Fiction words written last week: 5,282 words

Blogs/Newsletter articles written:  339 words

Writing month to date total: 16,005 words.

Writing year to date total: 16,005 words.

Drawing/painting last week: 0 square inches painted.

Illustration year to date total: 131.25 square inches.

Audio: I spent almost 4 hours last week editing and recording audio. At this point, I have 1 full track out of 6 for The Last Ant done.

Week’s happenings: This week I had to finish my most important bookkeeping for my sales tax report. I spent a lot of time getting that done and so didn’t get any writing done for two days.

Over the weekend, I got obsessive about my novel, Onesong. I started Onesong two years ago as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge. Shortly thereafter, I realized I’d actually been writing two novels and ripped them apart. Pretty cool when you end up with two started novels of about 25,000 words each. I put one of them aside and continued working on Onesong. Then I had a great idea for it and had to go back through to thread in this storyline. Recently, I discovered right idea, wrong characters. Fortunately, Onesong had bogged down and I had put it aside to finish For More Mischief and the 4th book in my Sacred Knight series. But now, I’ve picked up Onesong again and I had to go back several times to 1) refresh the story in my mind, 2) determine where it had bogged down at, 3) start to correct issues I’d had in it before I kicked some writing myths to the curb and got back to my natural writing habit, and 4) to re-excite myself with the story as new ideas blossomed. All weekend long I sat somewhere in the 59,000 word range. I’d write new stuff and tear out the crap. I captured word counts where I could, so I know that my count above is not truly accurate; I captured 3,485 words of my word count this week for Onesong, but I probably wrote twice that much if you didn’t count all the edits. Oh well. That is writing. And I am thrilled with this story once more. As I’m writing this, I have picked the story back up where it left off and am writing all new right now.

This next week holds me to working on The Doorway Prince, which is my February release. If you’d like to see a sneak peek of the cover (nearly completed), you can see it on my Facebook page. In The Doorway Prince, you will meet one of my older novihomidraks (new humans born of the dragon), Eclipse. There is even a mention of Moonhunter in the story — Moonhunter is the main character from Dragons of Wellsdeep, another story I’ve had to put down for the moment because others keep jumping on.

I hear Dean yelling at me about Heinlein’s Rules of Writing — specifically the one that says: you must finish what you start. I will, I will. I just can’t control my two-year-old writer. She gets to everything, but in her own damn time. I mean, I really should be finishing up the Sacred Knight series (which, by the way, I’ve given up trying to predict how many novels will be in it because I keep having to split them — the only reason I have “finished” book 4 is because I was at 130,000 words and had no end in sight so I picked a spot and it decided to make a good ending for book 4. On the bright side, I should be finishing book 5 then soon too!). I’d like to have Sacred Knight finished before releasing Onesong because of spoilers, but I have this feeling that it’s not going to happen. I think I’m going to release Onesong between books 4 and 5. It doesn’t matter to me because I already know the whole story (I know Steigan’s life from birth to death and I know how everything fit together between three timelines — there are no surprises for me, only fitting together the jigsaw puzzle and watching in amazement as the process of writing still surprises and delights me in how it all comes together). I swear the process is all magic to me. There is nothing in this world that I would rather be doing than creating something from nothing and watching a thing of beauty grow from mere ideas.

Especially when it has just been scattershot upon the wall. (grin!)