Catching up and the end of the year
Dev Blog #4
This is the cold season, and I tend to hibernate. My time becomes even more introspective. For a long time I had a poor outlook on these months. A sense of loss, the world breaking away, people busy in their own lives. But my wife and best friend showed me what this time of year can be so much more. So now I still find myself introspective of the year, but find reasons to see & talk to people in celebration of the past year and the moments we spent together. So I become busy in other ways, it also helps a lot with the SAD. So my dev post might be a little more erratic till the new year, my writing also tends to take a back seat. Granted, I have had plenty of ideas!
While I had hoped to be at least 20,000 words into my novel, this has not happened yet, really I got stuck in the mire of figuring out many of the details that I seemed to have overlooked. But I hold to the fact that I will arrive where I need to be when I am ready, and that this is all the journey of this story. I boldly embrace the zero words for NaNoWriMo, but now I have all the context and organization to make it a good story.
I have also done some house keeping to really get a hand on what I consider my promising short stories to see where I need to go with each of them. I have a little under a dozen that I am really excited about at this point, and could see on shelves if only I could reveal what is hidden under their current murky drafts. A lot of them have notes and brainstorming that I have shoved into margarines, some of them not my crazed thoughts, but valuable input from trusted readers such as my writing group. I just need to take action on them.
In terms of getting things out there, I have also been keeping up on pushing my pieces into magazine and publication house mailboxes. Hopefully, someone will bite soon.
My main newsletter this month is almost ready, I realized somewhere along the line, a main newsletter slipped through my life. It is what it is. Either way, I am planning to get this ready to go and scheduled for publication to account for my busy life in the coming weeks.
This past month I was able to meet up with my writing group at a group planned writing retreat, but more on this in my next major newsletter that will be a little later this month. This one will be a little more like my first letters, rather than a single focus like my newsletter of November. I felt that one on dyslexia really deserved a single focus, and anything more would have taken away from my goal for it. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.