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Everywhere But Home, My Own Personal Weirdness, My Writing, The Past Comes Back to Haunt Me, Uncategorized, What I Love, Writing

Playing catch-up

How is it already September? The summer went by so quickly and I’ve spent so much of it rushed off my feet with all the background, real-life stuff that is hard to cover in a blog post.

Here’s an update on my word counts from the last few months:

June: 8,880

July: 12,807

August: 22,434

Look at how I’ve improved! I’ve triple-checked that last one, but it is correct.

June’s improvement mainly came from writing more short stories. I stayed pretty busy with all the behind the scenes stuff from the other house, getting my eldest ready to go spend a month in China, teaching at both the ODWG writing groups, etc.

July’s word count bump came from not only more writing days in front of the computer on short story work, but also in the category I call “Lessons”, which I write for my local area writing groups. I was trying to get ahead for the busier times of the year when I’d have less time to prepare a lesson. It’s wild to me that I had any kind of improvement at all, really, because my spouse and I spent two weeks flat out with Covid.

August’s giant improvement came in the form of a road trip with my husband. For our anniversary last month, he surprised me with a trip to a little town in the middle of nowhere, which had a fantastic vibe, lots of fun things to tour, and quirky town oddities. Well, that tied in to the long-neglected Lake House Mystery in my brain. So I pulled out that old manuscript, updated a few bits here and there, and then started adding some fun stuff that popped into my head during the trip. After six days of adding little bits here, there, and everywhere, I had an extra 16,000-ish words added, all easy-peasy, which was amazing because that literally doubled the size of this manuscript.

I’m not done there, though. This mystery needs about 30,000 more words before it’ll be done. I’m wanting to finish that this month, while the mood is still is the air, so to speak. Crossing my fingers and hoping real hard.

-L

Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Speaking, Writing

Today’s Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group

I spoke today at the Open Door Writing Group – Day Group (at the Tyler Public Library) on “Elements of Crime Writing”. Despite some technological conundrums early on, I got my slide show up and running and the lesson ran smoothly. Several writers piped in with good bonus information, which I always love to hear…and add to my notes for later presentations. I’m always improving on my lessons, y’all.

You should definitely come visit this group sometime! More information here: opendoorwritinggroup.com

Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Speaking, Writing

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group – Day Group on August 28, 2024

I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group (at the Tyler Public Library) at 1pm on August 28, 2024 on the topic of “Elements of Crime Writing”. (If you think this sounds familiar, it’s because I did the same lesson at their night group a couple of weeks ago.) Come on over and join us!

Open Door Writing Group

Uncategorized

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Authors: Embracing Resilience in Writing Journey on September 6, 2024

I will be speaking at the Authors: Embracing Resilience in Writing Journey on September 6, 2024 on the topic of “My 2024 Resilience Journey”. Come on over and join us!

Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Speaking, Writing

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group on August 8, 2024

I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group (at the Tyler Public Library) at 1pm on August 8, 2024 on the topic of “Elements of Crime Writing”. Come on over and join us!

Open Door Writing Group

Everywhere But Home, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Speaking, What I Love, Writing

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group on July 25, 2024


I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group at the UU Fellowship of Tyler next Thursday, July 25, 2024 on the topic of “Story Beats and Echoes”. This is an updated version of what I taught at the day group, so come on over and join us!

Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Speaking, Writing

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group – Day Group on July 24, 2024

I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group – Day Group on July 24, 2024 at 1pm at the Tyler Public Library on the topic of “Character Reactions”. Come on and join us! 🙂

Uncategorized

Can’t believe it’s June already

I’ve spent most of the last week running around trying to keep my and my kids houses from falling down around our ears due to storm damages. A tree fell through the roof at the kids house, so they’ve moved back home this week. The power’s been out and then even once it came back, we had no internet for days and days. It’s been really nuts, so I haven’t managed to finish transcribing from May yet. There’s no telling how many words I got, though I’m going to hazard a guess that I almost matched February’s numbers (around 17,000) because I was really going hard on my short story work. I’ll do an extra update next week about that. (Update: I couldn’t find everything in order to transcribe it all, so I didn’t hit my goal. I was somewhere around 7,000 when I ran out of things to transcribe.)

One of the other writing related things going on behind the scenes is time spent putting together an anthology for the Open Door Writing Group. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before. We’re having members of our group (both online and offline) write short works of non-fiction, fiction, or poetry on the theme of frogs. It started off as a fun little writing prompt, but it really took off. The in person writers were entranced by all of our frog stories and really wanted a wider audience for them. Since I have the most behind-the-scenes knowledge of how to start an anthology, I’ve been doing quite a lot of the legwork for the project. We’ve opened up the possibility of having writers also contribute to putting the anthology together and handling stuff as well. It’s been fun so far. I hope all the hard work pays off. We’re anticipating a mid-November launch date.

In other real life stuff, we had Mother’s Day, which we celebrated early at a sort of local renaissance festival (2 hours away), and then actual mother’s day I just sort of spent hanging out. We finally got our roof replaced from the hail storm in February. Then we had all the graduations and parties to attend and finished up the month with my husband’s favorite annual family BBQ (which we host here at my house).

Around the House, Everywhere But Home, health, My Own Personal Weirdness, Parenting, What I Love

A New Year of Life and New Adventures

This month’s word count was even worse – only 5,562 words overall, nearly all of it journaling projects I was working on as homework from therapy. My Wednesday writing group started an offshoot nighttime group this month and I’m one half of the team leading it. So far we haven’t had quite the turnout we hoped for. So many people said they needed an evening group, but far fewer are showing up. ODWG also started work on an idea for an anthology, which should be fun. I prepared and taught one lesson on “How to Write For an Anthology” and one on “Character Reactions” for both the day and the night group. I wrote a few things about frogs for the anthology.

In real life, I got strep throat on top of all my other illnesses. My city was in the path of totality for the solar eclipse, so I got to enjoy that from my front yard. I lost electricity due to another storm for a couple of days. A tree fell in my kids’ yard, taking out nearly all of the patio furniture. My kids beloved band director unexpectedly resigned midyear and we have no idea what’s going on with that. My youngest kid bought another car, this time from his brother’s ex-girfriend, and sold us his old one.  It was also my birthday month, so I went out with the kids on my birthday, took my husband to the airport for a work trip, then had lunch and a fun afternoon with my BFF in DFW that day, then had a dinner with other friends later in the week.

Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Speaking, Writing

Upcoming Speaking Engagement at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group on April 25, 2024

I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group next Thursday, April 25, 2024 at 6pm at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Tyler (1629 Old Omen Road in Tyler) on the topic of “Character Reactions”. Come on out and join us! 🙂