Let me start with the work, and where all of that stands.
As you may know, for the past year and change I’ve organized my year idiosyncratically around three seasons. Last month I started my ‘summer’ season, in which I’m aiming to achieve three projects – the revisions for Aconite Braid, bringing it up to the point I can start submitting it to agents, a self-pub project using cut material from Dog Country and other previously written material to assemble a novel featuring a character perhaps familiar to some of you – Troy Salcedo. The third project is hazily defined and is a combination of using up my banked but un-used ‘vacation’ time from the past several months, maybe doing short stories, or possibly doing some planning ahead… but since these three projects are roughly in order of priority, the one we expect to get furthest with are the Aconite Braid revisions.
That’s work.
Now it’s time to circle back around to that question of how much of my personal life and circumstances to share with the public.
This is one of those really difficult questions? Like. I’m not popular enough to have trolls after me at this stage, but at the same time, divulging enough that random internet strangers could make me uncomfortable seems unwise… and at the same time I want to share what’s going on. It’s a tricky balance to strike. I may try and walk that line, eventually, by putting up the difficult details up in a patrons-only post sometime explaining what’s what, but. Speaking in general terms and without going too far into what the rough stuff is?
In the short to midterm future, there is likely to be a major change to my lifestyle circumstances. While it won’t stop me from writing in the long term, it may take me quite some time to get my life re-situated and back onto the kind of writing schedule I’ve enjoyed this past year. Right now things are okay, and with a little luck I’ll be well positioned to finish Aconite Braid before anything changes, though.
So, I have a lot of challenges ahead. Some of them personal, some of them professional – figuring out the Aconite Braid revisions, getting the manuscript out to some other writers and Jon Oliver, who I’m hoping to hire to go over the manuscript with an industry-oriented eye, there’s a lot going on. Some of it is outside of my skillset, some of it well within my skillset but challenging due to current circumstances.
The thing about challenging times is that they tend to cause us to stumble. And some stumbles are okay, because challenges and challenging times are not meant to be easy. In challenging times, it is okay to ask for help to get back onto your feet, or try something else until things are a little more stable.
Thanks to the help and support I get from all of you, I’m going to go ahead with trying to finish up Aconite Braid, assembling old material into something I can self-pub this year, and coping with life.
As ever, thank you so much for helping to keep me going.
