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!

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...

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?

 Early on in this blog (I'm not going to link to it and embarrass myself) I said that self-publishing was doing the hard work from the wrong end; that the hard work didn't go into making the manuscript perfect enough for a major publisher to pick up, but instead went into notifying the world that your book existed and would anybody like to buy it, please. Please relax. I have rethought that particular perspective, so please don't expend the effort into defending independent publishing. I'm with you. The fourteen-odd novels I've crafted with the help of National Novel Writing Month somehow wove themselves into a unified world which I've taken to calling the Juneiverse, after the main character in a novel called Soft Places , which I tried to revise and submit to agents but got nowhere with. (The last time I reread it, I understood why.) I hope to retell June's story one day in a much better version, but first... The first NaNoWriMo I have successfully complet...