Sheila and Sara

 Just a quick announcement to the three people who read this that you can read the first chapter of Christophina's Wings  at https://sarashay.com/2025/02/23/christophinas-wings/. Actual release date is still tentatively December 15 — I have to compile and refine the manuscript into ebook format and get ARCs out before releasing it to the world. The gap between now and release day is to account for anything screwing up and taking too long. I also have a newsletter set up! The form to sign up is also at that page. It'll pop up to prompt you about two minutes into reading. If you're not interested, just click elsewhere and it should go away. More updates forthcoming, though a lot more of my thinky-thoughts about writing are going to be on the newsletter first, and might not make it here. Thanks for reading, three people!

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her project for the past several days, as she went on a long weekend to see Sir Paul McCartney play in Las Vegas. This time includes a day off after her return to recover from a red eye flight. She has resumed work today, and hopes she'll be able to continue the momentum.

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her book today, because she was rereading and taking notes for her writers group tomorrow. Thank you.

It's a good thing I didn't swear to do this daily. For several days I wasn't able to sit down and post on time, because I have a cut-off on screen time at 9:00 PM. Now that I do have some time, I have three days to account for. On Tuesday, September 23rd, I prepped my submission (the rest of Chapter One and the start of Chapter Two) to my writers group. I need Chapter One to have maximum polish, because I'm planning on posting it on my website for all the internet to see, and my plan was to use Chapter Two as a lead magnet to get people on my newsletter, but I decided to do something else, as noted below. On Wednesday, September 24th, I went on VistaPrint, dug out the business card I designed for this endeavor (the one with the QR code leading to Chapter One) and revamped it for better legibility. The previous ones I ordered had way too many words on the front, making for a smaller font, making for something that can only be read if you know in advance what it's goi...

 First order of business is that Christophina’s Wings now has a tentative release date of December 15, 2025. Yay! So I’ve been avoiding excuse notes by, y’know, doing the work. But as things get down the wire, I’d like to keep track of my progress in a little more detail. And what better place to do it than in public where everyone can see? I figure that having a few people watching (I have no illusions about the size of my audience) will motivate me to have something to post each day. I know I won’t get to it every single day—I know how my life goes—but I’ll try to get regular progress reports out, sometimes compiling several days at once, depending. That’s my resolution. Let’s see how it goes.

So, after many months of intermittent poking, I have all the feedback for Christophina's Wings  from all the beta readers that I'm going to get. Which means I now have no more excuses. The last bit of feedback I got wasn't exactly glowing, but it made some flaws clear that I need to deal with. So I'm burrowing through the book and finding all kinds of things that need tweaking. I'm going to run the first and second chapters back through my writing group, so I can put them up on the internet to people to see, and in the meantime go over everything else in detail. This means it's time for me to resume the habit of Excuse Notes. Until I have the novel fully revised and out in the world, I have resolved to do at least something towards that goal each day. I did some work today, but I didn't yesterday, so here is my excuse note for that: Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday because she had to deal with her job later than she would have liked ...

  This is the way it all ends This is the way it all ends Not with a bang But a PowerPoint presentation So, I just watched the YouTube video about The State of NaNoWriMo , narrated by Kilby Blades, which can be summed up as We don't know how to manage money and you didn't give us enough, so we're closing down. Oh, and some of you were mean to us on the internet, which has something to do with it for some reason.  She does at least acknowledge the grooming scandal, and she mentions how terribly, terribly misunderstood that AI piece was, while acting as if that wasn't practically the death blow for the organization, since everyone from individual donors to entire sponsors stopped giving them money. She talks briefly about the MLs, but doesn't say a word about the restrictive and, in some locations, illegal contract they were handed if they wanted to continue to volunteer. She certainly doesn't say anything about the fact that she effectively fired every single ML ...

 The reason I've been ranting about NaNoWriMo for the past several posts is not because I don't care about them, but that I care very much. The first novel-sized piece of writing I ever completed was a NaNo project, and it was proof that I really could do it. I succeeded thirteen more times and had a blast. It absolutely breaks my heart to see NaNoWriMo in a death spiral from one person's ego and incompetence. I still have the novels, though. Somewhere along the line, I started to stitch them together into a unified setting I called the Juneiverse. (It's named after the protagonist of the second NaNo project I ever completed.) And somewhere further along the line, I decided to reboot the first one and offer it for sale. It ended up being the first volume of a trilogy. I've rebooted the other two books, too, but those are still being edited. When they're done, they'll also be put up for purchase. Now, as I'm writing this, the book isn't available yet...