Life changes*

I decided that since I can now live a schedule-free life -- which is a really strange and basically uncomfortable feeling -- I'd try to let my sleep patterns become natural and whatever they would be in a world that didn't include a 9-5 job or a class schedule and homework due dates. My guess was that I'd start staying up really late and waking up even later, but that seemed okay and even sort of fun to me. Apparently, however, that is not my body's natural sleep cycle and I feel silly a little for ever thinking it would be. Instead, I get tired when it gets dark, wide-awake when it gets light. I've been waking up at 5. In principle, I totally object. In practice, I really like walking the dog at 6:30 instead of 8:30. The world is peaceful and beautiful and no one is out except the herons and the squirrels and the ducks.

Unconnected to the sleep schedule, I seem to be becoming curmudgeonly. I feel a little young for it, but yesterday I read a review of a song -- yes, a song review -- and felt a strong desire to tell the author what an idiot he was. Then I read comments to a blog post about self-publishing and was halfway through writing a response that pointed out the total lack of logic in one comment when I came back to myself and closed the comment box. Next I saw a book cover and had to restrain myself from writing the author to tell him what he needed to fix on it. That one was frustrating because the author used a good photo with terrible typography. If he paid a designer, he should get his money back. I think I have to shut off my connection to the internet and take more walks, because curmudgeonly is not like me.

In book changes, I'm going to make the price on Ghosts .99 for a week, from May 1 to May 7. It's an experiment, mostly to prove to myself that it's a bad price point. I'd have to sell ten times as many copies in the first week of May as I did in the first week of April to make it seem worthwhile and I don't think that'll happen. But the only way to know for sure is to try it.

*I wrote this post mostly because while I walked I was thinking about words that were both nouns and verbs. In the title, I'm not sure which 'changes' is. I like that in a word.