Goofing Off

I’m baa-ack. Did you miss me?

It would be nice to say I’ve been absent because I’ve been too busy writing, but the truth of the matter is . . . I’ve just goofing off. Other than emails and a long letter to one of my sisters, I haven’t written much of anything since the beginning of the year. I was going to give myself the whole month of January off, but looks like I can’t even stick to that plan. LOL

At least I’m in good company. I notice there are a lot of other authors out there goofing off these days. A lot of the blogs I visit on a regular basis haven’t been update in weeks, or in some cases, months. What’s up with that, fellow writers?

So what have I been doing if I haven’t been writing? Good question. I’ve watched the first season of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and binge watched the first season of Titans, both on Netflix. Sabrina I found more annoying than anything else – I didn’t mind the darker aspects of it, but I do object to the portrayal of all witches being Satanists. Titans was awesome though – can’t wait for season 2. This was the grown up version, by the way, not the cartoon Teen Titans that the grandbaby loves.

I’ve also been reading a lot. The graphic novel series Saga that my daughter started me on at Christmas, Wicked, that my best bud sent me, also for Christmas, and the Boonsboro Inn series by Nora Roberts that I picked up in a thrift store. I’ve also got a stack of books waiting for me on my bookcase, so I’ll have to be sure to keep making time for that (not like when I read the Boonsboro trilogy where I basically did nothing but read for three days).

Other than that I’ve been farting around wasting time recharging my mental batteries playing games on the internet. And no, not the RPG that sharpen your mental acuity, I’m talking various versions of solitaire, jigsaw puzzles, and bubble shooter.

But the good news is, I seem to be coming out of that phase – I’m getting kind of bored of them all and I actually got some writing done this week. I’ve been going over Wandering Wizards to see where I stand and what needs to be done to finish it, and Friday I wrote a whole scene for my NaNo novel that’s got it moving again.

And now, I have a goal! I want to be finished the first draft of Shattered (the NaNo novel) before February 22. Why that specific date? I’ve signed up for a writing retreat from February 22 through February 25. It involves workshops and a lot of long hand writing, but there’s also a lot of free time where we can work on whatever we want. So I’d like to have Shattered edit ready so I can polish it up in my free time.

There’s a bit of a story to the whole retreat thing, but I’ll save that until Friday. Something for you to look forward to. :-D

In the meantime, you’ll notice some slight changes to my side bars. It was looking a little too cluttered and I’m not sure the Goodreads widget was even working. As I said in my last post, one of the things I want is to start working on stories for an anthology. Most of these are already written, they just need editing – some just a little, some a whole lot. And as soon as I figure out how to represent them, I’ll add them to the side bar.

So . . . what have you been up to lately?