Put in a 22 hour day yesterday

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Ah, the joys of parenting a child with sleep issues.

Without getting into too much detail without his permission, as I mentioned before the time change hit him very hard. Yesterday he couldn’t get up until noon and last night I couldn’t get him to sleep until after 3:30 am. If it were my sleep schedule that went out of control, I’d set my alarm, get up super-early, be tired all day and go to be slightly early. Fixed!

For him, we may be forced to let him stay up all night one night so he can turn himself around that way.

On top of that, we’re squabbling over his assigned reading. I’ve given him a book that’s a second-world medieval-ish fantasy and he’s treating it like a plate of bitter carrots (“It has castles. I don’t like castle books.”)

Aside from the stress of having a fantasy writer’s child refuse to read traditional fantasy [1] there’s also the idea that he doesn’t believe that I, as his homeschooling parent, have the right to assign reading to him (book-length reading, at least). This… doesn’t work for me, as you might expect. If he’s griping about books written for popular readers of the modern era (with fantasy elements, which he loves) how’s he going to respond to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

Obediently, if I have anything to say about the matter. Of course, it’ll help if he’s well-rested and has been fed healthy food that he likes. We’ll see.

Finally, I got my royalty statement for the middle part of 2010 and… well, those numbers could be better.

[1] IT READS THE HOBBIT BEFORE BEDTIME. IT DOES THIS WHENEVER IT’S TOLD

4 thoughts on “Put in a 22 hour day yesterday

  1. Steve

    If your series does become more popular (I very much hope it does, it’s one of only 2 that I look forward to these days), do your royalties for older books in the series remain constant? Leading hopefully to more and more leverage as you become known?

    Also, any idea how well The Dresden Files (my other favorite, naturally) started out? Obviously it’s providing a prosperous living now, but some of that is new readers buying the series, not just the most recent book. Maybe.

  2. Steve, my contract specifies a set royalty rate for the first X number of sales and a higher rate after that. I don’t have the numbers handy right now, but it’s pretty standard to arrange it that way.

    I don’t know how Jim Butcher’s books did at first. I assume pretty well, since they grew in popularity pretty constantly.

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