Category: The Writing

I’m not posting about resolutions or goals – but rather a state of mind.

One of the things that got me through 2023’s ups and downs (and honestly several years of the ugly divorce) was daydreaming about what my ideal life would look like. Especially once I got to my house.

Newsflash: I’m in my house! Finally!

My ideal life is so close…

What do I want every single day to look like? How do I want to feel? What do I want to spend my time doing? That’s what I’m focusing on this year. I’m almost there already. Getting my house next to Dad’s and Molly’s was Phase I. If all goes according to plan, Phase II will wrap up by the end of 2025. Though I can’t say more about that yet.

So now that I’m here, living my ideal life as closely as possible, what do I want my days to look like? What can I control? What can I do to get closer every single day to Phase II?

While assessing where I am and what I accomplished in 2023, I realized that I’d fallen into some temporary thinking and habits. The house we lived in was temporary. Staying with Dad–temporary. Even before we moved out of Nixa, I was just waiting for the divorce to finalize so I could move on with my life. So those years of court limbo were also temporary.

Honestly, even many years of marriage were temporary. I was in survival mode. I shut down a lot of the things I wanted to do, even to the point of stifling who I was as a person. Just to survive another year.

Goddess willing, I’m not moving from this house until they bury me. This is permanent. NO MORE TEMPORARY THINKING ALLOWED. I’m not in survival mode now. I’m in THRIVE mode.

It’s time to get back to my permanent routines that maximize my time and health so I can do this writing gig for a very long time.

Way back about a million years–it seems–I used to write dark & early. I’d be up before anyone in the house and get at least one writing session done before anyone else was up. That way, no matter how shitty the day ended up being, at least I’d already written something.

I’m going to do my best to re-establish this kind of routine, though I must admit mornings are hard for me. This is going to take some time to adjust. One thing I learned from last year was that sometimes very simple rewards are enough to start a new routine. Thanks to the sticker reward, I stuck with my planner all of 2023 – except July/August got a little away from me while I was deep in the move.

My reward for getting up at the butt-crack of dawn is going to be tarot and this cute little stamp set I got. In addition to my Agendio that I reordered with some minor modifications, I added the Writual planner and acrylic stamp set to my morning routine.

I fell in love with the round tarot cards at the beginning of the divorce nightmare. I told this story in the Triune group, so I won’t get into the details here. But I had a memorable reading and immediately bought my own set of Motherpeace cards. I have many (several) other tarot sets I may use occasionally but I tend to come back to Motherpeace. They just fit too well into Shara’s mythos to NOT use.

My 2024 plan is to focus primarily on Shara, though inevitably I’m going to end up crossing over into Karmen and Helayna’s stories at some point. I really wanted to have those trilogies finished before I tackled Shara, but I’m just too far behind to keep waiting. At one point last week while I was prepping everything I had all three projects open at the same time. I may do that several times over the next few months!

The other project I’d really like to get back to is continuing The Vicious with Dig the Graves. But Shara will be my priority indefinitely. Of course I’d love to make progress (finally) with Blizzard Bound as well. We’ll see how that goes!

I don’t usually post word count goals either, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is going to be one of my biggest years yet. I’m shooting for 90k a quarter, 360k words for the year. We’ll see if I can do it.

What a crazy year!

I never imagined that it would take most of 2023 to build my modest house. Getting contractors to show up in the country was a constant challenge. Luckily, Dad seemed to enjoy hounding people until they finally came out to finish their work, and I was able to move in.

• LLS in July – the month I needed to move. We drove home as quickly as possible and the movers came the next day.
• Moved my youngest daughter out to her own apartment in July.
• Moved the rest of our stuff into storage, naively thinking it’d be a month or two. (hahahaha)
• Eldest moved out into her own apartment in October. Sorting through the storage unit was fun [insert sarcasm here].
• Finally moved my remaining stuff into the house Dec. 26th.

Since my kids were setting up house for the first time, I let them take whatever they wanted between the two of them. They cleaned me out pretty well, which is a good thing. That means I’m off to a brand new start in my home – where I’m now living alone for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. I don’t have any furniture other than my bed and office equipment. I don’t have any kitchen items other than a few cast-iron skillets and stuff the kids didn’t want. So it’s “girl dinner” for me unless I go up the hill to Dad’s and eat with him (which I’ve been doing 98% of the time anyway).

Living with Dad for 5 months was an experience. I’ll never forget watching all the seasons of Alone with him, let alone countless hours of old black-and-white Westerns and the news (not Fox News thankfully). We took turns cooking and doing up dishes and for the most part had a great time–like an extended vacation. Molly often came up for dinner and we’d steal the TV to watch episodes of The Dead Files while Dad snored.

But living in someone else’s home isn’t the same as your home, you know? I tried to minimize MY disruptions to his life, especially the middle of the night work calls that had me up with the lights on trying to work. Or my dog wanting to go outside at O-dark-thirty. I struggled with carving out time to write, because I didn’t want to feel rude, locking myself up in the guest room rather than hanging out with him when I was the guest in his house.

And of course, I wasn’t prepared for how long I was without all my stuff. I took a single suitcase in July. I didn’t have any long-sleeved shirts. No coat. I didn’t take any of the birthday card stock, labels, etc. I didn’t have any of my shipping material or book stock. So that put a long hold on the business side. Bonus: I bought some new clothes until I could get my old stuff back.

All of this to say… my word count went down another 15% compared to last year (and if you go back and look at last year, you’ll see me whining about how little I wrote then too). I’m not whining this year because it was an incredibly stressful year of instability – and also a transition into my new life. A period of tightness and constraint in the chrysalis. A communal time of family that was much needed after the long miserable divorce and decades of marriage with a man who hated the rest of my family and never wanted me to see them.

Words for the year: 182,024. The lowest since I’ve been tracking in my spreadsheet (2021) but I’m sure you could find previous years here on the blog.

I still managed to republish a book, publish 4 new books, and participate in 3 anthologies with short stories.

I’ll do another post tomorrow with my plans for 2024.

Sorry, guys. I needed to bump the release a few more weeks so I can finish the best book possible.

I didn’t know it was going to be so hard to get into some semblance of a routine after moving in with my Dad the end of July.

My house still isn’t done. At this point, I’m hoping I can be in by Thanksgiving but that’s not guaranteed. The cabinet installer is coming the first week of November but I still have plumbing that needs to be done as well. He can’t come out until the cabinets are in–but it took him a month to come out last time. I have no heat in the house until he comes back and winter approaches. Everything has been delayed numerous times but I’m trying NOT to be stressed about it.

My eldest moved out into her own apartment (for the first time) beginning of October. That has been stressful but fun for both of us. My youngest lost another ferret this month, so I’ve been worried for her and making trips back and forth to the vet with her. RIP poor Felix. Our elderly dog KC – Kasey – got so sick last week that I was afraid I’d have to put her down. Luckily it wasn’t a stroke but vestibular syndrome. Some Dramamine and gabapentin got her through it and she’s 100% back to her sassy self. But all last week I was lucky to get more than 2 hours of sleep without her frantically pacing and crying because she got lost in the same guest room we’ve been in for months.

All of these little things that have conspired to keep me from hitting any kind of major momentum. Writing has been like pulling teeth all summer/fall. I really thought I’d have this book done EARLY and now I’ve had to bump it again. I’m trying to give myself grace, but I usually thrive under deadlines and pressure. The past year(s) have been difficult to hit my stride and roar through the book like I used to. Maybe I’m just getting too old for those late night, long hours. I used to love the thrill of a deadline breathing down my neck but I guess I have too much going on right now.

I don’t have stability. I don’t have my normal things with me. I’m sick to death of my suitcase of clothes. All of my winter clothes are packed in storage, buried in a mess. I’m behind on birthday and holiday cards, and kept hoping the house would get finished. Now I need to figure out a way to get them done in temporary housing without all my stuff that’s still in storage.

I’m about 65-70% finished with Monstrous Hunt. I really thought I could pull it out of the fire this weekend, but it’s just not going to happen. I will keep chipping away at it and finish it up as soon as I can!

My apologies if you placed an order recently. I’ve been on deadline to finish a story for the Dark Needs anthology. I finished that up and so will get orders out ASAP. (I always throw in a little extra if I’ve kept you waiting.)

I was going through some old files from the divorce and then decided to update it with everything I’ve ever written. It dawned on me that September of this year will be my twenty-year anniversary since I got serious about writing. TWENTY. That’s crazy.

In that time, I’ve written 91 stories (including short stories). Even without counting the Queen Takes More stories separately since they’re published together.

Correction: 92 stories including “Nighttime Feeds” that I just finished!

That means in the next year or so, I’ll hit another major milestone. 100 stories written.

Sounds like a couple of really good excuses to have a party.

So like a good little writer, I spent the past few days going over all my 2022 accomplishments and making plans for 2023. I’ve been off from the Evil Day Job since before Christmas. While it’s been a nice break, I feel the pressure building because tomorrow I’ll be back to work. I need to know what I’m going to be concentrating on and have a plan for how I’m going to finish all the things on my plate.

Yesterday I created a desktop for myself with my word and affirmation for 2023, including covers for each of the books that I’d like to focus on and write/finish over the next month(s). That way every time I open my computer, I’m looking at the things I’m supposed to be working on.

I was up until 1 AM last night against my better judgement. I decided to total up all my words for 2022 for comparison to 2021. While I do keep track of daily sprints, I evidently forgot to total up by month since March of last year. (I ended up writing 213,590 words if you’re interested.)

I’m already thinking about returning to work, and I guess that was on my mind because I could NOT sleep.

Toss. Turn. Flop. Fluff pillow. Doze. Wake. Asleep. Awake. For hours.

A song kept running in my head. I knew the song was on my Queen Takes Death playlist (still in progress – some songs are in trial mode and may come off). I knew it was by Halsey. But I couldn’t remember exactly which one or what the lyrics were. It just kept playing in my head. I woke up at 7:30 AM hot because my Ooler kicked off. I turned it back on and went to the bathroom while I was awake again. Climbed back into bed and settled in to try and get a few more hours of sleep on this last precious day of vacation…

The song was still playing in my head. Just snippets of lyrics but more the melody and meaning behind the song.

And then Karmen started talking in my head.

Karmen hasn’t had much to say since last year when I wrote her short story for the Love & Legends anthology. Suddenly I had the opening lines for Sunfires3.

I lay there a few more minutes, trying to get back to sleep. But then I was worried that I might forget those opening lines. I didn’t want to lose her voice if she had something to say. Remember too that I’m dedicated to following the spark and joy this year. That’s why my word is EASE. If I’m feeling the magic, then the words flow. It’s easy and right and natural.

So I got up early on my last day off and started Sunfires3.

The book that is not on my desktop staring back at me.

The song: Control by Halsey. It’s now on the Sunfires playlist.

P.S. I was so groggy and clumsy from the horrible night of sleep that I broke my favorite coffee mug. I set it on the counter to open the fridge for the half and half, and it just tumbled off and shattered on the tile floor. I can’t replace it. They don’t make that size any longer. It was my One Cut Deeper custom cup that I made myself. Sigh.

I don’t really like to do these year-end posts (I skipped last year’s). I’m never happy with how (little/much) I accomplished over the past year, especially with how many books I was able to complete.

At first glance, 2021 was a dismal year. I only published 3 new books (Leprechauned, Evil Eyed, and Monstrous Heat) and two short stories for anthologies. Worse, I set aside a couple of books incomplete this year, which I really hate to do (Darkness3, Monstrous Hunger, Blizzard Bound, Cajun Christmas). I REALLY HATE not finishing books that I want to finish. Especially when I have preorders on them.

But I can only do what I can do, and this year, I didn’t manage to write as many words as I wanted. I still wrote. I still completed 3 books and 2 short stories. I also started writing Shara’s Blood’s prequels, something I’d been meaning to do for years (I’ve completed Rik & Daire’s, Guillaume’s, Xin’s, and Mehen’s so far).

What the short list of “completions” doesn’t say is how many new things I tried this year.

• With the help of Pink Flamingo Productions, I was able to get Broke Down, Knocked Up, and Four Men & A Baby into audio. (4 Men is recorded – I’m still waiting for ACX to release it).
• I took several older series wide this year, learning how to publish direct at Koko, Google Play, and Apple. This includes republishing two dragon novellas with new covers, titles, and edits.
• I got my first solo BookBub! That was really exciting.
• I tried my first BookBub ads.

On the home/personal front, I was still in court limbo for the first half of the year, since That Man had filed another maintenance modification request. He passed away in July when I was at LLS in Savannah, so we left early to be here for my girls. The last few months, I’ve been working to finalize my forever house at my Dad’s, trying to balance what I can afford with what I want, especially knowing that the Evil Day Job dropped that bombshell in October. I have some plans drawn and the bank lined up. Just waiting now to see if the appraisal lines up and then we can get busy building.

For all my efforts at improving my process and streamlining my systems, I’m still pretty disappointed with my output this year. The list of things I want/need to finish just keeps growing and I have a hard time lining up which book will come out first. It really depends on what unfolds over the next few months.

The strict, rigid line up of preorder dates just doesn’t work well for me. Yes, I like deadlines. But I’m also an emotional writer, and I need to FEEL the story sparking. I need that magic working and flowing, or it’s just a slog. So my goals for 2023 will be finding the magic. Focusing on it. Letting go of the written-in-stone dates and just letting the stories tell me where to go. I’m going to dabble with writing in several different things, at least until something really sparks and takes off.

If all goes well, I’ll be moving again this summer. I may even need to find a temporary place to live a few months until the house is finished. All that’s going to be disruptive and stressful to my stability and environment. But the life I want to have in the country at my dad’s is just around the corner.

What I do know is on the plate this year are several anthology stories I’ve signed up for. Bloodlust releases in February, Dark Needs in May, and The Thousand Doors of Midnight Manor will be in November.

I’m also going to focus on getting the rest of the Blood prequels done so that you can enjoy Queen Takes Blood sometime in first quarter.

Lastly, and most importantly, I am going to get Shara back into the line up even if none of the other stuff that I wanted to finish first is done or not. I used the holiday cards to write out that intention over 1000 times. Shara returns in 2023!

The short statement:

I’m planning to cancel my last two pre-orders (Monstrous Hunger and Blizzard Bound). They both will still be published but I am not going to commit to a date. Side effect: I won’t be able to have pre-orders again for a year. And that’s ok.

The longer discussion behind this decision:

I’ve written a lot about my process. There are several posts (here and here) about the retrospectives I do once I finish a book. I try to learn from each book and fine-tune my process with the goal of writing faster with the same high quality book that you’ve come to expect from me. I stated early on that 2022 would be the year of finishing up loose ends with the goal of getting back to Shara’s world. I 100% committed to finishing Her Irish Treasures, and I did complete both Leprechauned and Evil Eyed this year. Though they took me much longer than I intended.

Why is that? When I’ve been making all these constant changes to improve my process?

I’m a thinker, a strategist, and sometimes, very analytical. I write code for the Evil Day Job and have a Masters in Mathematics. But I’m also a creative, a dreamer, and a visionary at heart. Sometimes those things work well together–and sometimes they don’t. The analyst keeps looking at my stats and scratching my head. What’s going on here?

WHY AM I GETTING SLOWER?

I’m not burned out. I’m not blocked.

I know my personality type. I thrive on deadline stress. I love impossible deadlines and challenges. Setting a pre-order seemed like it would be the ticking bomb that my brain needs to kick into high gear and get the job done. And yeah, sometimes that has worked over the last few years. But… Sometimes it hasn’t. The gear hasn’t been there when I tried to shift.

We’ve been over all the personal stuff that has been going on with the divorce, plus moving and pandemic and all the other stressors. That might play some of a role in my general slowdown but this felt bigger.

Like I was missing something. Something crucial.

So I decided to do a retrospective of my retrospectives. The biggest takeaway from those other retrospectives was that when I shift gears to other projects, I noted that the original project took a hit, and when I picked it back up, I had to build back up to a reasonable speed. Therefore, I determined that the best way to overcome context switching between worlds/books/characters was to stick to the same series and just finish it.

Makes sense, right? And I did that with Her Irish Treasures as much as possible, especially Evil Eyed and now Dynosauros. And Evil Eyed was so slow that it took me an additional 2 months longer than I originally planned.

I know what I’m capable of. I have written 50-70k in a month before when the wheels are spinning and the words are flowing with minimal editing needed (e.g. they weren’t throwaway drafts but solid work). Yet there have been months this year where it’s like pulling teeth to get 10k.

I have often referred to my writer personality as a horse (this post is old but parts still hold true). The urge to run wild and free is always there. Even in the middle of a blizzard, my horse wants to leave the nice warm stable. Lately, Beauty has been feeling like an old, worn-out plow horse. Just pulling the plow in nice straight rows, day after day. The plow sinks a little deeper into the ground. Becomes a little harder to pull. The field needs to be plowed, though. The work must be done. But she can’t help but wonder where the joy went, and if it’s possible to get it back. Why does it have to be so heavy?

And I realized today after doing some more meditation and journaling on the matter, that the answer has been in my retrospectives all along. Sometimes a strength can be a weakness. And sometimes a weakness can be a strength.

What if… the work that I took a break from was actually slowing down regardless of the break? What if that break to another project was exactly what my muse needed to do in order to re-energize and find light again? What if instead of beating myself up for switching projects and trying to “fix it” – I actually embrace the need to switch to something else as a strength?

What if switching projects is one of the key things that has helped me finish as many books as I do?

So I decided to embrace the switch. I have a short story that I committed for a BookFunnel anthology that I need to write. I WANT TO WRITE – you’ll see why. I actually dreamed about it (which is huge for me when the subconscious is working on the story for me). And instead of working on it then, I made myself write down the dream and then keep plugging away on Monstrous Hunger.

There’s nothing wrong with Monstrous Hunger. I love the story. I love the characters. But writing it is heavy and slow right now. It shouldn’t be. At all. This is a fun, over the top crazy story with dinosaur monsters, interesting peens, and all the shenanigans of a good sexy romp. But I have been plodding and plodding for days. Since the beginning of October, my sprint average has decreased by almost 20% and still sliding. With the deadline just around the corner, that is the opposite of what I want to happen. I need to be hitting my stride and cruising at my best speed.

As soon as I made the decision to set this book aside, I went to work on the short story. I decided to read the beginning of Queen Takes Knights to remind myself of what was happening when Shara first meets Rik and Daire. After all, I wrote that book 5 years ago this month.

And I started to cry.

It was like coming home.

There is the emotion and joy that I have been searching for. And when it’s time, and I feel that the well is full of joy again, I’ll come back to finish up the dinosaur romp.

And it’ll be even better than I ever envisioned.

Commence kicking down the stall in three… two… one.

Go. Run. Be free.