Sheila and Sara

 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!

 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 ...

 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...

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!

 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...

     One more week until that scary time of year...     ALL NANO'S EVE!     Yup, November fast approaches, and thus National Novel Writing Month. I plan to draft a reboot of the third volume of the Christophina trilogy, Christophina's Moon . I still haven't brought the second volume, Christophina's Garden , to its intended conclusion (and it's been nearly a year!) Volume one, Christophina's Wings  (remember that?), has been run past my writers group and is sliced up in Scrivener, awaiting revision. I'm going to be neck-deep in this thing for a while.      I've decided to dust off this wee blog and use it to chart my progress as I go. I'll at least post my wordcount by day and by total, and may go a little into the process and maybe even detail what happened within the story. Still deciding.     tl:dr - Hi! I'm back! I'm doing NaNoWriMo again! I'll write about it here! See you soon!

 Well, well. It's been a while. "Is That What You Want" was rejected by Clarkesworld, rejected by Analog, rejected by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and rejected by Apex Magazine. That really should be a longer list. I've written and submitted other stories and also have a nice collection of rejections for them as well. Except for one. In June of last year, just before my 51st birthday, I received an acceptance for a short story called "Home" for a shared-world anthology called The Forever Inn. It's coming out, as my dad would say, Real Soon Now. I've already been paid for it, in any event. I'll holler about it when it hits the streets. I skipped NaNoWriMo in 2020 (do you blame me?) but resumed it in 2021, taking on the rather ambitious project of rebooting the very first NaNovel I ever successfully completed. I worked out a detailed outline, broke it down into scenes written on notecards and lined up all over my floor, and then pro...