Tag: projects

Books, Everywhere But Home, I Am Traveling, My Writing, Organizing, poetry, What I Love, Writing

March 2025 Stats

I hesitated in posting this on April Fool’s Day, but please know that this post is in earnest. 🙂

In March, I wrote 21,346 words, which boggled the mind. Of those words,

  • 473 were for this blog (5 short posts),
  • 1,564 were for my journal,
  • 15,562 were for handouts, scripts, and slides for lessons (one for East Texas Writers Guild and one for the Open Door Writing Group and one for the Tyler Public Library’s Try It Tuesday Class),
  • 1,355 were on various social media accounts,
  • 894 were poetry (6 poems),
  • and 1,716 were in short stories (11 pieces of flash fiction).

There were 8 days that I didn’t write anything, but this month included traveling for Spring Break and two out of town Winter Guard competitions for my kid. I also haven’t heard back from any of the submissions I’ve sent out lately, but all the submitting guidelines said I probably wouldn’t hear back until mid-April or later, so I’m not worried about that yet.

As for reading, I read parts of:

  • Concessions by Libby James (e-book; thriller)
  • Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything by Kristin Bair (e-book; mystery)
  • The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell
  • How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy Guide to Sonorous Poetry by Thomas Foster (paperback; non-fiction)

…and I finished reading:

  • If Women Rose Rooted: The Power of the Celtic Woman by Sharon Blackie (audiobook; non-fiction)
  • Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T. L. Huchu (e-book; fantasy)
  • Such a Thing to Behold by Umar Turaki (e-book; fantasy)
  • The Midwife (volume 1) by Jennifer Worth (e-book; non-fiction)
  • The Truth of Me by Patricia MacLachlan (e-book; children’s lit)
  • Storyteller: 100 Letter Poems by Morgan Harper Nichols (e-book; poetry)
  • Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman (hardcover; poetry)
  • The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser (paperback; non-fiction)

So I have finished 16 books so far this year (and read parts of another 8, mostly for research, but also a couple of things I’ve had to mark DNF.).

I feel like I’ve finally hit my stride with this year, so of course the next couple of months are going to be ridiculously busy in my personal life, as I have graduating high school senior in my household and another kid who’s applying to law schools and may need help moving. Wheeeeee!

Crafts, Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, Music, My Own Personal Weirdness, poetry, Speaking, What I Love, Writing

Speaking engagements today and tomorrow!

I’ll be speaking tonight at the meeting of the East Texas Writers Guild on “Sounds in Poetry” at the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce Building at 6:30pm.

Tomorrow night I’ll be leading a lesson on “Beginner Calligraphy” at the Tyler Public Library at 5:30pm.

A busy week – I’m so excited! 🙂

Crafts, Everywhere But Home, Lifelong learning, My Own Personal Weirdness, Speaking, What I Love

More Speaking Engagements – Calligraphy and Crochet!

I’ve been asked to lead a a couple of sessions of the Tyler Public Library’s “Try It Tuesday!” programs. On March 11, 2025, I’ll be teaching a beginner calligraphy lesson and on April 8, 2025, I’ll be teaching a beginner crochet lesson. Both sessions are free to the public. They run from 5:30-7:30pm in the 3rd floor Makerspace at the Tyler Public Library. Hope to see some of y’all there! 🙂

Around the House, Books, Lifelong learning, My Own Personal Weirdness, My Writing, Organizing, poetry, Short Stories, Speaking, Writing

Happy 2025!

I know, I know…you almost forgot I worked here. I have the usual excuses, all tied up with string, sitting under a cat somewhere. Last year was a doozy of a year, filled with all manner of distractions, procrastinations, and other sundry explosions of my life.

I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about what my writing goals are for this year. One is to make my usual chart of what all I wrote last year, but that isn’t done yet because the transcribing isn’t done. So no numbers today. Maybe tomorrow. After I’ve written, of course.

I’m on the schedule with an editor for September, so my big goal is to finish the latest draft of my big epic fantasy novel and polish it up. This is the novel y’all have heard me refer to as Caro’s Quest in the past. I still need a better name for it, but that will come. 🙂

Smaller goals include finding homes for my poetry and short stories, finishing putting together my first poetry anthology, finishing my research on the best time to release it, and then publishing that anthology. I’m aiming for sending off at least one poem and one short story a week. We’ll see if that’s a manageable goal as time goes on and reassess after the first quarter is over.

I’m no longer on the board for the East Texas Writing Guild, nor my UU church board. Those were positive decisions for me, based on me needing more time to write. I’m continuing on as a moderator for the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library for the foreseeable future, which means writing and giving a presentation for a monthly lesson about writing.

That’s about it, y’all. It’s my first day back at the writing desk. I’m planning on starting off all my weekdays from here on out at my writing desk, working on stories or poetry for the first half of every day before moving on to social media, lesson writing, and marketing in the afternoons.

Yay 2025! I hope this year will be so much better than the last. 🙂

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

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.

Around the House, Books, Everywhere But Home, health, Lifelong learning, My Own Personal Weirdness, poetry, Speaking, The Past Comes Back to Haunt Me, What I Love, Writing

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 “How to Get Back on Track After Life’s Disasters.”

In real life, I had to figure out how to do my local church’s annual certification because our board president’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 it’s partner after my sock loom broke. I started a crocheted snowflake blanket.

I also spoke at two other groups, using the “How to Get Back on Track…” lesson as a starting point. Which was only funny because disasters kept making it so I almost didn’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.

My Own Personal Weirdness, My Writing, Organizing, What I Love, Writing

Done with Plotting My LHM!

Look at my beautiful graph!

(Actually, you couldn’t. Something went wrong with the embedding. But go here to see my Pacemaker.press plan about it.)

My Own Personal Weirdness, My Writing, Organizing, What I Love, Writing

Happy 2024!

It’s the first Monday of the first full week of 2024 and my official start to the new year. I always like to start off a new year looking back at the last year and seeing what I accomplished and try to plan for what I think I can do better in the upcoming year.

2023 in Review:

  • Overall, I wrote 160,202 words
  • January – 14,454
  • February – 33,559
  • March – 27,344
  • April – 6,387
  • May – 29,548
  • June – 8,742
  • July – 25,341
  • August – 1,671
  • September – 1,571
  • October – 5,100
  • November – 5,119
  • December – 1,456
  • 3,105 written for this blog
  • 40, 036 for Caro’s Quest
  • 13,676 in my journals
  • 45,436 for the Hannah Project, which makes my heart sad
  • 3,024 in poetry
  • 7, 723 in little flash fiction bits during writing groups
  • 1,495 in short stories outside of other writing groups
  • 2,250 for a non-fiction essay which was accepted for publication in an anthology about chronic illness
  • 15,838 in my social media accounts
  • 24,083 in lessons and worksheets and speeches for various writing groups
  • And 4,022 at the end of the year on the Lake House Mystery
  • (Most of this did not include background writing for various novels in progress – just writing that ended up in the draft)

So, I did pretty well for the first half of the year…and then health woes (both mental and physical) slowed me down considerably. So for next year, I will work on powering through the pain and not letting myself get distracted by non-writing side projects as much as I did this year.

Books

Weird Projects that relate to Writing

Starting last Friday I finally had some time to myself again. I made a list of all the writing things I accomplished last year, which is below:

2022 In Review – Writing Life

  • Led Open Door Writing Group 16 times
  • Attended Open Door Writing Group 24 times
  • Led East Texas Writers Guild meetings 23 times
  • Attended writers conferences – 1 online and 2 in person
  • Attended one writing retreat
  • Submitted the first three chapters of my current novel to a respected writing coach in my genre and spent two sessions discussing my writing style, my writing flaws, my writing strengths, and potential plot holes for this particular novel
  • Worked with two critique groups, covering five months of the year
  • Worked with an accountability partner all year
  • Mentored a new-to-writing fantasy writer for 3 months
  • Created outlines for two full novels
  • Learned to set up newsletters and mailing lists
  • Set up my newsletter and mailing lists
  • Redesigned my website
  • Had professional portraits taken
  • Submitted five stories to magazines and journals
  • Wrote around 125,000 words total
  • Read 6 books on writing and implemented their suggestions
  • Started taking a marketing class
  • Wrote alternately on two different novels
  • Had 3 poems, 3 personal essays, and 1 short story published in anthologies

Whew! That’s a lot, especially considering how many health woes I had, moving three kids to different rooms (sometimes in a different house, painting, moving into my writing studio, a kid graduating high school and starting college, and all the family stuff.

I also updated all my reading lists from the last few years. I thought Amazon was automatically updating them for me when I purchased a book or read one as an e-book or listened on Audible, but it hadn’t been. So I went back through my paper lists, Library Elf and Circulation Desk emails, old blog and FB posts, etc and added books back in. I’m sure it’s still not all I read, but it’s much closer to reality now. Looking back, I realized that most years I read about a book a week, some years more than that, and a couple years way, way less than that. I re-read some old blog posts and realized that one of those years I was PTA President and had two part-time jobs, so that made sense and the other time I was just crafting all year long and I hadn’t discovered audio books yet. 🙂 It was very informative to delve back into those lists of the books I loved or hated and see how they influenced the things I wrote those years. It was interesting to see the ebbs and flows of my interests, some years reading great swaths of neuroscience and other years mainly mysteries, but always, always a ton of fantasy and science fiction.

Now that I’ve processed all of that in my journal, I’m back on track with writing my own novels. I’ve got a schedule worked out for the rest of the month on what I’m writing for one and worldbuilding for another one. In the past, I’ve tried to plan out by quarters, but I’ve discovered that I get discouraged when one quarter bleeds over into a second one and that’s where I tend to fall down the rabbit hole. So I made a big general plan on what I hope to accomplish for the year, but I’m only doing detailed planning a month at a time and plan to regroup at the end of the month to rework the schedule for the next month. 🙂

Working on two different projects helps my brain have something to bounce back and forth between when I get stuck on one, so this month, I hope to finish the Caro’s Quest re-write and flesh out new characters for a YA novel I’m working on in a friends universe.

What are y’all working on this year? Leave me a comment about it and I’ll start cheering you on! 🙂