May 25, 2022
Week 85
Emotional State: Head Down
Books & News
I’m plugging away on the cozy mystery, and it’s taken some turn I didn’t expect. What does that mean? It means my first edit will be a doozy, but that’s okay. It would’ve been anyway, since the main character’s personality shifted from the first time I wrote it to the second time I wrote to the third, etc. It’s partly why I’ve decided to finish each draft all at once and also part of pantsing.
Pantsing has thrown me some curveballs in the story, and I’ve added a few new characters. I’ve also realized I may need the animals to have some of their own language and words for things, since they aren’t humans, they just talk like us. What this means I don’t know, except more confusion and things to track, but then I never met a manuscript I couldn’t make more complicated with world building, so this par for the course.
I’m also in the midst of starting a bootcamp on Kindle Vella, the serial program Amazon has out in the US. My current thought is to put my cozies up on Vella and then rapid release the first three books once they’re all completed for those people who like to read them in print or all at once. It feels like the right decision but may be more stressful than I think. It requires regular releases and in order to get them out in a timelier manner, I’d need to do two chapters/scenes a week.
That means they need to be written, revised, revised again, and then launched. Also marketing. With a reader magnet. That I’d now have to write. I’ve also added another freelance gig, put myself out there for more freelance work, and am trying to do all the things I was already doing. And don’t even ask about my plans for Medium.
Who needs to sleep, though, right? Not this girl.
In other news, I don’t want to talk about the news. I don’t want to talk about book bans, the lawsuit against Barnes & Noble to force them to add more layers to buying books communities don’t find ‘appropriate.’ Or the push against Overdrive and Epic from communities wanting to restrict (aka ban) the books the children in their schools read. The slippery slope that is all of that plus the downfall of Roe v. Wade and the numerous deaths in school shootings (27 so far this year. TWENTY-SEVEN. That’ s more than one a week).
Thoughts and prayers mean nothing against all that is coming, all that has happened, all that will happen. We’re at the precipice and our society can go either way. I hope it falls to the freedoms it claims it stands for and not the other way, but I’m not as hopeful as I’d like to be. I also know I’ll do what I was taught to do as a Gen X kid. Put my head down and keep moving forward. Fight the things I can and cheer on those who fight the things I can’t. Meditate and take breaks and dance and read and cry and hope.
It’s the only way forward and through. Or at least the only way I can see right now. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?