What I've Been Up To
Over the past few months, I've been launching new apps, maintaining and upgrading MKE Meetups, organizing my book-writing infrastructure, and doing some physical therapy.
On the PT front, I got a referral to address the pain I'd always had a day or two after running any distance. I've incorporated some new exercises into my routine to strengthen my ankle and foot muscles, but the big win came from reducing my stride length and increasing my running cadence. I also invested in some floofy new running shoes and got some insoles for my other footwear. I think I had maybe eight or nine PT sessions total, and now I can run without pain, which is amazing (I always just assumed pain was part of running).
I've stopped shopping my novel Yore for the moment in order to rework the ending (so that it's less "this is definitely the first book of a trilogy" and more "this is a complete story unto itself, with series potential"), and I'm reworking the ending of Methuselahs, too, after finishing up the 4th draft. Both books take place in the same world, so I also stepped back and more granularly mapped out the timeline of both books and the context in which they unfold. I had an AI make a beautiful visual of this (which also shows me chapter-based word counts and rising and falling action, which is wonderful), and I'm about to dig back in, redoing both endings, now that the chronological stuff has been tidied up and made more casually referenceable.
MKE Meetups continues to be a blast to run, and I took some time to upgrade the backend of the website and redo the newsletter design a bit, making the whole setup more intuitive and getting the site's SEO/AEO/GEO on point (I did basically the same for this site and the Truly Simple Tools site, too).
I've also launched quite a few new apps in the Truly Simple Tools catalog, including Story Wiki, TS Word Tracker, TS Nudges, TS Envelopes, TS Inventory, TS Symptom Log, TS RAW Camera, TS QR, and TS Flashcards. I've got two more mapped out and ready to build and test; all told, there are currently 17 macOS and iOS apps in the collection, and the feedback I've been getting (mostly as direct emails) has been really wonderful.
I've recently started to look into potential job opportunities, as well. This is something I've been thinking about doing for maybe a year and a half, but I wanted to make sure I had my personal projects squared away first, so that I'd have a better sense of what I could continue to run on the weekends and what I would probably sunset, if the right opportunity came along.
I have no idea what to expect, as I haven't had a real-deal job since 2008, but the process of putting together a résumé and portfolio, of figuring out which job titles to search for, has already been interesting. And the idea is that, just like with settling in one place (Milwaukee) after a decade of full-time traveling, I expect to learn quite a lot from having a more conventional job. I'm genuinely looking forward to that process of, first, applying what I've learned working for myself to such a position, and, second, filling in some gaps I'm sure exist in my professional rhythms and folkways because of my nonstandard career trajectory.
It's a weird job market, so this may be a long-term project. But I've started shooting out résumés and cover letters, and it's already been eye-opening, seeing what sorts of opportunities are out there.