Maegan M. Simpson's Blog, page 5

Real World Here I Come! (Sort of)

Hello hello!

I have magnificent news:

Me all fancy in my cap and gown

I am officially a college graduate! That’s right, the day I’ve been praying for and talking about for years is here! I can finally start writing fulltime!!!!

Of course, graduating from CCU is bittersweet…there are definitely going to be a bunch of people in Denver that I will miss. But I’m not saying a full goodbye: I’m already planning a visit to Denver to see everybody. But I’m also glad that my home address is once again in New Mexico! Unpacking and setting up my writing nook is tons of fun!

Anyway, my new status as a college graduate means that I now have the time to turn my attention to being an author, and all that entails. I have a lot of plans and a lot of learning to do. I hope you all are patient with me as I move through the growing pains of this new chapter in my life (ha…chapter. I’m so funny )

For now, those growing pains are probably going to look like a lot of changes to my website, social media, and to my books. The timetable for all of that is still in flux, but I’m excited!

I’m still hoping to publish Broken Healer this month, probably toward the end. Lord willing, I’ll have a preorder link up for you all soon (and a cover. I am so excited for you all to see the cover!).

Future Plans

Hello hello!

So, I’ve got some updates on several matters. First, as of Wednesday I will have finished my last midterm (oh for the day I can say that about finals!), and I’ve registered for my graduation ceremony. It’s starting to get real, guys!

However, in between midterms and my final final (ha, I crack myself up), are a LOT of involved school assignments. And senoritis is starting to hit (mostly in the form of reading way too many novels considering the amount of schoolwork I have to get done), making it even more important to guard my concentration…

Partly because of this, I’m pushing back Broken Healer’s release until after graduation. I want to have the time to give it my full attention before releasing it to the world, and I just…can’t do that right now. But! This delay will also give me a chance to implement some of my growing plans for my post-graduation days. I won’t reveal them all now because spoilers, but one fun piece of it will be new covers for the Agonizomai books!

That’s pretty much all…I just wanted to let you all that I’m still breathing, and that it’s going to be a bit longer before Broken Healer’s debut. Hope you all are surviving and thriving in this year 2021! Aaaand here’s a cat picture for your troubles:

Have a…Drabble?

Hello hello!

So I have a thing I wrote (I’m not entirely sure what to call it…I think it qualifies as a drabble, if you’ve ever heard of that?). It’s a little monologue-type thing that I wrote last spring, when I’d finished Born in Darkness and was trying to start my next book. I wanted to express how it felt with all the stories swimming in my head and none of them settling in, through the metaphor/daydream of my archive.

I’m sharing it with you now because…well, partly as a bribe for patience in the next few months. My last semester of college has decided to go crazy, so I may be a bit AWOL until May rolls around. Broken Healer is still in the works and I will post about that as soon as I have updates, but I’ll probably cut back to about one blog post a month.

I’m also sharing it because the same feeling I had when I originally wrote it is, to a certain extent, enjoying a repeat performance. Part of that is school, and assignments, and not having the time to really focus in on a project. Part of it is the allure of all these new stories whispering snippets in my ear.

It’s hard to describe, but hopefully this fun…drabble (I’m still not sure I’m using that correctly) will give you a glimpse into what it’s like in my head. You should recognize references to previous characters, which honestly was half the fun of writing it.

Alright, I won’t go on ad nauseum. Click below to read!

Welcome-to-the-ArchiveDownload

Here, Have a Short Story

Hello hello, and happy 2021!

I finally finished my Christmas present to you all! Now it’s more of a Christmas/congratulations-you-made-it-through-2020 present. Click here to see it on Amazon (or see the link at the bottom of the post). I tried to make it free, but for some reason Amazon wouldn’t let me price it lower than 99 cents. For now I haven’t enrolled it in Kindle Select (so it’s not on Kindle Unlimited) so that I can share it for free here later on if I want to, but that is something I’m open to changing. Let me know if you’d prefer one or the other!

The short story takes place in Agon a few years after Frosted Fire, and it’s from Henry’s perspective. Now, full disclosure: I meant for this to be a light, happy little short story for you all, but then I decided I wanted it to be from Henry’s POV to give you guys a glimpse of how he interacts with the characters in Frosted Fire after the book ends. And, well…Henry doesn’t do lighthearted. It’s very difficult getting him to lighten up enough to smile, let alone take part in a celebration. That’s part of who he is and part of what he needs to work on. But anyway, that’s part of why it took so long to write: me wrestling with Henry. But there’s people celebrating around him, and Zef gets him to loosen up a little…so we’re making progress.

Other than a new short story, most of my efforts have been toward Broken Healer (we’re making progress guys! I’m hopeful that its release will be this month!) and planning out my writing year. I have this awesome new bullet journal that I’m trying out that’ll hopefully help me stay more organized and on top of things with my writing so I can plan long term. It’s my first excursion into the world of bullet journals, so we’ll see how it works out… (if any of you have any tips and suggestions for bullet journal set-ups and tools, feel free to shout them out! I love office supplies and making things pretty, so any excuse to buy more makes me happy)

Of course, there’s the matter of my last semester of college (woohoo!) that keeps me from planning the first few months of my year too ambitiously, but after that there’s wide open freedom! (That’s an exaggeration, but I’m going to ignore that for now).

So that’s my 2021 so far…how about you all? How have you spend the first five days of this new year?

And Now I Can Breathe…

Hello hello!

Another semester behind me! I finished my finals last Wednesday, which also happened to be my birthday (yay!). I’m still recovering a bit from finals-brain (my head rebels and doesn’t want to take part in any sort of complex thought…a bit of a payback for stuffing it so full of information for exams, I think), but I’m working on catching up on all of my writing things. So now for a bit of an update!

The last three weeks of school were so crazy that I didn’t have much time to breathe, let alone write and edit. As a result, Broken Healer is delayed to January (I’m sorrryyyy!). I am back to editing, though, and it’s going fairly quickly…as long as my editors and I don’t find some major issue that needs in-depth surgery to fix, it should be pretty smooth sailing from here on out.

I’m hoping to have some kind of Christmas present/consolation-for-book-delay ready for you soon, though it might be a slightly late Christmas present. It depends on how well the story goes…it’s being a bit difficult, but I’m hoping to make some good progress today. Keep a look out for an announcement for that!

That’s essentially all I have in the way of announcements for now. Happy first day of winter! I hope you’re all having a good time preparing for Christmas. It’s coming up so fast it’s almost unbelievable.

An Update

Hello hello!

I’m home for Thanksgiving! This year more than ever I am so thankful for this time at home with my family, even if this break feels a bit like an extended homework session.

Ah yes, homework. I’ve got a 20 page research paper in the works (due in about two weeks…I’m trying not to think about that too closely), so I haven’t been doing much writing or editing lately. Broken Healer’s release date may have to be pushed to January, but that’s not a sure thing. I’m hoping to go through another round of edits during break as well, but it does depend a bit on how much homework I can get done.

The research paper is fun, though, and definitely worth it. I don’t know how many of you know or remember that I have two majors: Biblical Studies, with the ever-valuable exegeticals, and History. This semester I’m taking the capstone of the History Major, the backbone of which is an intense paper featuring primary research. In other words, I get to be a historian instead of synthesizing what historians say. It’s extremely intimidating and I may have a panic attack when I have to turn it in, but I’m really enjoying writing my paper. It’s on my Grandpa Speedy, who had a fascinating life, and I’ve loved digging through his documents and interviewing people. I may share it here when it’s finished, if any of you are interested. It’s an academic paper, but it still has heart to it (I hope). And hopefully it’ll be good enough that you’ll forgive me for the (possible) delay on Broken Healer.

Unique…

Hello hello!

Have any of you ever pondered individuality? The uniqueness of every human? Maybe it’s just one more piece of evidence that I’m a weirdo (the writing’s been on the wall for years, anyway. Good thing I’m okay with it!

Current Projects Page!

Hello hello!

Once again, I’ve gone MIA without fully intending to. I blame homework. But yesterday I turned my exegetical in, and now I have a little breathing room! Although now it’s midterm season, so I should probably be careful how much breathing room I take… no matter. Today I’m celebrating freedom! And ignoring the limits to that freedom.

Writing, Homework, and Camping Adventures…

Hello hello!

This has been a pretty productive few weeks (if a little crazy). I think I’ve found a rhythm with school, though as always looking at my calendar for the semester gives me a bit of a shock. But my classes are in seat, my living situation this year is great (there’s a kitty!), and I love the subjects I’m studying. It helps that this is my last year, which is simultaneously super exciting and terrifying.

Last weekend I got to go camping with my Mom! The place we went was beautiful, and I had a ton of fun. (It’s also why you’re getting this update this week instead of last). Our location was Pagosa Springs, CO, which we found out is home to the deepest hot springs aquifer in the world! It’s along a river, and it’s a really fun spot because there’s this resort with the aquifer and all these pools on one side, and small springs with make-shift pools on the other side. That led to an image in my head of these posh, circa 1900 well-to-do folk relaxing on resort side looking down their noses at the working-class kids splashing and having a good time on the other side of the river. Maybe there’s a short story in there somewhere. It really is a fun image… At the bottom of the post are a few pictures from my trip.

In writing news, the first round of editing for my next book is finished (at some point I promise I will give you the title), and it’s back with my Mom for another round. It’s already about 10k words longer than the rough draft, so that’s fun! I still don’t really have a release estimate, but sometime in late 2020 is definitely possible.

Meanwhile, I’m already deep into my next project…it helps that I already had over 20k words written when I returned to it a couple weeks ago. It was one of the three (or was it four?) books that I started before settling in to Agonizomai book 3. But the story was only coming in snippets, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what comes in between. Now the story’s finally settling down and coming to me in more than bits and pieces, and I’m excited for it. It’s not in the Agonizomai series (though book 4 is close on the horizon), it’s the first book in another series that I’ve had in my head for years. I’ll see about an excerpt in the next few weeks to whet your appetite…

That’s all for today! Hope you guys are having a fun time as we gear up for fall! (My color scheme has already switched to Autumn, and it’s taking a lot of self-control to wait for actual Fall to put out my decorations)

Waterfall! See the little birdy clinging to the top?Pretty mountain road…The aquifer!View of the valley from a waterfall.

Rough Draft…Finished!

Hello hello!

Everybody. I have accomplished the almost impossible. I have actually met (and slightly exceeded) an estimation/goal. Today I finished the rough draft of Agonizomai Series book 3!

The rough draft is a bit shorter than my last couple of books…about 76k words (the rough draft of Born in Darkness was somewhere around 90k), but there’s a big section of this book that needs some major tweaking and expansion, so it’s very likely that this book will grow significantly in the next draft.

A particularly exciting bit about this particular book is that this is the fastest I’ve ever written a rough draft of one of my books. Between school and life, it usually it takes me seven or eight months to write a rough draft. Even Stone Heart, which is barely long enough to call a novel, took me five months for the rough draft. Online school and COVID craziness prevented me from starting this book in earnest until the end of the semester, so that means start to finish this rough draft took about four months. This bodes extremely well for after graduation, when writing will slide up in my priority list to school’s vacated spot.

I’m so excited, you guys. I was wondering if I’d have to put off my next book release until after senior year, but the progress I’ve made this summer means you might get another book this year (But don’t quote me on that. I’m still going to get settled in classes before I venture forth with an official release estimate).

Well, that’s my happy news of the week! I hope you’re all doing well! I’m settling in to my apartment and prepping for classes on Monday…let another school year begin!

And good luck to students, teachers, and all the other myriads of people it takes to run schools! Your task this year isn’t easy, but you can do it!