A totally wild month

This month, I managed 17,967, but 2/3 of it was lessons for the ODWG. I also tried to train a new membership chair for one of my local writing groups.

I wrote one really long poem about teeth. No, really. It started off about teeth and then it got weird. I also wrote a poem about grief that involved Pokemon. You know you want to read that one. (There were several other poems this month as well, but those were my favorites).

I also was the featured speaker of the month for my local writers guild. I spoke on โ€œHow to Get Back on Track After Lifeโ€™s Disasters.โ€

In real life, I had to figure out how to do my local churchโ€™s annual certification because our board presidentโ€™s life exploded that week. I attended the first of hopefully many delightful meetings of a local yarn group. I loom-knitted one sock and then tried to figure out how to regular knit itโ€™s partner after my sock loom broke. I started a crocheted snowflake blanket.

I also spoke at two other groups, using the โ€œHow to Get Back on Trackโ€ฆโ€ lesson as a starting point. Which was only funny because disasters kept making it so I almost didnโ€™t get to speak at either group (first an epic hail storm and then a mass internet outage).

I also read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet.

January stats

This month, I eked out 8,749 words, but a lot of it was poetry, so when I think about it that way, that’s a LOT.

I prepared and presented two lessons at ODWG. I also worked some more on the Lake House Mystery and made a whole new system for tracking my poetry and short story submissions.

I also rearranged my entire writing studio again because it turned out that one of my bookshelves could not stand up without the support of the two on either side and books were everywhere.

In real life, one of my kids had an MRI for migraines and also sliced open his foot badly, all in one month. My dad visited for a long while. I started crocheting the Pineapple Peacock shawl, took it apart and restarted it twice more, then finally gave up. Knitted a scarf for my spouse instead.

We had a polar vortex hit and had several โ€œice daysโ€ I started reading โ€œBarbara and Susan Talk About Empty Nestsโ€ once a week as a kind of devotional for therapy homework. I also read โ€œShadow and Boneโ€ and โ€œLessons in Chemistryโ€.

Two books for sale, one to go!

I honestly wasn’t expecting all the pieces I sold last year to come out all in the same week. They originally had publication dates that gave me a few weeks of breathing room in between each one, but one came out later and another one sooner and BAM, here they all are. So thank you for being patient with all my posts being about these books for sale. And thank you for supporting me and my writing for so long. Y’all are the best!

Now on to the books. One came out earlier last week and one came out today and the last one will be out tomorrow, but I was just too excited to wait. Here are links for the first two, along with a little description of what to expect from my piece in each book:

https://amzn.to/36qEyjY

This book has my poem “Last Family Vacation” on page 116, which is a peek into the heart of a mom with a kid in his senior year of high school. ๐Ÿ™‚

https://amzn.to/3OvLLAF

This book has my essay “Revealing Rainbows” on page 74, which is a more in depth personal look at encouraging not just my sons to be themselves, but all the other boys they know as well.