2013: Part One

I've enumerated some of the obstacles (mainly health-wise) that barred me and my wife from a more creative output in 2013. Money was also a major factor. In most ways, we were doing better on unemployment than on the paltry part-time gigs we obtained in late 2012. The constant struggle with health and finances made the first part of the year less than productive. and in the midst - towering over it, you might say - was my 90 year old father's rapidly declining physical and mental health. We stayed with my father, and increasingly, I fell into a ritual of grocery shopping and errand running for him on my days off work (I wasn't getting many hours after January anyway). Sarah fared better with hours, but was unhappy with her job at Ross and took a new one up the street from it. Her ankle gave her significant problems at Ross and more recently at her current job. Add this to her fibromyalgia and arthritis, and our bouts with depression and anxiety, and the Covert clan was in rough shape as we approached convention season, which I hoped would be a balm to all this, as cons always excite me and provide an escape from the mundane. 

From HeroesCon to FarmerCon to San Diego Comic-Con, I have always felt truly at home and in my element at a convention, since the first Heroes Mini-Con I attended at age 9.
Also, I felt the cons would give us a chance to resuscitate She Never Slept's content, which had waned since the last barrage of reviews by Sarah and the episodes of my videocast Retrodrome. Associate Editor Sean Lee Levin had been largely maintaining the site under Sarah's direction, and stalwart Assistant Editor Heather Royston had been contributing content, but the Coverts largely lay fallow, beset by the difficulties cited above. When ConCarolinas, a very fun nascent local sci-fi/ fantasy convention, rolled around in the first part of June 2013, we all saw it as a chance to get back on track with our journalism. Sarah and I would each write a report, as would SNS scribe Angie bell. All three of us reported on ConCarolinas for SNS in summer 2012. Such was the plan this year as well. But so goes the cliche about the best laid plans...

Next up: 2013: Part Two: The Conventions (and A Few Surprises..)