Hey hey!! I've returned from...wherever I was? Honestly, I feel like I blinked and it was May, and the last time I've been on here was October. Oh boy!
In the past six and a half months, a lot happened.
I had a lot of personal and family things going on.
I read a lot of ARCs.
I got a lot of free products from my favorite place that sends me free stuff, and I reviewed them.
I beta read for three of my friends (five manuscripts in total), one of whom will officially be on sub next month!
I saw two of my short stories get published and put them on my "shelf of me." (Next to Polyphony HS and Forest for the Trees, which is very exciting!).
I turned 25 and had the requisite "quarter life crisis." I'm still in it, tbh?
I worked too many jobs, which was a poor life choice. Good lord, may I never have to work three jobs at the same time again.
I supported pretty much every pitch contest that came across (the only one I've missed this year is PitDark, which sucks because it's my favorite, but I had no bandwidth). I wasn't doing the pitch contest circuit myself (more on that below), but I love the energy of supporting more than anything.
I got a revise and resubmit from a dream agent, and while I was pretty sure I knew where the problem lay in SLL, I got the advice of two wonderful beta readers (one of whom is the person going on sub in June!!) before I touched anything. With the help of Lucy, Marnie, and endless 3am braindumping in my notes app, I spent January-March polishing that bad boy up. Well, I say polishing. It was more like barging into the first 180 pages with a very precise and occasionally lethal flamethrower.
I got back beta comments on CMP, my other manuscript, and sat on them for a very long time. They weren't bad comments compared to the multiple drafts to get SLL decent, but I had written 180 pages from essentially scratch in a month and a half on SLL, so I wasn't up to touching anything.
I was very tired. Everything made me tired. I took my iron pills like the good little anemic person I am, and I was still tired, possibly because, as I stated, a lot happened in those six-plus months.
But also, not a lot happened.
I tried to go for walks and got foiled by my schedule and the rain.
My body stopped hurting in familiar ways, started hurting in new ways, and then reached a strange kind of equilibrium.
I read and reviewed a lot of ARCs, like I said, to the point that I had well over 80% as my response rate. Then, I requested a bunch more ARCs. So now I'm essentially at the same place I started (15 unread ARCs, 70ish% response rate). If we measure progress as forward movement, it's looking pretty bleak on the NetGalley front.
I spent the entire month of January enshrouded in ennui.
I didn't really go anywhere or do much.
I didn't finish any manuscripts, though I am halfway through one that I had false-started back in October. With time for it to cook, it was coming along very well! Then, I finished part 1. Things ramped up at my job. My brain itself was cooked. So, now I've been staring at part 2 for weeks now...fun fun!!
I am hopeful, though. I have the day off today. I updated my author website. I'm beta'ing a friend's book again. And I am going to--I promise you, I am going to--update things more regularly here. And I will finish this new MS by August. It's 60k more words left, and I wrote all of CMP in two months...we can do this!!
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