Heck of a Start!

Boy, that was a heck of a start to the year, wasn’t it?  And we still have the rest of the year to go!

I would very much like some boring now. Anyone else with me?

Unfortunately, it’s likely to get more interesting before it gets boring. So I’m going to hole myself up in my writer cave and try to ignore the outside world. I have edits to work on, and a new book to write.

Heir to the Firstborn is going to focus more on Del, Treesi and Aria (as much as the boys will allow. I need to wrestle the focus of the books back from Owyn and Aven. They keep trying to take over.) It’s been slow getting started, but I’ve also been working on edits. The edits on Wings of Air are done, and I’ll be getting the preorder up this week. I’ll be starting the edits on The Lady and The Sword today, but I’ll be taking those more slowly. The Lady and the Sword isn’t scheduled to come out until May. I have a little bit of time there.

Focus is… challenging at the moment. (for example, I’ve been staring at this blog post for over an hour, trying to find the next word.) There’s been doomscrolling, and stress eating, and rather a lot of yoga to try and offset the effects of doomscrolling and stress eating. I’m trying not to engage with conspiracy theorists online, for the good of my heart (remember, the block button is your friend!). If I didn’t have books coming out that need promotion, I might go on a social media hiatus… or, you know, not. Because let’s be real — all my friends live in my computer, and social media is how I talk to them.

How do you maintain focus when the world around you is chaos? I know this has been a real issue with a lot of other creative people. After ten months of quarantine, a lot of us have found workarounds. But now things are going even weirder and focus is gone.

I think the first thing is to be gentle with ourselves. Things are so far from normal that we can’t even see it from here. And honestly, there’s no way back to that normal. Nor should there be — normal is what got us here in the first place. We need to redefine normal, and we really can’t do that until the chaos factor eases up a bit and stops acting like someone mixed their Jumanji cards up with Cards Against Humanity.

So, here’s hoping that soon normal will be something other than a setting on our dryers.

Preorder now on Amazon!