Are we doing the 2024 Retrospective thing? Yeah? We are? Okay, well, I did a metric shit tonne this year, and I know it, and of course I also didn’t get anything like nearly as much as I needed or wanted to done. But let’s focus on the positive. I wrote in the region of 400K words, I think, with 4 books (WEAR WOLF, DEATH OF AN IRISH DRUID (out in January), OCTOBEARFEST and PARTRIDGE IN A BEAR TREE), 2 novellas (LION ON LOAN, KOALAFIED FOR LOVE), a massive revision which…
Earlier this year, before acquiring an agent, I wrote a very short, like back-of-book-blurb, romantasy proposal that I sent to an editor I had access to. She asked for a full proposal (a full synopsis, 3 chapters), and that’s been on a back burner while I’ve been doing a thousand thousand other things. But yesterday I got to get started on it, and… I’ve talked often about how I tend to get to the 1/3rd mark in any book, no matter how long, and hit a wall that I have…
I had an epiphany recently. Not one that’s likely to lead to a sudden burst of writing because I am So Fucking Far Behind On Everything that the idea of resurrecting a project that has like an absolute total of 10,000 words written on it is just not happening, but. So I’ve been re-reading the Continuing Time books by Daniel Keys Moran, which are easily some of my favorite books ever. Desert island stuff, that. But I ran out of the ones I had on my ereader so I switched…
I have just signed an agency agreement with Jennifer Udden at the Laura Dail Literary Agency, and I am OVER THE MOON about it!!!! After an introduction through a mutual friend who thought we would hit it off, Ms. Udden and I spent a couple of months in email contact as I sent a variety of things, from completed manuscripts to very, VERY short book proposals back and forth, and eventually stepped things up with a vone call. Our mutual friend was extremely right: we did hit it off, with…
I was afforded the unexpected opportunity to go on a writing retreat in mid-May. It was a great success, but I have to start by telling you about the first time I went on this retreat, in 2019, which MIGHT have been the first year this retreat was held. That week, I wrote 41,000 words. Which is a lot. In fact, it’s enough that they said “we’re now going to use ‘murphy’ as our unit of measurement for this retreat forever,” which I thought they were joking about, except it…