I'm Back, Friends!

I’m baaaaaack! Did you miss me?

It’s been far longer than I anticipated, and I apologize for my long absence. When I sent out a poll at the end of May on my social media pages, asking what my fans would like to see me talk about next, I didn’t consider that so many big things were happening all at once that were going to keep me from being able to post much of anything at all.

I spent the entire month of June packing up my house. I believe I’ve mentioned here before that my husband is working to become a pastor, and part of his training involves moving to a new church and working there as a vicar for one year. So, we moved cross-country at the beginning of July, getting renters into the house we own and were living in near his school. Then, I’ve spent most of August unpacking and trying to get everything settled as well as continuing to freelance edit for my clients. The last three months have been exhausting, but I’m happy to be settled once again.

As you can imagine, packing and moving hasn’t left me a whole lot of time for writing, but I’m slowly getting back to it, working again in full force on my poetry book, Dear You, that I’ve been penning this year. As you may remember, at the beginning of 2021, I told you about my very lofty goals: publishing a full-length novel, Dear You, a Christmas book, I Must Be Tripping Wedding Bells, and probably a few other things as well. Obviously, as August winds to a close, I’ve come to terms with the fact that those things aren’t all going to pan out. I’ve been far too busy to devote my time to that many projects.

So, this is what I’ve settled on doing for the rest of the year: I will publish Dear You, hopefully in October. I’ve completed 14 multi-page poems, and I have a list of about 20 more that I’d like to write. I don’t know if I’ll write all of them before I publish, but we’ll see. There will be more coming out about Dear You soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that. I’m also working on a writing prompts book I hope to release in the next month or so, but that’s lower down on the list of goals than Dear You. If the prompts book must wait until November or December to be released, I am alright with that. My only other goal is to write in and complete NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m not sure what idea I’ll be using yet (see below for more details on that), but it’s one of my goals. I want to have a mostly completed manuscript in November that I can spend a few months polishing and refining before getting out into the world in Spring 2022.

About NaNoWriMo: Some of you may remember that I wrote in and completed NaNoWriMo 2020 last year, working on a full-length fantasy-romance novel about soulmates. I didn’t complete my manuscript in November, but I spent several months at the beginning of the year working on it, hoping to finish it to publish later. Well… As I was working on adding and changing things about the manuscript, my word count kept going up and up and up. I stopped working on it at just over 130k words, more than double what I wrote during NaNoWriMo, and I discovered the story wasn’t finished yet. There was more world-building that needed to happen, more description of the way the world I had created worked, and more character growth that needed to take place. I didn’t want my story to turn into a 200k mountain that readers would be afraid to climb. So, after some consideration and conversation with both my writing group and my husband, I’ve decided to turn the book into a trilogy, giving me the opportunity to explore my characters further and build the world. I have more stories begging to be told in that universe as well, and if this first trilogy goes well, there will be more books written in the same world later. First, I’ve got to get through this trilogy.

As I am a writer, though, one idea is never enough for me to focus on for some reason. During moving and packing and unpacking, I had another idea for a different, unrelated fantasy-romance story hit me, and I’m torn between writing that novel, which would be a standalone, or working on developing one book for my trilogy during NaNoWriMo. We shall have to see. I’m quite excited about all the possibilities to come, and I hope to get all these stories out into the world someday.

It’s funny to me, as I’m sitting here thinking about how much I want to reveal to you about my upcoming works, that many of my ideas seem to be within the fantasy genre. It was never something I enjoyed reading much as a child, and I’ve only recently discovered how much I love the genre and exploring magic and other-worldly entities in the stories I write. I always imagined myself penning works in the romance or historical fiction genres since that is most of what I read. Fantasy wasn’t a choice I consciously made until I sat down to work on my NaNoWriMo project last year. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

One other quick announcement I’d like to make: If you’d like to meet me, get your book signed, or purchase one of my books, I will make my first author appearance (not by choice, but this nasty pandemic keeps making author meet-and-greets extremely difficult) in my hometown of Washington, Kansas, September 16 through 18. I’ll be setting up a little table along Highway 36 during the annual Highway 36 Treasure Hunt. I will have books, business cards, and teasers for Dear You there, so come out and see me! More on that to come!

Meanwhile, thank you for popping back to my blog to see what I’ve been up to and what the rest of 2021 holds for me. I’ve missed writing these blogs, posting to social media, and interacting with all of you every week. I’m excited to get back to this, and now that we set my office up (and the bat is out of my bathroom), this should become a more regular thing again. I look forward to chatting with all of you again!

Have a great week!