Authorly Goals and Progress

It's already March!

This year is going by fast. A little too fast for making significant progress on author projects, but aside from that, I'm not saddened by the speed of the year. It's been good. (Other than that evening when I babysat a six-month-old with separation anxiety, and then the next day my sister started throwing up while my parents were out of town. That was a rough weekend, but I made it.)

So where am I on writing, etc.? Well, it's going.

I've been working on recording Creighton Hill. I'm through Chapter 12, but I just had to get a new SD card. The recorder didn't come with one, so I just used one we had laying around from a camera, and it gave me data write errors sometimes. Apparently that's indicative of a problem with the SD card, so yay. My goal is to finish recording by the end of the month, which should be doable, so long as this new SD card fixes all the issues. I'm excited about the project, and like always, once I get past Chapter 8, it's fun. I've been over those first 8 chapters WAAAAAYYYYY too many times.

Carrie Mouse, my picture book idea, has been worked on a bit. My sister and I storyboarded the whole thing, and my sister has done a few test illustrations, but I still need to write new text. I don't expect it to take too terribly long once I sit down to do it, however, words count even more in a picture book, so there's likely to be lots of agonizing over word choice. I don't have a specific goal on that project (I need one), but I'd like it to be out in time for Christmas. Fingers crossed. We also want to have little Carrie Mouse stuffed animals to go along with the book. My sister will be making the Carrie doll—that shouldn't be hard for her, she's fabulous at it—and I'm planning on knitting a little cardigan for each one. I haven't started figuring that out yet, but I have started knitting baby sweaters for the Klay Kottage Etsy shop. By the way, if you search "brown mice" on Pinterest, it gives you rice recipes. Go figure.

And Acktorek. I just really need to carve out some time to sit down and write. I decided to cut part of Chapter 1 and combine it with Chapter 2, so that means I'm writing Chapter 3 right now. I really want to finish this first draft by the end of June so I can use the second half of the year to rewrite the Espionage sequel, but I'm not super confident that will happen. I'm still hoping, just not confident. I reread A Wind in the Door to help reawaken that sci-fi/fantasy portion of my brain, and it's been great (and I feel like I should reread some more L'Engle). Things are getting strange in the story, and I'm eager to know exactly what's going on. I'm really pantsing this book, so I often don't have a clue what's going to happen next. Hopefully that doesn't mean it's going to be a mess. I'm planning on really starting to push on with this project, because I really want the first draft written by the end of June. We'll see how that goes.

So that's what's going on with me author-wise right now. It's an adventure!