Life and Updates

We fool ourselves sometimes by thinking we have complete control over our schedules. We plan and think everything is laid out nice and neat like rail road tracks leading into the distance. At least, I fool myself that way. Maybe for a brief while I can follow those tracks, but then life throws a rock and I don’t even realize what happened until I look back and see the shattered bits of the wheels in my wake.

My husband and I unexpectedly ended up spending half the week in the hospital last week. Just to be clear up front, we’re okay, but as you can imagine, this derailed any plans I had, writing or otherwise. And I had to take my own advice from my last post and Just Breathe even though I’d just started getting back into a solid writing schedule to finish the Hidden Mythics II manuscript.

Despite the disruption, however, things are still getting done. Here are the updates:

Hidden Mythics II (Still no official title)

I’m now at 94K words out of the original 100K goal. As some of you may know, my writing tends to be a solid mix between outlining and writing by the seat of my pants. So the 100K goal was based off a guess-estimate from the outline. Now that I’m so close to that finish line, I can safely say I’m going to need to stretch that goal if I want to finish the book right. Quaking Soul was closer to 135K in rough form, so that’s where I’ll set the stretch goal. No matter how you look at it, though, the rough draft is in the home stretch.

Mystery of the Golden Shells

The first physical proof arrived this week! It’s like opening a present on your birthday when a package arrives with the first print of a book. I’ll be posting a lot more in the next month but I can now safely say that the book will publish on August 15th!

Wax Eater (Short story spin off from Discarded Dragons)

A while back I mentioned a short story of mine got picked up for an anthology called Paradoxical Pets. I didn’t have any specifics at that time but I now know the anthology will be published in December and is being produced by Word Balloon Book Anthologies. They just came out with a similar Middle Grade or young reader anthology titled Beware the Bugs that looks super fun.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. I just wanted to stop in to say I’m still on the tracks. I might be traveling by one of those little hand carts, cranking the handle for all I’m worth instead of enjoying the luxury of a steam engine and a sleeper car, but I’m moving forward and the writing journey continues! (I might also be a little over-dramatic at times). Thanks for sharing the journey with me 🙂

Blessings,

Jennifer