Category: Life as a Writer

• May 27, 2023

  Late May Update

  So, I’m officially retired as a teacher. It’s been a week out of the classroom so far. I thought I’d have a lot more written by now, but I’ve mostly been working on formatting The Saga of Tarod the Nine-Fingered, which is up for pre-order now. Amazon’s KDP won’t allow pre-orders for paperbacks, but the…
• May 13, 2023

  OWFI Recap 2023

  It had been more than 10 years since I last attended the annual Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. conference. The main reason was cost and return on investment. I’ve always been poor, and when I did attend OWFI in the past I seldom felt like I learned enough to justify the expense. So, I had no…
• April 1, 2023

  March Report Card

  March is over. It was a long, strange month, with some ups and down in terms of my writing goals. I never actually set out my goals for the month, so I’m going to detail some things that happened, then give an update on the missed goals from last month. Most importantly, my new novel…
• March 2, 2023

  February Report Card

  I set pretty lofty goals for February, and I failed miserably. There were a couple of weeks with a nasty cold and all I wanted to do was sleep. Most recently, the depression crept back in, and I’m trying to get receipts collected for 2022 taxes. I’m not a good recordkeeper and I hate tax…
• February 23, 2023

  Second Chance Romance

  One of the cool things about joining BookFunnel is the opportunity to participate in big promotional events with other others in the same genre. With the release of Dust in the Wind earlier this month, I got to sign this contemporary romance up for the Second Chance Romance promo. You should check it out! Remember,…
• February 2, 2023

  February Goals

  January was a month of writing. First Born, begun on November 1, had to be finished, and then Dust in the Wind had to be written (I’d only written the first chapter beforehand). February will be a month of editing. One thing I forgot to mention in my last post was the OWFI contest. A…
• February 1, 2023

  January Report Card

  The first month in the year I hope to go full-time as an author has passed. It was not the launch I was hoping for. Despite my preparation, things just didn’t pop the way I’d hoped. You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I posted a list of things I wanted to accomplish in January.…
• January 19, 2023

  January Goals

  I’m writing this on January 18, so it might be cheating. Mostly it’s procrastinating. One thing I’ve learned on this quest to become a full-time author is that the non-writing stuff is tedious and takes a ton of time. Nonetheless, here are the goals for this month. That seems like a lot, I guess, particularly…
• December 1, 2022

  NaNoWriMo2022 Completed

  About 20 minutes ago I reached the end of chapter 29 on a novel I’m not calling First Born. That put me at 50,258 words, which made me a winner of NaNoWriMo for the third straight year. It’s been an interesting and enlightening month of writing and reading and listening to podcasts about marketing. When…
• November 18, 2022

  NaNoWriMo2022

  Last November 17, I crossed the 50,000-word mark on a literary book I call Yes or No and won NaNoWriMo for the second year, giving me a perfect 2-of-2 record. (I wrote Mother for NaNoWrimo2020.) Tonight I reached 26,647 words. There are a few reasons for the slower progress. The biggest one is the day…