Hello to any readers who happen to stumble upon this. It’s been some time since I last updated my blog; ten months in fact. Life has a way of getting away from us like an out-of-control train barreling down an icy track toward a group of carolers singing merrily at the base of the mountain. Full blast, no control, no slowing down. Faster and faster until it comes crashing down. Perhaps that’s cliché, but it’s the truth of how life can be. It’s certainly how mine has been since October. Between an 8 to 5 that drained every ounce of energy, to health issues suffered by a family member who required extra care, and a teenager who is starting to find herself and thus needing an attentive eye on her at all times…it’s simply been a lot.

Life is finicky. Everything seems to be going perfectly then BOOM! a wrench meets the engine that propels life forward and gets bogged down for a time.

But here I am! On the other side and ready to share what’s been going on because a lot has changed.

First off, I’m several months behind where I wanted to be with my current manuscript. When I last updated my website, I had hoped to be done with it in late fall 2025. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.

Not to give anything away, but I’ve done something rather risky with how I went about writing it and the uncertainty that came with that decision stalled me for a time. I put the manuscript down sometime in mid-October and picked it back up in late-December and tinkered with it. I got some general feedback on the first 20,000 words (I only had about 34,000 written at that point) from an editor who helped me determine whether it was working. After a lot of back-and-forth e-mails and after she spent some time with it, in fact more time than she would have normally, we had our zoom call. During that discussion, we focused on whether the narrative point of view was working. What she recommended was that I keep the narrative point of view but change the tense, so I did.

I picked it back up only to put it down again at the beginning of April with a rough zero draft complete at approximately 55,000 words. I didn’t pick it up again until the middle of June.

I completed a series of major revisions and sent off draft 3 to my beta readers. Draft 3 is 84,500 words. It was intentional that I sent the draft to beta readers when I did. I felt the story was complete, but I wanted to leave room in the word count if anything major was missing.

Right now, I’m actively working on revision pass 1 of draft 3 using the feedback from beta readers as a guide and am currently at 87,000 words. The manuscript, once complete, will likely land close to 95,000.

As I’m working on these final revisions and headed toward the line edit, I’m also looking at agents on Query Tracker and will begin doing some research on ones that might be a good fit, but that’s a topic for another post. It’s my hope that sometime within the next month, I’ll be ready to enter the query trenches.

On social media, I’ve recently hinted at what my next project will include. I’ve discussed it previously on my website under the tab: Current WIPs. That section is now blank because since writing that section, I’ve decided to pivot on how I’m going to tell that story and am still hammering out some of the mechanics. That project requires extensive research, so I will be taking my time with it and likely will be writing other material at the same time. We shall see how it all goes.

Something I’ve started doing for myself is using writing dice that I was gifted years ago and hadn’t opened until a few weeks ago. I decided that I need to get my brain going in the morning before I start working on my manuscript because it used to be filled with one or two paragraphs every so often that were clearly where I started writing on any given day. “Warm-up paragraphs” if you will. So, the writing dice activity is activating the creative part of my brain instead of that going into my manuscript as words that will just end up being deleted.

Initially, I wanted to use the writing dice Monday-Friday and then I was thinking I’d post my favorite story from the week as a blog post, but I haven’t been consistent because the days have been busy with birthdays, family get-togethers, and a rapidly approaching school year. I still like the idea of sharing them through my blog, but I need to be more consistent.

Here are my thoughts on how I’ll go forward with the writing dice exercises: I’ll write a minimum of four per week because that’s more realistic for me and I’ll post my favorite to my blog on Sundays. At the end of each month, I’ll develop the top choice into a short story to send out in a monthly newsletter.

I’ll leave it here for now and will hopefully remember to write again soon.