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Being Cool and Like Popular

 Hello. C J here. I’m currently working on a light romance starring some of my characters set in Ascala called Heart of Glass. There will be a series of these and each one has a theme. The theme for the first one is what the characters all do when they have vacation time. Ascala is known for its hard working citizens and so most of my characters who live there don’t like time off. Our main character, the gay male noble blooded Blue, currently has to find ways of entertaining himself on a three month paid vacation. Find the free chapters as I write them in the Novels page in the link.

This vacation project turned out to be a lot larger and more complex than I thought. I had expected to just have our friend Blue go on long walks and eat some lunch. Then I thought about how he prevents heat exhaustion. Then I realized I don’t know what lunch would be good to recover from that much exercise. I looked to my own life for ideas and realized that a lot of what I know about running this home office job here while also exercising might be useful in the story.

I’ve reduced this down to so far two key things that I have to keep in mind to write the novel. One, Blue is an introvert. When all of us here on Earth think of vacation time we probably think of catching up on social media and maybe meeting some new friends. Yes. Amazing. I tried that. I nearly passed out from the fatigue. I’m an introvert and so social media platforms like Bluesky and Facebook are way too social for me to use on vacation time. Earth thank goodness has ebooks as well.

Thanks to looking into this for the novel I’ve rearranged my weekly work structure. I’m doing Bluesky and Facebook for both business use and to meet people. I’m moving that to the weekends and I’m allocating Saturday and half of Sunday to it, no more. If you’re an extrovert then do the opposite. What am I doing instead? I don’t really know yet. An extrovert needs people in a way that I don’t. I’m good with people but I have had to acknowledge that I have limits.

Two, body temperature. I exercise when I’m bored. This I’ve learned is causing a lot of fatigue and is screwing up my ability to plan how much food I need in a day. I have food on hand and I can always make more but if I screw up I’m more or less hungry than I normally am. It’s probably not healthy to keep heating up and cooling down rapidly. So, where do I go with the story from here? I’ve introduced another main character who is also an introvert and is on vacation so I have more characters to work with. Past that I’m still planning.

C J Mcpherson


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