on Reading and Writing and All the Speculation In Between
July is always a month of introspection for me–primarily because my birthday is in the middle of it. And this year, it marks the 20th anniversary of when hubs proposed to me. So there were things to celebrate and remember this week. There was also the reminder of our recent losses. Next week marks the…
The funny thing about this week’s image is that while it’s true, counting the hours we spend on our various activities sometimes also reveals… there really aren’t enough hours in the day. And sometimes decompression by way of reading through the night is the best way to balance the work-day stressors we deal with. I…
What makes holiday weekends so interesting is the speed with which they zoom by. I started catching up on some of my NetGalley review books earlier this weekend–and even posted reviews of them over at Goodreads. (If you’re interested, they were for Reincarnation Blues and Marriage Claws.) Part of the reason I went looking for…
I keep getting the question from supportive friends and family: Do you think this week will be less intense? I’m to the point where I think I must’ve leveled up somewhere, because it seems that even weeks that should have been “lighter” end up exhausting. This week I lost another filling and New Dentist says…
I’m not actually much of a Dale Carnegie fan, but something about this quote from him struck me as appropriate for any writer facing edits. I now have all three edits back from Liana, and actually began work on book 1 this week. The good news: Liana reported significant improvement in my writing between books…
I’ve been broadening my supporting cast of author services recently, deepening my relationship with my latest editor (the fabulous Liana Brooks, if anyone is considering a content editor), adding marketing support (via Chelsea Author Promotions), and a new cover artist (Kelley York with X-Potion Designs). This weekend I saw the first results for Dust to…
I haven’t looked at any of my recent words in the past three weeks, so when I got a note from my editor that she is expecting to finish her job this week, I had another one of those internal push-pull conversations about whether I should try to start something new now, or just keep…
My mental vacation continued this week with a day of actual vacation. I took Friday off to extend my Memorial Day weekend to four days. My thought was that there have been so many little honey-dos on my list for so long, maybe if I had enough days in a row at home, I might…
What was once cause for panic and dismay, this week was more of a sense of accomplishment and celebration: I wrote no new fiction words. It’s always an odd place to be at the end of a project. Should I start right away on something new? Should I wait to get into something new until…
It was the week that felt like a year. It started very well with an intimate evening of music, listening to Eddie Jobson and Marc Bonilla pay tribute to prog rock greats John Wetton and Keith Emerson by telling stories about them and interpreting their songs rather impressively for a two-person gig. An actual date…