Life, Writing, Reading Watching, Listening, and Exhaustion: How to Keep Going When You Really Want to Sleep

Whew, that’s a long title, but hopefully it’s a good capture of what’s going on with my Fandom Friday this week.

Due to wonderful life events: a daughter’s 24th birthday, wedding plans, a bit of wedding dress shopping for me, the Mother of the Bride (M.o.B. – I feel like there’s something about that being similar to the MOB… do I get be a M.o.B. Boss? Probably not.), a podcast interview which will be coming out in March, a fun meal-packing event at my church at which we packed 40,000 dry meals for children in Sierra Leone, teaching on Monday, teaching on Wednesday, and some fun writing events last weekend like recording my poem at Lakewold Gardens in Lakewood, Washington as preparation for the 2023 Poetry in the Gardens Lit Fest there February 3-5.

And some stressful events: not going to detail those here, but they happened.

Due to the above (wonderful and stressful) life events, sometimes, there are days when I need a rest. Most of the time, that means I read a book, or I really dive deep into my reading pile. This week, less so. I had a few days when I read quite a bit, but sometimes I stared out the window instead, or did some writing late at night, or watched one episode of one show on Netflix, and one movie on Amazon Prime. Where did the time go this week?

Prayer. Bible Study. Conversations. Physical Therapy.

Writing.

Writing and more writing. Plus, I created some pro-con lists for the avenue for a particular project – agent submissions, indie publishing, Kindle Vella indie publishing, under my name, a pen name?

And here I am on Friday, and I discovered the books I read this week were read on Sunday and Monday. Late Wednesday, I read a book on my phone.

Reading onward with the 2023 Reading List:

13. Pride, Prejudice, and Pizza by Shauna Jared. A fun, warm romance I discovered on Kindle Vella. It’s short, probably around 12,000 words, so it’s more like a lengthy short story or a short novelette, but it was a fun read with good humor and great HEA. Contemporary Romance.

14. Song of Ebony (A Snow White Retelling) by Deborah Grace White. This is the first of a new series and the world-building within the book is excellently paced as the characters live in and discover new aspects of their world, which is full of wild magic, dangerous to humans on an island they live with the elves, who they believe tricked them into dying on the ground in their past. The main character, Bianca, is a young woman but her hair has turned all white due to contact with magic unexpectedly. She loves to make her words “dance,” and this becomes an important aspect to the story, so I can’t quite give away what this means, but I loved the idea. Clean Fantasy Adventure Romance by a Christian Indie Author.

15. Beauty and Beast, one of the three novellas in Timeless Fairy Tales: Books 1-3 by K.M. Shea. This is a fractured fairy tale retelling and I enjoyed the way Ella is not the typical Belle, but a highly skilled spy for the crown, and the “beast” prince is hiding away in his castle to protect his servants from being bullied by those who fear the curse. Clean Fairy Tale Fantasy Romance.

In addition to these, I started re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (American version) by JK Rowling, inspired by the lovely Jen Chandler, who is re-reading the whole series with anyone who wants to join in and creating some great blog posts about it.

Plus, I’m re-reading Miracles by C.S. Lewis with my College Prep LA class.

And then there’s a bookshelf of library books and such which… well, I’ll get to them, or I won’t in the next 3-6 weeks (depending on if I can renew specific titles).

Plus, I read a bunch of industry and non-fiction articles, but don’t have enough time to go into those in detail here.

Film watched:

Episode 7 of The Recruit on Netflix, and The Electric Life of Louis Wain, which was a wild ride of a biopic on Amazon Prime.

Listening:

I went back to my 2022 Spotify List, found a song I wanted to listen to and started there, plus I listened to some worship music, but I wasn’t feeling up for podcasts this week. For writing, I did listen to a bit of Jesse Cook, all guitar, no lyrics, and that inspired some of my writing time.

Exhaustion and How to Keep Going When You Really Want to Sleep

I’m not sure I have the time at the end of this long post to tackle this topic properly, but I can say four things helped me:

1. Napping. Twenty-forty minutes can make a difference for me. Even tiny five-minute deep-breathing breaks help me recharge.
2. Water. Plenty of it. While I think caffeine is going to energize me, sometimes it doesn’t, and then only water will help.
3. Healthy food. Basically, if I eat too much sugar or salt, I feel even more tired. It’s hard to make healthy choices when I’m already tired and birthday cake is in the house, but sugar and salt will just make my exhaustion worse. My faves this week for boosting my energy: bone broth-based turkey soup and fresh sugar snap peas.
4. Exercise in small doses (5 minutes) throughout the day helps reenergize me without making the exhaustion worse. (BTW, I have ongoing health issues, plus my body is taking a long time to recover from an injury, so I am more prone to tiredness than average, and I’m not “sick” in the sense of some random virus or bug.)

Bonus: Planning an early evening or two (or the rest of the week) helps, too. Bedtime tonight: 9:15 PM, and I may repeat that throughout next week.