After a long, dark winter and a busy spring, summer finally begins! Being hospitalized in February and then spending the spring trying to recover and stay current with my teaching, I got very little writing done. But summer promises to be better.
The final installment of Revin’s Heart, Rewriting the Rules, comes out June 23! I’ve been writing posts for a blog tour that should happen the week before it comes out. It’s been fun writing the posts, but it’s meant I haven’t been posting anything here.
I didn’t get NO writing done. I wrote a piece of flash fiction A Bad Night in Cloudrise, which I submitted to the Queer SciFi Flash Fiction Contest. And I also wrote a Better Angels story over spring break: The Better Angels and the Military Morale Mishegoss. But, other than my #VSS365 fragments, I didn’t get much fiction writing done at all.
That makes sense, in that my students come first. My writing class was among the best I’ve ever had! They really brought passion and commitment to their Proposals and Projects. I was impressed and touched to see their drive and excitement. Just a few students can really tip the “feel” a course has, but this was like a groundswell. It was wonderful. My honors students were, as always, an ongoing source of inspiration. It’s simply amazing to get to know students throughout a whole year and watch them develop skills and self-confidence. I’m so grateful I get to teach this course.
This summer, I have two projects I need to wrap up and then a big project I want to focus on. While writing Campshire! (a Revin’s Heart project) a story occurred to me that I wanted to tell. Lady Cecelia’s Flowers is about 2/3 written and I just need to write the buildup, the climax, and the epilogue. I know what’s going to happen — I just need to let the events flow onto the page. And while I was writing the triple-M, I had an idea for an ambitious Better Angels story: The Complicated Camping Catastrophe. I’ve got it outlined and have written a dozen scenes, but I want to get it wrapped up before I move on to the Big Event: The Ground Never Lies.
For about a year, I’ve been writing scenes and vignettes for a story about Veronica Bellox, a geomancer with an anger problem, and Sophie, the sheltered girl who falls in love with her. I wrote a kind of pilot short story that went off the rails. But there’s a fun story here and I think it will need to be a novel to tell it properly. And that’s what I hope to spend the balance of the summer on.
Due to my uncertain health, I was unable to plan to attend events during the winter and so was unable to propose myself as a participant for BayCon, but I’m still hoping to attend, to meet people and sell books at the Water Dragon Publishing dealer table. It’s not yet certain I’ll attend, but I’m working on it. Watch for details soon. I may also be at a local Queer Pop-up Market on Saturday for Pride. Fingers crossed.
