Welcome to my October 5, 2026 update. Before I tell you what I worked on this week, happy Blindness Awareness Month and Disability Employment Awareness Month. I found out about the latter through LinkedIn.
September was great. I was hired for a new part-time position. I’m currently a substitute teacher and the job is inconsistent because I prefer working with high school students, but will consider working with younger ones as long as I’m in a support role. I don’t know yet what this current position will look like for me.
The biggest accomplishment of September was the NJ Council of the Blind convention. I’m part of the convention committee and helped with the planning where I could. This year, I also announced the door prizes. The day was full of very good information and, while we had a few hiccups, the convention was successful.
Last week was productive, even though I had a lot going on. I finished reading The Apothecary Diaries Volume 10. As always, The Apothecary Diaries brings with it a good time. Though it explores some darker subjects, I consider it a cozy fantasy the same way I consider Fruits Basket cozy fiction. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
I believe I had two days in which I didn’t write, but I finished the second draft of A Little Bird’s Rise, a book I plan to publish in 2027. It’s a fantasy memoir about the rise of a deity of chaos. This draft consisted of line edits only because I wrote the first draft some time last year, so I needed to reread it. I still wanted to do some form of editing, however.
As of now, I’m planning to publish this book exclusively on Kindle Unlimited, but that might change because of how they want us to verify our identity. The process requires you to take a picture with your webcam as well as scan your ID. A lot of places are using this inaccessible method of verification. I’m a member of Behind Our Eyes, an organization that supports writers with disabilities. Members have done their best to reach out to people to advocate for a more accessible verification method. We’ll see how this is going to go. Amazon is a large corporation making a lot of money and they haven’t shown that they care about accessibility from what I know. My hopes aren’t high.
If I don’t publish this exclusively on Kindle Unlimited, it’ll be available wide. My policy is that, when it’s available everywhere, I’ll donate it to Bookshare, an accessible online library for people with reading barriers and I make the ebook $0.99 for libraries. They suggest pricing it three times higher than the original price, but librarians are already having a hard time with conservatives wanting to ban books and our politicians being cowards and more than willing to cut library budgets. I hate this joke of an administration and am patiently waiting for it to end. Book banning and budget cuts were happening before this, but this specific administration has given power and liberties to people that have only made our lives worse.
I also worked on the first draft of Meet Me At Midnight, a Cinderella retelling. This is also a fantasy memoir, but Cinderella is a villain. This is one of my many projects I’m working on, but it’s definitely my fun story.
Finally, my essay, A Writing Exercise With The Apothecary Diaries was published on October 2 on Substack. I took a creative nonfiction course in university, but haven’t been writing essays in the last few years. I got in the mood to write creative nonfiction and it’s been really enjoyable. I’m treating these like opinion pieces. The essay will appear on my blog and Patreon soon.
Overall, my week was pretty normal for me. Until my next update, how’s your week going?
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