Newsletter - January 24, 2023

I usually look at my phone pics for the week to remind myself what went on, but this week, I just have photos of my dogs. I must admit, I've felt a little under the weather the whole week, but not enough to say I felt sick. There's a lot of that going around Austin. Allergy season? I don't pay enough attention to know. All I know from this week, as evidenced by the ultimate source of information--my phone history--is that my dogs are cute.

This week at work I have to do a pile of quarterly reviews and compose a burn-down chart for a project which is underway (on top of my normal work load), and I think those things will consume my mornings, leaving me little time to write.

The most interesting writing topic for me this week is art updates. Unfortunately, I have no pics to share, just updates. One of the young men from high school that I'd been talking with about art has a history teacher for a father, one who is actually a lawyer who prefers, and chose, to teach over practicing law. But he wrote up a contract for me and his son which was educational and... don't shoot me for this... kind of fun. Oh! Kristen, if you're okay with it, I'll shoot it your way and you can tell me what you think.

Why would a bunch of legalese and contracts be fun, you ask? Because, (1) it deepens my commitment and that of the artist -- we both have skin in the game, and hope we will create something better together, and (2) it made me acknowledge how much I enjoy art in my books, which flies in complete opposition to the review I included in last week's newsletter. Furthermore, it made me realize this--because I am self-published, I can do it the way I want. I'm willing to bet that if I like these drawings, others will too, but I don't have to argue about it, b/c I'm the one creating the book! (I don't know whether to insert maniacal laugher or awe-inspiring hymnal music, or possibly overlay the two). Not to mention, the young man's art is so good!

Despite my return to work and its crazy amount of personnel issues... or maybe because of my desire to escape it... I actually threw down quite a few words last week. About 12k words in the Alluvium town of Cenaedth. Since I expected a word-count close to zero, I'm pretty happy with 12k words. There's at least four or five words strung together in a good order in there too. However, the more I push into the next part of Elliah's adventure, the more the piece I skipped gnaws at me. There are character arcs that need to progress, and with some characters, I didn't leave room for that while with others I did. The pic below shows Elliah's travels so far, but I would have to zoom out further to show you every place she needs to hit in Part 2 of Mother of Trees. Too bad they haven't invented any of those fancy ways to travel that exist in The Guardian League.

The red path is the first 42 chapters. The yellow line is the "bit" I skipped.

o To-Do list for writing last week:

~~Email updates~~
Keep working on Part 2 of Mother of Trees. I don't expect much progress this week for time reasons. [I actually made much more progress here than I expected.]
Plant some seeds in my own mind about the Faelian Swamp - there's definitely a gap in the story there. [I did not make much progress here. I have a couple of seeds, but I didn't plant them... just kind of threw them on the ground, hoping they'd take root.]

o To-Do list for writing this week: