on Reading and Writing and All the Speculation In Between
The funny thing about finishing the first draft of a book is that in the immediate aftermath, it kind of feels like you’re on vacation. There are no more deadlines and you’ve finished the work that you can… at least until you get your editing letter and start digging through all the suggestions to make…
It’s been an unusual weekend. I finished writing my eleventh book, even meeting the deadline I’d arranged with my editor for its completion. And, as my brother’s wife and daughters are traveling, he and his son asked us if we would binge the director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We agreed. We…
While I’m working hard on finalizing my Team Alpha manuscript this month, my blog might have been echoingly empty, except that I met the fabulous Lorna Suzuki on Twitter a few months back. Last month, she ran an interview with me, so I jumped at the chance to return the favor. 1. You’ve lived an…
It’s been a productive month; I think the choice to reduce my blog check-ins is paying off. Traffic has only dropped off slightly, while my ability to produce new fiction has increased dramatically. Since my last post, I’ve added 8,428 words to my WIP. If I average 600 words per day through the end of…
This week I spent three days in class learning about ITIL, Information Technology Infrastructure library (according to Wikipedia)… or IT Infrastructure Lifecycle according to the notes I took from what our instructor told us. A great deal of what was covered hearkened back to the word salad I had to get used to for my…
Something about the changing of the years invites an atavistic response to make grand adjustments. As I get older, though, it becomes clearer to me that really, the change from one year to the next is about as stirring as the change from one day to the next. There’s gratitude that we’ve been granted another…
It’s officially the last day of 2018 as I start writing this, so my final check-in of the year isn’t even on my regular blogging day. Sometime in the course of this year, my blogging goals shifted on me in a way I’m not entirely clear about just yet. The quarterly ROW80 “sprints” drift in…
Our Milwaukee house finally sold last week. Objectively, three months on the market is not bad. However, given all the stress that came with ridding ourselves of terrible tenants, preparing the property for sale, and then crossing our fingers after each of the open houses our realtor held… it’s felt like an eternity of hoping….
It’s been a strange, wordless month. It only occurred to me in the past few days that maybe the reason I’ve buried myself in other people’s books all month (my Goodreads challenge page indicates I’m well on my way to doubling my “normal year” of reading) was related to the unheralded second anniversary of my…
Another week with profoundly troubling national news against the backdrop of a lot of being busy meant my library card got tagged for action again. This time, I checked out Gail Carriger’s Prudence. I’m having a hard time deciding whether it was because I was truly exhausted or because this iteration of the series of…