Checking in 70: 07.07.24

Halfway through the summer already and more than halfway through the year. I really think I’m in some kind of a time anomaly. It is just going so damn fast.

New Steps

I have finished the revision of Forge and Vine, my current WIP, which is a m/m high fantasy romance. It is currently sitting at around 107,000 words. I set it aside for almost a month to let it rest and disconnect from it. Last week I picked it back up. I read and took notes on the entire thing. Color coded no less. It’s not bad. Not awesome, but I think the potential is there. I want to get through with this new draft by October (more on this later). I actually sat down and made an editing plan for this round, because plans are good.

I’ve discovered I need to get clearer on a few things, especially surrounding the lasting effects that Rowan and Aurick’s pasts have had on them. I need to do some thinking, maybe do some writing exercises to explore their POVs some more before I get to that step in the editing process. Other than that, I think the changes I want to make should go pretty quickly. If everything goes to plan, I might even get a book published this year. Fingers crossed.

I am currently in the middle of a four-day weekend (Thursday through Sunday) thanks to the 4th of July holiday. My intention for this weekend was to get a lot of writing done. To get a go start on the editing process. So far (as of Saturday morning) I’ve only gotten in about two hours, and I’m only halfway through the first step of editing. Not great. Not nearly as much progress as I wanted to make, but there’s still time.

In other news, next weekend, my critique partner and I are heading to Winston-Salem, North Carolina for SAGA, which is a genre fiction writer’s convention. I am getting excited for several reasons. Firstly, there are going to be lots of interesting panels/workshops. Learning is always good. Having a chance to improve my understanding of writing craft can only help. There will also be a lot of opportunities for networking. Being able to spend time with other writers is always great. I don’t think it can be said enough that writing is such a solitary activity in an already very solitary life, that anytime I can get around others who really understand the process is so beneficial for my mental health.

A big thing I’m looking forward to is Sherrilyn Kenyon as a keynote speaker. I absolutely love her writing. The Dark Hunter series was my first foray into paranormal romance. And I also really enjoyed her League series, which is sci-fi Romance. Incredible. She really opened my eyes to cross-genre fiction, which is what I write now, so thanks Ms. Sherrilyn for that. I would love to chat with her for a bit if she has the time.

Lastly, I haven’t really travelled since the Baltimore trip last September. It was right after that my back started bothering me, so long distances in the car became problematic. They still are, but I’ve been dealing with the problem long enough now that I know what aggravates it, and I can mitigate the symptoms to a certain extent as long as I have notice. And what I can’t lessen, I just have to roll with. Travel is one of the major things that re-fills my bucket so to speak, so getting back on the road will be good.

To that end, I am also planning a solo writing retreat in October, hence why I want to have this draft complete by then. I want to work on my next project, which I am super excited about. It is a new adult urban fantasy trilogy, that I have plans to lead into an adult urban fantasy romance series. I am leaning into all the autumn feels and taking advantage of my happiest time of year in order to make some major progress on that one. Super excited. But that’s all I’ll say about that for now. I’ll talk more about it as we get closer.

The Breakdown

So… I decided to torture myself. It started out innocently enough. I wanted to read 11/22/63 by Stephen King. The premise of a time travel story revolving around the Kennedy assassination just really interests me. Then I happened to see a video on YouTube where the host said it was a crossover with It.

I am not a huge horror person. I don’t often get a thrill out of being scared. Very occasionally, yes it can be fun. I have read maybe five horror books in my entire life. I’ve seen more horror movies and series than that, but still not a huge part of my entertainment repertoire. As such, I have never read the book. Nor seen either version of the movie. I am familiar with the general plot, because it’s one of those stories that has reached the saturation point in our society that you would have had to live your entire life in a cave to not know what It is, but that’s it. I never had any plans to read this… ever. According to this one YouTuber however, in order to truly appreciate and understand 11/22/63, one has to be intimately familiar with It.  Is this true… I have no idea. Well, guess who decided to read It without corroborating if that is in fact true. Yeah. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I have been trying to read more genres, so that is good, I guess.

One thing I did not realize until I got it is how huge this book is. My printing is 1153 pages! I knew it was big, but my god. You could kill a small child if you dropped this absolute brick of a novel on them. Which also begs the question, why would I decide to read this in paper form instead of on my eReader. There is no good, logical reason for this. I have no defense, or excuse. I clearly was completely unprepared and unresearched. But here we are.

I would like to report that I am about 300 pages in at this point and I am, tentatively, enjoying it… kind of. There were some rougher scenes at the beginning that were hard to read. I’m sure there will be plenty more. We’ll see how it goes. On a fun note, I’m sure my facial expressions while I’m reading this are hilarious. There have been a few times when I held the book away from me and just grimaced and made weird noises because of the grossness that was on the page. There will be many more of these times I’m sure to my sister’s great amusement.

Living Life

Getting back to the back thing. <Sigh> There has yet to be a satisfactory diagnosis for my issue. They’ve had ideas, implementing several types of treatments with varying levels of success, but so far nothing has fixed it. At this point, I’m just dealing with it as best I can. I don’t have the luxury to continue to jump around trying different treatments until one sticks. I know that is generally how these things work. The back is a very tricky area to deal with, but I just can’t. Most days it’s hard to justify spending the money and taking time off work to engage in what at the end of the day feels like a waste of time.

I do what I can to limit the worst of it and most days, honestly, it’s more annoying and frustrating than super painful, which I am grateful for. At this point I figure it just is what it is to a certain extent, and I need to figure out how to adjust my life around it. I’ve put off doing a lot of things that I genuinely enjoy because of it: travel as mentioned above being the biggest one. I’m actively trying to get back to doing those things. At least right now it is better than it was, even though it isn’t completely healed. If it does get worse in the future, I may be back to trying treatments, but for now, I’m saving my pennies.

That’s all the things for now. I’m trying to get back on a semi-regular schedule with these. Hopefully monthly-ish.

As always thanks for reading. I haven’t really been doing the social media thing. If you are interested, I am posting personal essays on Medium.com under this same name. I should have a new one being posted this week, so check me out there. Give me a clap or two if you enjoy it, and thanks for reading.