Blown away

A few days after my end-of-August post, Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm on the south Texas Gulf Coast. I had to evacuate. It was weeks before the area was deemed safe enough to return. Roads had to be cleared of debris and fallen power poles. Power, water, and other services such as the Internet had to be restored.
Over a month later, the city of Port Aransas and I are struggling to reemerge. Some areas of the city were devastated and face many more weeks of debris removal and rebuilding. My home and office sustained damage. Most of it was exterior and unlike so many others, I was able to regain occupancy and begin the slow process of returning to normal.

My cats are doing a much better job than I. Once they found themselves in familiar surroundings, they resumed napping in their favorite spots and turning up their noses at their food if I failed to offer the correct flavor. All’s right with their world.

I, however, am finding it difficult to resume my routine. I may have returned from sojourning in various temporary housing arrangements but my Muse has not. The 134-mile-per-hour hurricane gusts seem to have blown out my creative flame. Many have suggested that we’re all suffering from some degree of post traumatic stress disorder. As my sister put it, “Of course you are. Your city was attacked.”

I’m exploring a variety of techniques to rekindle my creativity and syllable by slow syllable, they seem to be working. Although I have several works-in-progress that I’d like to get back to, I started two new short stories inspired by recent events, and I’m kicking around ideas for a National Novel Writing Month project. I hope to have enough energy to participate in NaNoWriMo this November. It would be my 7th writing marathon.

Over the weeks that I’ve been out of touch, I feel that I’ve lost connection with the readers who have enjoyed my work. It’s almost as though I have to start all over to form those links. To that end, I’m going back to school. I’ll be taking the Indie Author Mastermind courses which offer a simple, actionable plan to restart my promotional efforts and help me to reestablish my presence in the book-loving world.

IAM was developed by none other than Alesha Escobar, an Amazon bestselling author with over 10,000 ebooks sold, as well as a bestseller at B&N, Kobo, and iBooks. Alesha’s learned what to do and what NOT to do when publishing and promoting books and is sharing that expertise through the IAM courses.

I’ll share my experience as I work through the course material. I always was a good student and I like to learn, so I’m excited to get started. Meanwhile, you can check out the curriculum and see what I’m getting into here.