Dribs & Drabs ...

Happy New Year, to whomever might be reading this :)

Things on my plate for this January:

Finish prepping Best Laid Plots - Book the First to be sent to my editor

Work on my first Roll20 campaign, and first campaign in about 20 years.

Prep two trainings I will be doing towards the end of the month - not writing related (although one of them is Time Management, which I have done at When Words Collide. But these ones are for a Guiding Conference.

Speaking of my Guiding life - need to prep for our first Unit meeting of the year, which will be Monday the 10th. I also need to order our Spring cookies, and do a bank deposit for the Unit

Before Christmas, I sent out A Winters Tale and Best Laid Plots - Book the First to some people for Beta reading. My sister got the first story, and a friend got both. My sister's reaction was - varied. She liked some aspects, didn't like others, and didn't "get" the overall idea of a sword and sorcery story. Not surprising as Fantasy is not something she routinely seeks out. To her, Fantasy is all about fairies and myths, and is probably set on our Earth in the past, present or future. She is familiar with Xena - and thought my heroine should be more like her (which is weird, because she is a lot like Xena), but kept looking for celtic or gaelic references to orient by, which definitely aren't part of the story at all.

My friend, who got both stories, didn't really care much for BLP-B-1st - took her a few days to get through it. Liked some of the things, chuckled here and there, but overall it wasn't really her cup of tea. But WT - she absolutely loved it! Whipped through it in four hours (a habit she has if she likes a book). And has been gently nagging me for a sequel ever since :) And while the ending kind of hinted at a sequel, I don't actually have one worked out for this one yet. Prequels, yes. A trilogy, as well as a prequel to that. I'm about 1/3 of the way through book one of the prequel trilogy, and unfortunately futher progress has been sluggish. But I've finally named the horse, which I think I've mentioned in a previous post. The rest of the book has been loosely plotted, and the rest of the trilogy really loosely planned.

Now BLP-B-1st definitely has a sequel - 2 in fact, which have also been loosely plotted. So far though it's just notes jotted down and transferred into the Word file I have for most of the stories I'm working on. Haven't yet set up a Binder for it, although the section cover sheets are printed off and ready to go.

BUT.

I haven't actually written ANYTHING since well before Christmas. Sure, I did lots of baking. If you call 9 types of cookies lots. And made cabbage rolls. And did the rest of the usual Christmas stuff - shopping, wrapping, decorating, etc.

But no writing. And I am having a hard time getting back to it. Discipline has never been one of my strong suits (can you see the irony in me training Time Management???), but the hope remains that at some point I'll actually be able to follow the schedules and daily plans and actually be productive, but that day has yet to happen. But soon. Or eventually. Sometime!

And that's all I have to say for this installment! If I am able to start posting here on a regular basis, then that will likely mean I have started following my schedules and daily plans ... and that's all the New Year's Resolution I need!

Until next time!

L.