I lost my job last week. Or, to quote Bob­cat Goldth­wait, “well, I didn’t actu­ally lose my job, I mean I know where my job is still. It’s just when I go there, there’s this new guy doing it.” I won’t go into the details, other than to say a lot of peo­ple got let go at the same time, and I’m not sure it was a coin­ci­dence that nearly all of them made more than the aver­age salary for their job title. #justsayin

Even though I know it had noth­ing to do with me per­son­ally, it still threw me. I was already down in the dumps over look­ing back at the last decade (it wasn’t the best time of my life), and even though my peo­ple (I have peo­ple) are already work­ing on get­ting me on board some­where else, I let the accu­mu­lated self doubt knock me off my stride and didn’t write for days.

Part of it was that I’d already stalled out on Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I was bored with revi­sions on Rev­e­la­tion, and scared of con­tin­u­ing with Cru­sade. I’m start­ing to think I’m still too close to the story to revise it prop­erly, and yet burned out on it after writ­ing the whole first novel. I need a change of pace. Maybe I should start work on some­thing really dif­fer­ent, like Ghost Ronin, Titanus or Home­world.

Or maybe I’m just wuss­ing out again. I’m mak­ing it up as I go along here. Now that the “seven books in ten months” marathon is out the win­dow, I’m try­ing dif­fer­ent things.

On a sim­i­lar note, I’m back to writ­ing every­thing in one mono­lithic Word file rather than indi­vid­ual chap­ter doc­u­ments in Ever­note or Google Docs. Just feels more nat­ural. Maybe I’m old fash­ioned. I am still keep­ing the Word doc­u­ments in Ever­note to keep them synced any­where, and if I need to write a lit­tle extra, I have a new jail­break exten­sion for my iPhone that lets me quickly scroll down to the bot­tom of the Word doc­u­ments to see where I left off before typ­ing in the new stuff in Evernote.

On the tech front, I’m work­ing on a review of the new Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver for the iPhone, which allows me to use my Stow­away in sit­u­a­tions where I’d rather not carry my net­book. Some­times that three pounds mat­ters. What?