CITATION HEEDED

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My general delay in getting posts up is that I’ve had a combination of bad events, starting with my mother dying.

This meant that I had to take over her business in addition to my own, as well as all the usual things of getting an estate in order, as hers was not. She’d also been neglecting her own business, which I did not know, so a lot of the work there is not only transitioning the old business to one without her as it is playing catch-up to fix what went wrong under her watch. repairing what went wrong under her watch.

This also lead to my brother relapsing into addiction, and so I’ve also been working on that, first cleaning up the damage that he caused to himself and others, and then trying to get him into treatment, that treatment failing, then trying to get him into treatment again. We are sort of in that last phase. It goes without saying that he is not a help with the estate, so I am on my own for that.

Put in a run of books that I did not like, and had high expectations for, and, while I could find the time, it has generally sapped my ability to have mental acuity to read, even for fun, or to write about what I read.

I worked on getting things reorganized this weekend, but I was rejected on a book that I particularly wanted and thought was in my wheelhouse. Ordinarily this would not cross my mind twice: the ways of authors and publishers are inscrutable, so you move forward. Right now, however, I feel like catastrophizing it.

All my reviewing writing has always felt fantastical. You can just ask people for books to review and they’ll give them to you? Unreal. I don’t have any special sense of know-how to apply, so I don’t know why anyone would choose me (save desperation, which is demonstrably not the case). So maybe the dance is over. My rational mind has no reason to think that it is, but if for no other reason that to keep up my post rate, I’m venting the feeling. I expect it to change and for things to resume their orderly course, but if they don’t, you know why this place is shuttered.¹

1. But I have at least one more post in me, about a letter to the editor that I wrote, and I am at least floating the idea of forcing myself into a stronger focus on the books I choose, to see if more specialization might change things for me, even without any sort of credentialing to justify that specialization. There’s also no real reason for this to be a footnote, except to not go on without one. Well, okay, I wanted to end the text with that sort of explanation, but then I thought about reasons why it might not be the case. ↩︎