And so the insanity continues.

My campnanowrimo project

For some reason, being busy is never enough. I need to be INSANELY busy. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm worried I'll get bored, although I can't see much danger of that. The beginning of this year was taken up by finalizing edits and the last checks on Keir ready for release, along with organizing my book tour and coming up with guest posts. Around this time the sfr that chose to pounce on me Christmas Day continued to take shape. Originally I thought I'd be lucky to make it to 20-25K on the word count. Currently it stands at 35K - over my estimate much?! But come May and the blog tour, the muse seemed to go on strike except for writing blog posts. By the end of the tour I was shattered and muse was a blank.

I needed to get back into the writing groove. The idea of working on Keir's sequel scared me, frankly. After the edits on Keir all I could see were the errors in book two. I rewrote the ending - which then made the title irrelevant - and that was as far as I got. I had a short scifi story I'd intended to self-publish that was sitting on my hard drive half finished, the rough draft of the new sfr Tethered calling me, and my scifi novella Gethyon still homeless. I'd kind of lost my aim and didn't know where to start first.

So, I picked myself up from the downward drift and made plans. I was struggling with the sequel, and after chatting with my Lyrical editor, I sent it to her for some emergency treatment at her skilled hands. I dived into the short story and posted the first third of it to Critique Circle. Having also posted the first chapter of Gethyon to CC and receiving a ream of solid feedback, the story had the beginning overhauled. Muse perked up, and although her idea is probably unpublishable she did at least get back into gear and come up with something new. She wanted to write up the events between the end of Keir and the beginning of the sequel, and since that gave me some solid background and a couple of neat ideas to add to said sequel, I've let her pootle away at it. Currently we have nearly 10K on that - all new stuff. So I'm happy. Even if I'll never submit it anywhere.

Gethyon has now gone out on submission. The sequel is back with a ton of advice and notes, and I'm powering through it. The short isn't finished, but the critiques it received confirmed my own doubts and that will now be shelved until I have time to rework it. The first 5K of Tethered went to a couple of trusty beta readers and will be polished up for a literary contest that closes at the end of June. The first SFR Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop takes place on the 22nd June, closely followed by the Angels and Demons Blog Hop. By the 1st July I'll know if Keir has made it into the Readers Favourite Contest Finals. If so, it'll be going into the EPIC contest too. So July will be spent on the sequel. And to complete the insanity, I've outlined (yes, actually outlined) a superhero romance for my campnanowrimo project in August. And yes, that is during school holidays. When I have all three children at home.

Hey, I'm a writer. We're all insane. You knew that, right? :-P