how anyone could read the Iliad and think it a glorification of war and manly honour. It's a dismal story of inevitable death, usually violent, for the besieged and besiegers alike, as they are manipulated by the squabbling gods.
  • Okay now I need another nap.
  • I have acquired and am very looking forward to Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis, which I expect to be delightful, and a perfect mental antidote to all this excellently written but also grim material.
  • In between writing that last and sending this post, I took a break from Authority and read Wooing the Witch Queen and it surpassed my high expectations. What a lovely, sexy, thoroughly good-hearted fantasy romance.

Eating:

I was happily well equipped with ingredients, and my friend Erin kindly brought me more: soup, bagels, Greek yoghurt and icecream, food to feed the soul and soothe the throat.

I have also been doing a lot of what I call oven food, where I stand up and chop or mix things for five minutes, then shove it in the oven, set a timer, and zone out until it dings. Stovetop food tends to require more care, precise timing, and attention to detail, none of which I'm great at when I'm sick. Traybakes are kinder. So is fruit sponge for dinner, which used up the last of my peaches and nectarines and made a great breakfast the next day besides.

Fruit sponge; sanguine peaches split for stewing; traybake yoghurt chicken on a bagel with homemade pesto I nearly forgot I still had.
Fruit sponge; sanguine peaches split for stewing; traybake yoghurt chicken on a bagel with homemade pesto I nearly forgot I still had.

Housework:

I can be lackadasical when I'm well. When I'm sick, I feel better if I vaguely keep up with dishes and laundry, though I draw the line at ironing when I'm wearing some variation of leggings/wrap dress/tunic every day anyway.

I also washed my sheets on Saturday. Stripping the bed was exhausting. I piled the sheets into the machine and pressed start, then stood up, gratefully thinking that now the task was underway, I could take a nap. I went to my bedroom, saw the stripped mattress, and my brain stuttered like a video game glitch.

A good indication, I feel, that all is not well.

A couple of business things!

  • Due to this illness and a shift in my dayjob timetable, I'm definitely going to have to push out the XO, Xena release date. I am hoping to release it earlier than the new date in early July, but this way I leave myself wiggle room without panic. Go ahead and pre-order now, and then you'll get it the moment it's out.
  • Because of that I am going to be placing the Ask Cassandra and Love, Laodice e-books into the Kindle Unlimited library (and thus, Amazon-only sales) earlier than I anticipated. The paperbacks are on their way and won't be exclusive, but if you'd like to grab Ask Cassandra or Love, Laodice in e-book form from anyone but Amazon (and NONE COULD BLAME YOU) then please purchase within the month!