Newsletter - July 19, 2022

Hmmm, writer's block on life's updates is a bad sign...

It's so far been a massively hot, painfully dry summer in Austin, TX. The trees in our yard are dropping like dominoes (most exposed tree dies first, and when it fails, the next ones get too much sun...) We've been through this before, but it pains me to lose trees. In the midst of this nastiness, our new neighbors have moved in. One of my pups has made friends with the new neighbor dog, but the other has sworn an eternal blood-feud--another situation we've managed in the past, but everything seems harder as they age... or as I age.

I have another month-and-a-half of brutal work... multiple 11-12 hour days in a week, where my mind comes out like putty, and I struggle to remember anything about the real world (like names of roads or why I'm on them as I haul my kids around in the evenings). Plus the guilt of spending that time on work and missing a season with the kids--I'm often reminded that no one sits on their death bed wishing they'd spent a little more time at work.

WHINING DRIBBLE: Wow, I probably shouldn't write a newsletter at this time--difficult week. I may have gotten one review from the Goodreads Giveaway of Book 4, but I'm pretty sure that guy (a friend) purchased the book, so massive fail on the GR front. I have nothing "big" in the works for near-term, so nothing to hype up for advertisements, and I need to cut back across the board on ad budgets b/c books aren't selling. On top of that, b/c of work and life craziness, my reading time has gone to zero. (I really don't like reading in small chunks.) So, yeah, I'm hugely disappointed as I box up my business game and put it on life-support-only mode.

Let me try to find a few positives. (1) I've had a trickle of increased following on FB--I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with their recent changes to how Pages work rather than anything I did. Still, I'll take it. (2) I have a fun book-signing event coming up in August at a local brewery. It'll be something of a coming-out event for me, as I intend to let folks at work know about it, and hence about the fact that I write fantasy. That'll be weird--I have quiescent fears that folks at work knowing I write fantasy will injure my scant credibility. (3) I still enjoy writing. Sometimes I have to actively remind myself of that, b/c I get lost in my inability to find an audience. But finding an audience wasn't really the point--though it is the key to being able to do more writing and less chip design. (Not that I don't like chip design, but I'd rather be writing.)

REAL WRITING UPDATES: (haha, i finally got to it) I'm plugging away at Book 1 of Thaumatropic Roots, where you will learn more about the elves and trolls and what led up to finding El'daShar. I'd forgotten how slow progress is in the beginning, as I have to backtrack, make notes, cast forward, change notes, fill out ideas and then trash them b/c they don't fit. It's fun, just slow. I'm at about 9k words, but stuck on navigating a minor plot problem.

o To-Do list for writing last week: