You know what's tough? Self care. Self care is super, super tough.

But when it goes right, it's a great thing.

I've been letting my self-care slide a lot the last few years. I've gotten somewhat better about it in the last year and a half, since I sort-of left the work force and started focusing on work-from-home pursuits, but I've still languished in the land of 'I'll get to it later' on some things for far too long.

One of those is my weight.

Okay, so that's obviously a blatant lie, but still: I FEEL like I'm an awful person, which is about the same thing right?

Well, it's been a while since I did one o' these!

Okay, so here's the deal: I have a story idea. Err, more of a story *framework.* And I need help executing it.

The premise is as follows:

A TG convention is being held, and a group of women who have never met each other before are thrust together by a rather unique circumstance: they are all named Rose. What follows is a Canterbury Tales-esque series of short stories as the women get to know each other, telling their tales of how they came to be one of the dozen Roses.

I know, I'm doing terrible at this so far.

I spent most of today at the hospital in Capital City (a 2 1/2 hour drive away) and will be doing the same tomorrow. Wednesday is Thanksgiving prep, and Thursday thanksgiving itself. Saturday my cousins have Plans for me.

To put none too fine a point on it, this is going to be a Busy Week, and I just don't have the time or headspace to do Ready Reads right now.

Real Life and a case of the blahs have gotten in the way a bit. Ready Reads 2 will be out tomorrow.

Melanie E.

That's right, I have another, yes, another book, live right now and ready to sell, sell, sell, on Smashwords!

Enamored: A Transgender Romance Fiction Two pack!

If you like my stories "Romeo and Roomiette" and "Little by Little," then this is the pack for you! Enjoy both on your favorite reading device for the low, low price of only 1.99 USD.

I have a desktop again! And a job! And the two are related!

Okay, so as I've shared here before I've been trying to make something akin to a work from home situation work for me for a while. I've been trying to find indie devs interested in some of my music work, and I've had a couple of jobs lined up, but the death of my computer a couple of months ago almost killed that opportunity for me.

Until I re-negotiated one of my contracts.

It looks like I will be building a new computer.

The motherboard, it seems is better toasted than we had thought. While it boots to BIOS fine upon pulling my CMOS battery there was a nasty burn ring on it, and trying to boot a few different Linux distros from USB returned issues every time, with the system trying to boot in only to start throwing errors and then crashing.

We had family visiting the last two days so sorry for missing my Friday posting schedule on these!

This next week's 3 words are:

Hand
Needless
Route

A quick breakdown for 'em:

Hand. An extremity used for grasping and moving things. To pass something to another. A selection of usable options. Helping hand, hand of cards, the hand we're dealt, idle hands, hand of fate.

Needless. Pointless. Inane. Meaningless. Or, alternatively, "needless" could apply as in someone or something without any needs, something complete.

Since I'm unemployed for the moment I figured I'd put some hard work into getting a few books done for Amazon. Rather than plugging away at my edit jobs for the two BCTS conversions I'm working on, though, I have a number of never-before-seen stories in the works I'm focusing on first, including the one I've chosen to focus on right now, a silly little short(ish) romance novel.

But . . . there's a problem.

Hmm.

Tomorrow I SHOULD be posting the second set of challenge words for my "random inspirations challenge," but as of yet I haven't seen any stories posted for the first part (unless I missed them?)

If nobody has any interest in this challenge then that's okay, though I hope it's not because of the lack of a prize.

Melanie E.

The tag is set (see above for evidence,) and it's time for the first week's challenge words!

Ready folks?

At least assuming we're not gonna see any entries from Japan/China.

As a reminder, everyone has until the end of February to do their reading and voting (these were a bit longer than your average contest entry story after all!) I'll announce contest winners at the end of the first week or so of March!

Thanks again to everyone who entered the contest. It's been really special to me seeing how enthusiastic everyone, both readers and authors, have been about this one, and I'm really glad we all did this together.

Holy cow!

Thank you SO much everyone who's already chipped into the new contest! Wow! I've already got a ton of stuff to read, and I still haven't finished all the entries from the LAST contest (sorry Angie!)

Y'all're all awesome :)

Melanie E.

PS: Call it a bit of ego, but I was thinking of running a Henry Harrelson's Custom Fit Boots contest for March if there was enough interest: otherwise I'd come up with something else. Opinions?

I'll try to make sure I get one up this coming weekend. Life be all hectic like, yo, know what I'm sayin'?

Also, STORY PROGRESS. More on that eventually if it actually goes anywhere.

Melanie E.