I am a fool
Soooooo, remember how I had high hopes I could get writing done? As long as life co-operated?
Life did not, in fact, cooperate.
If you don’t know, we down here in Texas just had a massive tropical storm hit. I mean flooding like I haven’t seen since I moved to the middle of nowhere. (I’ll never go back to the city. Do you have any idea how nice it is to never physically see your neighbors?) We weren’t too worried, though. Celest, my bright blue SUV got us home safe and sound despite the pine tree that blocked our driveway.
It was only after we went into the yard around the tree that we realized the tree wasn’t the problem. The live wire lost in the tall grass we were currently driving in was. We got to the house safely, but my husband and I will be forever grateful that we decided to be lazy and drive the car to the house instead of walking. Since we still had power despite the lost wire, we weren’t high up on the repair list, so we spent the morning trapped at home, trying to get in contact with people to check on them.
All of our friends and family made it out alright, and I’m grateful for it.
On the writing front, I didn’t get… nothing done. I actually did a huge thing, even if the actual “writing” didn’t move much. See, I’ve mentioned before, but I’ve got a lot of barriers to entry to a writing application. It has to be browser friendly since I can’t download anything on my company laptop without having to explain myself to IT. It has to have unlimited book options since I’ve got so many going on at once and I want somewhere safe to store them all together.
I also really, really wanted something I could do a one-time payment on. The platform I was using wasn’t terribly expensive, but they only had a subscription option, and it was just another bill to keep on top of constantly. Enter Ellipsus. The monthly subscription is less than half what I was paying before and it has a one-time buy option that I can upgrade to when money isn’t tight.
It also lets me design my own theme, and I’m a sucker for anything that lets me have pretty colors. My theme is named Mermaid Melody, and I refuse to admit how long I spent getting it just right. Much less time than I spent moving every copy of my writing from the old platform over. It was an agonizing process, but it’s finally done.
However, with all of this, I’m admitting defeat. There’s no way I’m getting Ace of Wands ready for publishing by October. Between formatting, editing, and everything else, I just can’t be sure I can get it done in time. I’d much rather push back the publishing dates and make sure what I put out is clean and polished than rush it and give everyone a sub-par product.
You’ll also notice if you look at the Wolves and Rain page it looks shorter. I started working on the third book and just realized… I wasn’t enjoying it. Sure, there’s lots of points I want to explore in that world, but the emotional arc Selena and Dominic go through by the end of Howls and Thunder makes anything after feel, for lack of a better word, excessive. I’m definitely going to do some heavy edits because there’s a lot in there I still want to add, but I think writing so many books and actually finishing them is getting me more into the groove of what stories I want to tell and how I want to write them.
All in all, this was an awful, terrible week, and I’m more than happy to leave it in the rearview as I tackle a new month and start prepping for all the big things happening next year for me.