My last post was not in March, as this blog would have you believe.
My last post was in August. I gave a general recap of my spring and summer and the (lack of) progress made on Unquickened due to pandemic brain. And then, at some point, my site went down. So did the e-mail attached to this site. Apparently a server crashed, and it took several days for the hosting company to get everything back up. When the site returned, my August post was missing. Because I do not treat this blog or this fiction-writing endeavor the way I should, I did not have a back-up of the post, so I can’t repost it.
So… to recap… Summer was fine, or as “fine” as anything is these days.
Y’all. Unquickened is not playing nice. This book is trying to kill me.
I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean, seriously, characters are reaching across the boundaries of the multiverse with swords and magic and other mystical things to snuff the life out of this adolescent novel and kill me in the process.
That was the last time I checked in with y’all. I’m not sure how I managed to let a whole season pass without so much as a “hey, I’m still alive” post. But then, it’s not like I’ve never done that before…
Fall was very busy for me with freelance copywriting, which was generally a good thing. I did manage to blog a little more over at Story Junction, so maybe I used all of my blogging abilities there instead of here.
I was doing my daily 1,000 words on Soultainted. Aside from our two-week road trip, I’ve been doing those words pretty much every day. I’m finding that focusing for half an hour or an hour on doing the words seems to wake up my brain. Maybe I’m finally starting to understand why some writers start every day with words…
This meme has nothing to do with my post. It’s just my favorite.
In any case, once again, I was writing along and stumbled onto a fact about a character that I knew as surely as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. I can’t tell you how I knew. All I can tell you is that this fact was a revelation to some of the characters in the scene, but that as soon as I typed it, I knew it was true in that world.
August has been mostly taken up by frantic final preparations for our big summer road trip and then the actual two-week road trip. We borrowed my in-laws’ pickup and camper and set out to have a few fun days in Idaho before dropping my daughter off in Montana for her freshman year of college. After the big move-in day and orientation, we took the two youngest and headed down to Yellowstone National Park for a quick couple of days of exploration and then headed home.
There’s a lot of this sort of thing in Montana. I kind of love it.
(Side note: If you are one of the folks who left a comment on a recent post and never saw it approved, let me just apologize for the languishing. I barely touched my computer for two weeks.)
I’ve mentioned this before. I actually think I’m okay with the number. I’m not sure I’m okay with all the myriad aches and pains that are suddenly showing up.
Milestone birthdays, though, tend to put one in a contemplative frame of mind. Couple the approaching milestone with my two oldest children moving away, and my head is bound to start down some paths that I’m going to need to process and share.
And so it is that I come to this blog–a topic that I’ve been noodling over for… maybe a couple of years, to be candid. I’ve been afraid to post about this–afraid of judgment and questions and disagreement.
I think I’m not going to fear that.
So if you’ll all forgive me, I’m just going to get kind of real and very open and maybe a little Jesus-y… And it’s quite likely that I will mightily offend some people. And I think I’m okay with that.
This was the first time any of us had tent camped in a year–basically since the same weekend last July. My two daughters and I went yurt camping in March, but yurt camping is pretty plush when you’re used to sleeping on the ground in a tent. So really, this was our first REAL Honest-to-Goodness Camping Trip in about a year.
There was a time when on at least one weekend every month (usually two weekends), one of the adults in this house was gone camping with a group of scouts.
