Sheila and Sara

 I'm moving my writerly blogginess over to my actual website,  sarashay.com , to simplify things and keep them under my control instead of subject to the whims of the Googles. It's in the menu under "Blawg." I'm keeping this blog up as an archive of everything I posted up to here, and I may poke my head in to point people to the blog proper when I have updates, just to make sure this thing doesn't get deleted for inactivity. Big changes are afoot. You can read about them  here . Thanks to all who followed me along here. All three of you.

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel for the next several days, as it is Holy Week and her state of mind for that period will not be conducive to doing so.

 After years of drafting, trunking, rebooting, and rewriting, my debut novel, Christophina's Wings , is out for public consumption. I know I've been intermittent about posting here about it, but I'll be back with progress reports and excuse note as I refine the sequel, Christophina's Garden. Anyway, if you want to check out the book, it's available at sarashay.com/books for your perusal. Whoo-hoo!

 I have uploaded the final version of Christophina's Wings  to Apple Books and Amazon, and the Kindle listing is up for preorder. (The Apple listing has been delayed due to a mistake I made. Twice.) This...kind of makes it real. Yikes. Anyway, here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G3XYZJXW Release date is December 29, 2025. I'm sure all three of you will be right on it.

 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...

 Dear NaNoWriMo.org-- I'd already planned to skip National Novel Writing Month this year, in part so I can devote my time to getting a novel (a novel rooted in my first NaNo win, in fact) formatted for EPUB and prepped for public release, but mostly because I don't have any ideas particularly burning to get out. My brain is focused on the Christophina saga, and I have no new volumes that I want to work on just yet. When you chucked several marginalized groups under a bus to keep people from criticizing you about your stance on generative AI, I decided that even if I did  do National Novel Writing Month, I would not do it on the official site--I would use TrackBear to graph my wordcount and find a Discord server where people were doing it unofficially. However, I did not delete my account, as many have, because I still hold out hope that the event can be recovered. What does recovery look like to me? Three things: 1. Get rid of Kilby Blades . This is non-negotiable. She has d...

 Well, well, the word got out, didn't it? The folks at NaNoWriMo HQ have edited the page where they called objections to AI ableist and classist, and posted a statement that comes down to "sorry if it came across that we were accusing AI critics of being ableist and classist, we didn't really mean it quite like that , and, no, we're not going to apologize to the people we used as human shields to justify our argument." Is this really the hill you want to die on, NaNoPeople? Because I think you're going to die on it. That said, there are some things I've been seeing that starting to nark at me and if I can rant about Oxford commas, I can rant about these things, too. 1. They're going to sell your novels to the AI people!  Nobody who declares this actually has evidence, of course, it's just "the sort of thing they would do." I see this a lot from people who don't seem to understand how NaNoWriMo works in the first place. For a while, y...

 Boy howdy, did you shit the bed. I know you lost a lot of people with the grooming scandal on the forums. I stood by you, NaNoWriMo, even then, because your board stepped in and promised real action. Which...hasn't really been done? Moderator X has been sacked, but the forums are still in limbo and we're closing in on a year since they were shut down. But that's not really what my problem is. You're under no legal obligation to even have  forums and I can just write it off as This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I only just now learned about the controversy over you plugging known vanity presses, so that's not really what my problem is, either. I'll just say...really? I don't even have a problem with your refusal to condemn the use of AI in novel-making. I work in AI; it pays my bills. If somebody wants a fast-food novel instead of writing one from scratch, I guess that's what works for them. I even understand why  you're refusing to take a s...

 I finished drafting Christophina's Moon  last week. Grabbed the epilogue from the zero draft, updated it to match the reboot, grafted it on (because it was Camp NaNoWriMo and I set my own rules), and hit the finish line. Yeah. Next step is to add a scene to Christophina's Garden  so I can submit it to my writers group and set things in motion to get that book gone over, whilst also doing a final grind and polish on Christophina's Wings . I'll be consulting my niece for some insights into ice skating. Things like that. I still don't seem to have a sense of completion, since I've gone from finishing one thing to revising another. I probably won't feel complete about this trilogy until I've shipped out that last one for publication,

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today, as she spent all her writerly energy drafting a short story to submit to an anthology of interest to her.

 Now that I've brought Christophina's Garden  to a proper ending, it's time to complete the trilogy and get Christophina's Moon  finished. I looked over the outline, made some calculations, and set up a Camp NaNoWriMo goal for July. I'm shooting for 30,000 words. I think I can pull it off. Heck, I've got one more day to work with than in November. The rest of the month will be spent drafting a short story for a Tanith Lee tribute anthology. My hope is to get it done in time to run it past my writers group before the submission window opens. I've banged out an outline and I'll start writing it tomorrow. I have no idea how long it's going to be. Long enough to get all the ideas in. That's all I can be certain about.

The longest day is over The longest day David Sylvian, "Alphabet Angel" Two hours after sunset on the summer solstice, I finished drafting the reboot of Christophian's Garden . It is now narratively complete. I have an ending. I have 109,034 words. I have a lot of work to do. The next steps are to reread the whole thing and divvy it up into segments for use with Scrivener. July is reserved for finishing Christophina's Moon , taking advantage of Camp NaNoWriMo for motivation. August will be devoted to a final grind and polish on Christophina's Wings  and maybe even putting it out for public consumption. It's still June, so one thing at a time. But it's done. It's done. It's done. It's done!

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she was cleaning up and recovering from her birthday party on the 15th of June. She has done work on her novel today.