A Current Endeavor – Crazy Busy

I eked out a little Chapter 6 today but the last few days have been frantic. I attended a CMA conference on Thursday and Friday with some pretty incredible speakers and I’m still trying to process everything they had to say. Amanda Lang’s views on the necessity of changing how we think and how we educate our children so we all ask more questions and become more innovative sounded pretty sensible to me, and Bill Strickland’s keynote speech about treating people like assets and recognizing the value of generating hope where hope is lacking was very inspirational. I liked his notion that hope is the cure to spiritual cancer, and he ought to know considering the miraculous things he has accomplished in his life. I’ll be dedicating next month’s blog posts to him. I think after a year that has been pretty dismal to this point, I could use a little more hope in my life.

Yesterday was the date of my children’s school’s spring fair. In addition to baking a few things for their bake sale, I donated a copy of Casualties of War and The Blood Is Strong. The books went into one of the raffle prizes and I’m hoping someone will end up reading them. After the fair, I was planning a weekend of gardening, writing and rewriting when two e-mails popped up. I found myself spending eight hours reviewing the edits for Prisoners of Fate (followed by a quick proofread of a short story’s final edits) and now I can’t shake Ebon, Urwick, Shetland and Anna from running around in my head.

I’m very proud of my plot for that book. It is dizzyingly convoluted, in a good way, and an excellent example of the type of story – one with circular logic in places and multiple timeline cross-references – where an outline was absolutely required. As my hubby said: “without one, you would have definitely gotten lost.” But we’ll let the critics judge for themselves once it has been published. I’ll be offering up a teaser tale, “The Phoenix Egg,” for that book in the near future, once the book’s release is drawing near.