If you were sitting beside me right now, you’d hear my sigh of exasperation/disgust. How is it the end of May already? Didn’t I just do one of these?? What year is it??? How old am I?!

The month of May adds another mark to the annual tally of years I’ve been trapped in this flesh prison, so there’s that too. I’m not going to tell you how old I am, only that I’ve apparently endured the pendulum swing from “young enough to card for a glass of wine” to “visibly old enough not to need carding” to “old enough to card as a form of flattery,” so there’s that.

I did take some time for a little celebration this past weekend, which is one of the reasons why this update is a little later than usual. It was definitely much needed. I have a tendency to function in DO ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME mode, which is where I’m usually happiest and most fulfilled. In fact, I never feel more miserable than when I feel like I’m not working toward something. The downside, however, is that the deeper I get into goal-chasing mode, the higher the risk that I’m going to forget how to be a socially functional human being that can carry on a conversation and remember how to have fun. I call this sliding into my hermit hole.

The hermit hole is a very productive place (as you’ll see), but probably not the best place to stay for too long. Going out to do fun things and hang out with people was a much needed reset.

So that I can be prepared to DO ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME even better in June.

Anyway. Book stuff!

In case you missed my reel about it, Bloodlands has officially been updated with an excerpt for Nightlands, and the first batch of stock copies has arrived! It’s officially in ink–Nightlands is a real book that’s really going to happen, and it really better happen by late 2023 or I’m going to end up being a fucking liar.

Coincidentally, Amazon KDP just announced that they were raising printing costs in June. It’s a pretty negligible amount (15 cents per copy for Bloodlands) and I’m kind of surprised they held out this long, but it’s good incentive for me to make sure that I give Nightlands a good trim so that the printing cost doesn’t get out of control. And no, I’m not raising my paperback prices. While it would be kind of hilarious to up the cost by exactly 15 cents and start charging people $15.15 for a copy, I would end up having to math correct change for people with cash at events, and let’s face it, if I could do math, I wouldn’t be a writer.

That’s a joke. I’ve been a cashier before. I can do money math, it just takes me a minute… and the usage of my fingers and toes.

So after all that hermit-holing, what’s our current progress look like?

Oh, look at that. We’re really starting to get somewhere now. Where progress was slow last month, I made much greater strides this month with a full five chapters completed and a NaNoWriMo’s worth of word count.

In my last update I talked about how tracking daily word count was useful, but could drive the wrong behaviors by leading me to prioritize quantity over quality. This month, I purposefully set my monthly goal low so that the focus was just on maintaining the daily writing habit and driving toward chapter completion. Seems to have been pretty effective! I’ll do a repeat of the experiment for next month.

Maybe, just maybe, that’ll bring us to the end of the rewrite.

Because it’s my birthday and I’m feeling generous, you get a little (imperfect) out-of-context excerpt/graphic as a treat to close out this post.