A Forced Absence

Well folks, looks like I will be forced to step away from writing, publishing, and social media for a short time. The injury I wrote about in one of my last posts of 2024 has finally reached the point of surgery.

No surgery date has been set yet (but hopefully soon). According to my last visit with the orthopedic surgeon, my recovery will likely take 4-6 weeks. With tears in my rotator cuff and other parts of my shoulder, nerve damage in my elbow, and “mild” carpal tunnel in my wrist, I’ll be out of commission for a while once the surgery is done.

Fortunately, this injury and the subsequent recovery period will have only a minor impact on my publishing journey. With the release of the final book in my Ascension Legacy series being completed last year, I had already resolved to take a break before committing to publishing my other finished books. This break was not to give me time to work on finishing more books but to focus my energies on other things for a while to avoid burnout. Between writing 9 books over the last decade and spending considerable time and money since 2018 to find a path to publication for the 6 books in my series, I feared that if I continued that I would start to resent writing or get bored to the point of stopping.

I’m one of those goofballs that has 1,000 ideas in his head at all times and I never want to be tied down to a single activity or process. Repetition is great in some aspects but I don’t want a hobby or job to be all that I ever think about or deal with. I want to engage in other things. To let my creative processes work in a variety of ways. Whether I’m writing books, programming software, developing AI art, recording a podcast, or whatever, I enjoy being able to have the flexibility and potential to do more than just one thing.

But now it seems that all of that will come to a screeching halt for the next month or so soon. Do you have any idea how hard it is to program with 1 hand? To shuffle a deck of cards with 1 hand? To put a harness on a dog, even a small one, with only 1 hand? It turns out that it’s all hard if you’re not accustomed to it. And guess what, I’m not!

Who knows, maybe this forced break from ALL activities will give my brain a chance to reset and I’ll be inundated with ideas for some of those unfinished stories and when I’m allowed back at my keyboard that the words will just flow from my brain through my fingertips into the keys to make my best stories to date.

Only time will tell and that time is rapidly approaching. With all of the tests done, the results returned to the surgeon, and decision to do surgery already made, all that is left for us to do is book a date and get to slicing. I have an appointment in 2 days with the surgeon for us starting just that, book dates, schedule services, pay co-pays, etc. With any luck, I’ll have surgery the week of March 10 (about 2 weeks from today) which would mean NOT missing the upcoming Matt Rife show in Dallas that my lovely wife got me for Christmas.