Newsletter - December 20, 2022

Christmas break has begun--two of our three girls are out of school, and the oldest just has a week more. My wife is on break. I'm on break. /whew

To celebrate, we spent a day away from home visiting nearby towns, forcing the kids to endure our company for extended periods of the day.

Interesting to me: our oldest, 17, no longer complains about every single decision we make as parents. She's starting to roll with them, find her joy under our oppressive regime, and not focus so much on fighting every word out of our mouths. Middle child is right in the thick of the teenage whoa-is-me stage where a minute without the queso she wanted, or having to pick up her dirty clothes from off the floor, sends her into a spiral of parental derision. Youngest daughter is dipping her toe into that same pool. The weird part--I'm sure we'll miss this when they're all off on their own in a few short years.

Oh, carryover from last week—I decided the windows needed frame molding too. Almost done with that. Then on to the much-anticipating caulking and painting fun. (Hate that part).

I wrote the final scene of the first part of Mother of Trees. Now, I'm doing as I mentioned, and circling back to tidy it up. I definitely found some small and medium discrepancies that need sanding. That said, drop me a note if you're interested in reading through and providing feedback on the structure and characters. You undoubtedly expect a stack of books for gifts, so the timing is likely poor, but I'm also in no particular hurry--the story must go on. I'll keep writing.

I'm going to mope in frustration for a minute -- Barnes and Noble didn't order my book for their store. I went in after waiting a couple of weeks, and they said it looked like, though the manager added my books, the person in charge of purchasing cancelled the order. The manager added the order back in, but it has yet to show up as an order, so I believe the same thing has happened again. I also received my copies from Ingram Spark, and I was sad to see that the cut of the covers is not perfect--very similar to the small discrepancies I see at the Amazon print houses, where alignment varies. The latter probably only matters to me. Well, I suppose both of these complaints only matter to me. Ha!

Thank you for the feedback last week on covers! With you input, I decided not to redo the series (cancelled that effort), and instead just redo Book 2. Coincidentally, I started talking with a young man in high school who lives up the street and fancies drawing, and he is going to work on a new cover as part of a school project. I also sent him a scene from the Mother of Trees that I was interested in seeing drawn, but I believe he is going to work on the cover first, b/c it aligns more with a current assignment for school.

o To-Do list for writing last week: