Bromley Stench Update! (+ resistance)

Before we get into it: this free, multi-genre romance offer is still running, and the box-set/anthology sale (featuring my absurdly cheap Olympus Inc boxset) has less than a week to go!

Anyway, hi, how are you, awesome, POOP UPDATE.

Last time I wrote about the hideous stench that has enveloped my side of the city, and a few historical parallels to the Great Stink of London, including what I thought was a very wise and measured suggestion that the mayor and city council work beside the damaged water treatment plant to see if that could speed things along.

Well, goodness me, I did not expect the mayor to put forward his own suggestion for a solution only days later!

Still less did I expect that solution to be "let's partially treat 20-30% of the city's sewage with chlorine and dump it into the ocean".

Various bodies, including the Canterbury Regional Council, the local community board, and the Minister for Fisheries1, had not been informed or formally consulted and to quote from the article that first broke the news: "[Mayor] Mauger was not immediately available for an interview and the council's statement did not say when the plan would come into effect, how much sewage would be pumped directly into the ocean or for how long."

When he did deign to speak to reporters, spaketh the mayor that he reckoned it would cost a "couple" of million dollars.

Mm. Sounds super reasonable and well thought out to me and not at all doomed to incredible failure. Updates will persist. Much like the stench.

On a happier note, I am going to Ages of Pages!

It's on Saturday 2 May, Claudelands Event Centre, Kirikiriroa/Hamilton, and I am very excited and a little nervous. My indie author friends have been talking about how great AoP is for years, and I'm delighted that this time the stars have aligned so that I can go too!

If you are also going to be there, and would like to buy books from moi, the best way to ensure you can get what you want is to pre-order through this form. You order, I send you an invoice, I bring you signed books in a special me-made gift bag, all is great.

Also, if you happen to be the lovely person who ordered the Movie Magic series and the first three Olympus books when this form was first advertised on the AoP Facebook group, please get in touch! Due to an error (mine. my error.) the form didn't at that point have a space for email and name, so I don't know who you are. (I will of course set books aside for this person anyway, but I feel terrible that I can't get hold of them!)

In RESISTANCE news, the FaRo Society Books They Can't Burn auction made $9000 (US) for PEN America, which is very nice.

I also donated books to an auction raising funds for my friend Danny's top surgery. It was an in-person auction held during Danny's Cut Em Off Caberet2 in Canada, so I didn't advertise it here, but the surgery and associated costs are now fully funded, hurrah!

The final numbers for the Romantasy Rebels anthology (also raising funds for Pen America) haven't come in yet, but at last check it was over $6000.

My contribution to that anthology, Mrs Beeton's Book of Magickal Management, is now available to all my patrons via my Patreon, and will eventually make it to your local retailer.

I spent way too long on this cover this morning.

I have recently revived my office whiteboard, which currently looks like this:

I love a planner. My bright yellow day job planner is affectionately referred to as "my external brain". For book stuff, I have a quarterly plan, a promo yearly calendar, and this guy, all visible from my desk. (The review isn't book-related but because it's a task that involves writing, it goes on the planner so I can see where I need to prioritise my time.)

The FaRo Society author group has been really helpful with helping me reframe my thinking about work, which is yet another reason they are awesome.

The thing about being an independent author instead of "just" a writer is that those admin tasks build up. Of course what I really want to do with my writing work time is write, but if I want people to know about and read the resulting books, I also have to do the admin. I have learned that there are a bunch of tasks which, if left undone long enough, make it really hard to take on the creative work with a calm mind and happy heart. I did not quit full-time work in a great-but-demanding job to make myself sad, y'all!

This year I am making a concerted effort to keep admin as a priority for two days a week (this week, it'll be more, because *waves hands* stuff) and keep words as a priority for four (this week, three). A 66:33 ratio seems reasonable. I am also, after three years of constant work punctuated by occasional rest periods, trying to take a whole day off every week, usually Saturday.

It's all making a massive difference to my stress levels, which, given the rest of the world, don't need any internal assistance to rise.

Yes, I know, my handwriting is terrible. That says "Patreon scene", not "Patreon scare". I'm writing something fun for my Bonus Content patrons this month. I figure we could all use it.

Whatever your week looks like, I hope it's going well!

Love, Karen (Kate).

That Healey Girl is the weeklyish newsletter of Karen (or Kate) Healey, a romance and speculative fiction author who lives in Ōtautahi, New Zealand and shakes plots loose by wandering along the river.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it, and comment using the link below! (Don't email back. I won't see it.)

1 Fisheries Minister Shane Jones managed to twice mention that "God-fearing" fisheries businesses would be unfairly damaged, so now I know that businesses can fear God, an exciting addition to my understanding of the world. I do wish that the minister had expanded to give his position on the rights of God-ignoring or God-sceptical or there's-more-than-one-conception-of-God businesses, but I suspect I already know.

2 We can always trust the poets to name a fundraiser.