What Have I Been Up To?

There goes my hope of doing a blog every month. How do YouTubers do it? But I’ll be honest — like most people, it has been a crazy fall and a bizarre winter. What have I been up to?

Well, recovering from knee surgery has not been an easy road. I’ll try not to gore you out with the details (and maybe skip to the next paragraph if you are squeamish), but I separated my quad muscles in two places from my kneecap. Yes, it was as painful as it sounds, and now months later, I’m still recovering (another few months to go) and, for now, walking with a cane. For the record, doing one-hundred squats per day seemed like a great idea at the time. I received a stern (yet hilarious) lecture from my surgeon, who had one of the best bed-side-manor of any doctor I’ve ever met. Mostly it was about no longer attempting to do the exercises that I did in my twenties and thirties . . . yes, I’m getting old. But as someone who used to be in top shape during my professional dancer days (I miss my abs), this was the first winter since my teenagehood that I hadn’t been able to exercise several times per week. I hadn’t realized until this year that working out had done wonders for keeping my mood up. In our area, we only had three sunny days in January. At least the sun is out today.

I took several online writing courses. If you have the extra cash to sign up for MasterClass, N.K. Jemisin and Neil Gaiman have very inspirational lessons. I also returned to basics and revisited courses that taught grammar for a novelist. That included proper punctuation for dialogue and advice on how/when to use a semi-colon (the consensus out there seems to be . . . don’t!). For my previous novels, I’m happy to report that I scraped money together to hire a professional book editor to re-edit books one and three for me. A huge thank you to Oren Eades. He’s personable and professional, and I will definitely use him again. Once I scrape enough cash together again, I will see if he could re-edit book two for me, but for now, I will leave that as is.

Finally, I’ve been writing. I had a draft title of World Jumpers. However, as I near completion, the name doesn’t quite fit anymore, although the draft image does. See my page —– for the description. It is about eighty percent done. This has definitely been a different process than my first series. Granted, after almost two decades, the characters in that first series had been defined and redefined in my head. As the plot and the character’s motivation shifted, a number of discovery drafts (which no one will ever see) were needed for World Jumpers. As I complete the first full draft that will go out for review, I’m delighted with how it’s turning out, but more work needs to be done before I start the review/editing cycle. That includes taking a break from World Jumpers to give me some distance from it. What I’m trying to admit is getting it completed by May 2023 is a bit ambitious. However, it should be out and available by July/August this summer. You can read a draft synopsis of my subsequent work on the link: Coming Soon page of my website.

Hey, other writers, I have a question for you. Have you been writing a story where you have been close to completion, only to have another novel’s story come into your conscious mind? Over the past two weeks, a speculative fiction/sci-fi novel has popped into my brain. Maybe when I’m pausing World Jumpers, I’ll jump into writing that story.

So to anyone who may see this, there may not be one novel out this year, but two. We shall see. Thanks for reading!