Hey! It’s been a minute, but I’ve been doing stuff off of the socials. Let’s do this in backwards order.
Conventions
I’ll be at RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia this weekend. It’s a small, but friendly SFF convention.
I’ll be talking about Things I Hate as a Reader, To Pseud or not to Pseud (all about pseudonyms), Old School Monsters, Embracing Fear (when your writing isn’t going well), What’s Your Comfort Media, and I’ll be presenting my Better Beta Reading Workshop, as well as, of course, having my regularly scheduled Lazy Sunday Afternoon Productivity Stream, where sometimes we’re productive and sometimes we’re not, but we always have snacks.
Back in February, I presented a couple workshops at ScribbleCon — a small ‘con’ at a local middle school, for kids (and their families) interested in writing.
Writing
Back in November, I decided I was still doing my own 50k word challenge, despite disassociating from NaNoWriMo. I hit my goal and kept going. Then, last week, at 126,050 words, I finished the rough draft of my urban fantasy.
I usually have an outline I loosely follow, but this time, I was writing entirely by the seat of my pants. Which led to me jumping back several times to sort things out, or change things. But, since I was tracking words written on this project, I just crossed out the old stuff, and added the new.
Long story short, as soon as I copied the rough draft into a new file and deleted all the cut prose, the story shrunk to 126,051. So far, I’ve put together an outline of what I have, tracking word count per chapter and POV character. I’ll be editing that over the next couple months. I’m still debating if I should swap to 1st person POV. Currently, I’m rotating through, chapter-by-chapter, each of the 3 POV characters in 3rd person close.
On the polished manuscript side of things, I’m thinking about getting back into the query trenches with my space fantasy.
Reading
My New Year’s Resolution was to read fewer books in 2025 than I did in 2024. I finished over 680 books last year, in an extreme hyper-fixation that’s been disturbing my sleep. So, far, I’m off to a bad start. GoodReads has me currently sitting at 243 books, mostly paranormal gay romances, again.
Thanks for continuing to follow me since my hiatus. I’m not sure how regularly I’ll be back, but I want to keep you posted when I have progress to report. And, hey, I might get back to blogging convention notes again, some day.
If you want to follow me elsewhere or grab some swag, check out my links.
WRITING TIPS & WRITERLY MUSINGS 