March – Q1 Writing Update

It’s time for the first writing update of 2024!

The first quarter of 2024 has been incredibly difficult as far as my creative work goes. Between sickness, editing/marketing work for SnowRidge Press, and a severe bout of burnout, the vast majority of any writing time I’ve had has instead been spent recharging my creative batteries.

January was a decent month – before sickness overtook my little household for multiple weeks, I reached the halfway mark in the rough draft of my summer contemporary novel! My contemporary novel, affectionately dubbed Summer Is A State of Mind, has been a passion project I’ve kept on the back burner for over five years now. It’s only been in the past six months that I’ve officially started drafting it, and it’s been such a blast to work on! However, reaching the midpoint means reaching the place where everything starts to go downhill for my characters… *sobs*

My mental health hasn’t been in the best place due to burnout, so I’ve pushed the pause button on that story until I’m feeling okay enough to deal with the heavy topics it addresses. Hopefully I start feeling better soon, though, since this novel is scheduled for a first round of edits with my editor in September!

February I didn’t work on anything, instead refilling my creative well with some great books and tv shows and some of my favorite movies. ❤

And now that it’s March, I’m starting to emerge from the fog of burnout and take interest in my projects again! (Of course that would happen during a super busy work month… But we can’t win them all LOL!) This is just in time for the super epic writing retreat I’m going on next week! I’m still debating what I want to take with me or if I’ll plan on juggling multiple projects… But I do think I’m going to take book 2 in my Operation Renaissance series with me!

After the release of A Sleep as Deep as Death, the start of the sequel series to Tales of Nottingham, I really struggled with Operation Renaissance’s trajectory… I had all the books outlined well in advance, but after editing Sleep for release, I realized the initial series trajectory wasn’t working anymore. My editor, bless her, let me send her three or four different series outlines to account for the editing changes I’d made in Sleep, and I’d finally settled on a new series outline that I thought I liked…

Until I didn’t.

And so over the past couple of days, I’ve been scrambling to figure out a new angle for the series yet again. I think I’m actually onto something, and ironically enough, it calls back to a note my editor had made for me while I was in the throes of editing Sleep based on her feedback… We’ll just see if it pans out. 🙂

I don’t want to say too much and risk sharing my shiny new ideas only for them to fall through, but hopefully in my next writing update, I’ll be able to talk about it! (Especially because if I can talk about it, that likely means I was able to work on drafting over my writing retreat, ha!)

Wish me luck, friends. 🙂