Been a long, lonely time...

So… it’s been a while. I won’t bore you with all the details, but last year I got a job which has sucked the life out of me. Very early mornings, long hours, back-breaking work, split days off, and no ten minute breaks in sight left me sleeping on the couch by three o’clock some days and barely leaving the house to get groceries . I wanted to work on my novels. Deep down I have always felt that there would be a future to my writing career so I wanted to keep moving forward, but I still had other things to do.  As little as we may like it, bills have to be paid, beds have to be made, pets need taking care of, clothes need laundering, dishes need washing, and the list goes on forever.

I have never been one for assigning myself a strict number of pages to accomplish within a certain time frame. I tried it for a while, but the outcome was sloppy, unimaginative writing that would have taken so much time to fix that it was easier to simply throw it out and start over. When I am past a certain point mentally, I would not torture anyone with the novels that would result.

I did try to keep up with this blog and my twitter account, but eventually I realized that I was facing a choice. Did I give writing or promoting what was left of my depleted energy? Social media slowly faded out of my thoughts as I did my best to rustle up the energy to finish the edits on Prince Dead and begin its sequel. My blog was cut off first, then I gave Twitter the slow fade.

I missed interacting with other readers and authors, as much as I missed the opportunity it gave me to reflect on my goals and keep me on track.

The good news is that Prince Dead did get completed and is now available on Amazon in both print and ebook versions. I also wrote a historical romance novel during the last year. I will talk about that one more later, but it will need heavy reworking and is not on my schedule of releases yet. Land of Battles, which will follow Prince Dead in the series, is about 60% complete.

I have also decided that it is time to give my writing more priority in my life. Hopefully, after the holidays, I can move to working my real job four days a week instead of five. If so, then I will continually remind myself that writing and promoting should get close to half of my time. I plan on promoting in person through book signings and self-publishing seminars. Online, I now have a Facebook account and I will be setting up a Pinterest account soon. I hope my readers will be patient with me on those, as I have never used either before and probably have a great deal to learn as to how they function.

I look forward to reconnecting with the many great people I knew here before and I can’t wait to meet even more authors and readers. I will be embracing the internet in a new way, thankful for the opportunities that it gives and the people it connects me to, whom I would never have known without it.