Newsletter - March 21, 2023

Our Spring Break plans went awry from grandparent medical issues, but we tried to make the best of what remained--small trip to the rodeo carnival, planning out our next vacation... to Canada in the summer, and hanging with friends. I'd love to say that we rested well, but last night was the first good night of sleep I had over break, and now, the Sunday before I return to work, is the first day I woke up feeling human. Hey, better than nothing.

Wow, I cannot get it together, even as I try to write this--yet another reminder that even though I'm not a planner, I am all over the map when I don't have a plan.

Carnival photo… a couple are mine and a couple are borrowed kids 😜

My big, exciting news from this week was getting to see my first book at our local Barnes and Noble. I made some posts on IG/FB for it, and then celebrated by boosting those posts. I have no evidence that boosting posts does anything good for the promotion of my writing, but I feel okay about using it to share my excitement. (My wife, who sometimes reads this, will probably disagree... Janelle (her friend... our friend, but my wife would get her in a divorce... who always reads my newsletter), don't bring this up!) That was fun to punctuate--you don't get to use parenthesis in fiction (very often).

My next exciting thing — recording an episode on Fiction Fans Podcast. We will record on March 29 and I’m so pleasantly nervous about it. If that phrase rings hollow for you, you’re probably not (A) an introvert and/or (B) not old enough to recognize that nervousness tastes like a potion of youth.

Editing - I’ve never had such a difficult time editing. I think, underneath all my efforts to fix little pieces of Mother of Trees, something fundamental is still off. And my struggles loom from my subconscious mind telling me I’m ignoring some foundational flaw. Meh. I'll figure it out. It's probably that I I'm attempting to split the story I intended into separate books--maybe I just haven't wrapped my mind around that yet.

Review - I mentioned this book last week, but hadn’t finished it - The Fragments by Minu Freitag. This book really hit the spot for me, resurrecting memories of stories from the years before I became a cynical old man. It reminded me of some of my favorite games… Zork and Myst with their world-discovery puzzles, Ultima and its moon-gates, Tomb-Raider physical perils, almost all in story form with the occasional pictures that brought the same feels. Fair warning: the mechanics of her Universe are not simple, and she doesn’t brush them under the rug. I, personally, enjoy it more for that. She does a fantastic job of keeping descriptive narratives to a minimum, with even the world-building coming through action or conversation.

o To-Do list for writing last week:

~~Email updates~~
Re-read MoT and make notes for corrections. Still chipping away at it--very slowly.
Keep poking ahead on the next book(s) to convince myself it will all come together. Yup, yup... poking ahead... also slowly. I think I need to break this down further to make it chewable.

o To-Do list for writing this week: