I know what you’re thinking, I missed last month. There were no August updates. I have to apologize for that and I promise there is a good reason for it. My best friend, whom also runs my website, lost her father last month. As everyone who has ever lost someone close to them knows, sometimes you just need a minute.
My girl needed a minute and I was more than happy with giving it to her.
 
So an update, I’ve completed the edits to Mechanical Dragons one and two, I’ve received the new editor’s edits for book one and sent two off. I got my newest book, The Gift, the second book in the Blood Magic series, back from my betas and ended up adding an additional 11k words to it and I am currently working my way through Mechanical Dragons book one edits while simultaneously writing book five of that series. And of course waiting for The Gift to be returned from my other editor, so that I may finish that book and send it off to be formatted and fitted for a cover. (It’s being release in November of 2019.)

I’ve decided to push the short stories to next year; it just wasn’t a reasonable request for me to do everything I was already doing and create quality products. But this is good. I’m happy with my choices.

In the midst of all this craziness I also took a short vacation. Hubby and I drove to Yellowstone and did some touristy stuff. Well mostly he did the touristy stuff. I’m not much for sightseeing but I tagged along while we looked at waterfalls and big holes in the ground. We missed Old Faithful by about an hour and we weren’t going to wait around for the next show.

Drove on a road that was so scary I didn’t want to look out my passenger window for fear that Hubby may sneeze, veer off the inch wide shoulder, and careen down the mountain side. Yes, that scary. But it was beautiful, very picturesque and I was happy I went.

On the other side of Yellowstone was a dear friend, whom I like to refer to as Utah. We only got to spend about a day together but we talked and laughed and she let me play with her VR system. I was introduced to Beat Saber and I must say best game ever! Loved it so much I nagged Hubby all the way home and for another week until he caved and bought the system.

Two things happened that has caused this VR experience to become a major disappointment. First because I hit it so hard core when it was up and running the bursitis in my shoulder flared up and I couldn’t lift my arm higher than my elbow. Yeah it was bad.

The second thing that has been happening is the game, only Beat Saber has been crashing incessantly. There are days where I can’t even finish a song before it crashes, then other days I can get through four or five with no issue. It’s extremely frustrating, we are working the problem and I still play, I just quit after the third crash.

I would still recommend the game but would warn that this crashing problem is pretty wide spread, and of course the gaming company is doing nothing to work the problem from their end. But that’s a rant and soap box I don’t want to get into or on.

So onto the good things this game is doing for me. It’s getting me active. I do play it every day and I do work up a sweat while doing it. It’s amazing cardio as long as you move about, don’t plant your feet in one spot. Myself, well after the first two days my knees were just blown, I couldn’t walk, stairs were a nightmare. I think no matter how much I tried to move about, I would lock my knees. I have bad knees to begin with so this just made it worse.

My solution, an exercise ball. I sit on an exercise ball while I play. At first I thought I wouldn’t get any benefit out of this, but wow was I wrong! The muscles it takes to balance yourself on the ball was surprising. I make sure when I play I don’t reach, with my shoulder still a little sore I can’t reach to far without causing pain. So I shift on the ball, sorta roll back and forth, and I make sure I sit straight up and don’t lean forward.

The shifting actually gives my legs and hips a decent workout. Depending on the song and level I play, later in the day I feel like I had been doing squats all morning! It’s pretty awesome, I still want to cry when going up the stairs, but for a very different reason.

I’m doing a 100 day challenge with it. I’m on day 8, I did not include the few days I took off to rest my shoulder. And some days I play more than once, and usually it’s for about thirty minutes. When we get this crashing thing nailed down, I’m going to increase that time and really get a workout in!
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Well that’s it for now. I don’t have any morals of the story, no real grain of wisdoms, to pass on. Just an update on me.
Feel free to update me on what’s happening in your lives. I would love to hear from you!

At the beginning of this year I announced a new plan of writing more and becoming more productive. The plan laid out across two years, writing six books and publishing at least two a year. When I made this plan I felt so overwhelmed. I had fears that I could never keep up with such a schedule and I was almost certain I was going to fail.

About three weeks ago there was a shift. A number of circumstances pushed me into an even tighter schedule. Seven of my eight books had been pulled from distribution. Yup, you read that right, seven out of eight books were yanked from the shelves.

Why, you ask? Well it really was a case of, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know”. What does that mean? Well for the first five books I had little knowledge about how to properly write a book. I had no idea there were rules to follow for such things as proper dialogue setups. NO IDEA! Nor did I understand passive/active voice, show don’t tell, the list really does go on and I won’t bore you with it.

Let’s push forward and I’ll tell you what the new plan will entail. This new and even more frightening plan is only for the next six months. I’m happy to say that I completed my tenth book and have started the next project. So that’s one thing off of my ginormous to do list.

The Mechanical Dragons series. I’ll be frank because why change now, right? This series has not done as well as I had hoped and thought it would. I love this series, the characters, especially the dragons. They were so much fun to write. But the first two books were riddled with issues that I had no idea about. Well the ones listed above of course, but the biggest most prominent problem, the one that got me a scathing review was the POV (Point Of View) issues.

I was all over the place which made that first book very difficult to read. But I was never made aware of the problem, not even the editor I hired commented on it. And it seeped its way through to the third book. This I believe is why those books aren’t successful. So I decided that I’m going to fix them. I’m not rewriting the story, I’m just fixing the problems I didn’t know at the time were problems.

What’s the big deal you may be thinking? Well on top of the writing of my eleventh book, editing my tenth book, having a book signing for my eighth book, I’m writing four short stories, free giveaways for signing up to a newsletter I haven’t started yet, THEN on top of all that, I’m editing four more books (Mechanical Dragons) for rapid release in January and February of next year in anticipation of the fifth book in that series in March of next year!

I thought one project plus one blog post a month at a time was strenuous, I was wrong. Very, Very wrong. I can’t say that I’ve underestimated myself, I won’t truly know until December when all these projects need to be completed. But I have to say that so far, even though I’m a little stressed (Okay a lot stressed), I’m pulling it off. I’m making it happen. So maybe I have underestimated what I’m capable of doing.

I have two takeaways from this. The first is when you really want something don’t set boundaries that may prevent it from happening. I set those boundaries for myself in January when I insisted that I couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. That I couldn’t split my focus. I proved that in the last three weeks that in fact is not true. Not only did I finish 20k words to complete my tenth novel, but I also edited twenty one chapters of the first Mechanical Dragons books. Plus a blog post in there, well two actually.

The second takeaway well let me tell you about the Guardian Series. It was the first three books I had ever written. I loved this series and these characters and the premise behind the story, the whole shebang. I was at the very beginning of my now career and had no idea what I was doing and made one horrendous decision after another. I published these books back in 2012. And by the time 2013 rolled around I regretted that decision. I regretted not researching, not learning and not slowing down. I regretted that the books were not what they could truly be. The characters, the world, wasn’t as rich as I wanted them to be.

Every day I struggled with wanting to pull the books and fix them. As each year passed by and the more I learned and the stronger the writer I became I regretted those books more and more. I finally made the decision that set my mind at ease, that gave me peace and that I knew I was doing the right thing.

I pulled those three books and made the choice to rewrite, not revise or fix but rewrite those books. Tell the story like it is supposed to be told.

The takeaway? Trust your gut, no matter how badly you want something to happen right now, no matter how much you crave that instant gratification, SLOW DOWN, check all the right boxes, cross your t’s and dot those dang i’s! Regret is a terrible bedfellow.

I may feel as though I’m standing on a house of cards, because frankly I sure as shit am, but I’m happy and content and feel good about the choices I have made.

The final thought I will leave you all with today is a quote from an author I met. I never fully understood it until about three weeks ago. So here it is:
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“Never, ever, sacrifice what you want the most, for what you want the most at that moment.”
― James A. Owen, Drawing Out The Dragons: A Meditation on Art, Destiny, and the Power of Choice.