Sheila and Sara

 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!

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!

I've decided the only way I'm going to get this trilogy finished is to issue myself some deadlines. They are as follows: I will finish Christophina's Garden  by June 30th. I will take advantage of Camp NaNoWriMo in July and bring Christophina's Moon  to narrative completion by July 31st. I think it's feasible. I'll find out, won't I?

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she went to a screening of Citizen Kane  that afternoon and spent long-delayed time in Second Life that evening. She has already started work today.

 Many years ago, my father set up a micropress to publish a textbook my mother had written about nursing education. When I got it in my hypomania-addled head that I wanted to publish some self-help books of my devising, I put together one called Catbooks and Other Methods  about various free-writing techniques for head-clearing and problem-solving. My father let me release it through the auspices of Lullwater Press. (You can still get it! Just go to  https://www.wonderbink.com/books/ and pick your ebook purveyor of choice.) It was a new experience for him as it was for me, since my focus was digital publication and the previous book he'd done had been in print. I designed the cover and handled the conversion process; he got the ISBN block and provided the company details to the various booksellers.  I still haven't sold enough copies to collect payment on it. But, I'm kind of okay with this. It was, primarily, an exercise to to get a feel for the process. I had othe...

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today, as her evening was taken up with planting tomatoes, preparing feedback for tomorrow's writers group meeting, making lunch for the week, and taking a damn shower. Thank you.

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today, as her evening was spent making up the work hours she lost to oversleeping this morning. Sheila would also like to report that, as of yesterday, she has completed the reverse-engineered outline for Christophina's Garden  and is looking forward to completing the work as a whole. Thank you.

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today because she had a full day of work and a visit from a dear friend. Thank you.

 I made it! That's really the overall feeling that comes out of this year's effort--I made it. How did I manage this with a full-time job? I know I've done it, repeatedly. But this year it was harder than it's been in a while. I lost a couple of evenings doing things that were not writing, and that days that I did write were under 1,000 words for a long stretch. One day, I only wrote 93 words. But I persisted, had a couple of high-volume days, and hit 50,000 a few days before the 30th.  The story is nowhere near complete--my outline is 26 chapters, plus epilogue, and I left off at the start of chapter 19. My master plan is to return to Christophina's Garden , create a new outline for what's been written and what has yet to be written, and then finish the thing!  After that, I'll finish up Christophina's Moon  and then work on revising all three books simultaneously to sift out the continuity errors. If I'm clever enough, I may be able to come up with...