Current status and updates for all my active projects, both on and offline. For quick synopses of each of these books, check out my Wattpad info doc: it's linked in my profile bio and in the intro chapter of this book.

Song of the Deep: Thank goodness for chapter buffers. I admit I haven't touched this one in a month aside from weekly editing for the chapter I post on Wednesdays. Fun facts: editing a chapter takes me almost as long as writing it! SotD's chapters average around 3k words when posted, but many are over 4k in rough-draft form. My editing process consists of cutting excess words, rearranging sentences for better flow, polishing character voices, and making sure all my plot points and foreshadowing are in order. All that takes about an hour and a half for a 4k rough chapter. Now you know why I'm often posting at absurd hours for someone who lives in Canada!

Can You Cook a Dragon (Flash Fiction Collection): Still on hold. With that said, I'm looking ahead to this spring (life updates below!) and will likely start another flash-fic challenge in May or June. Thirty new ficlets are on the horizon.

Thistle in the Sky: Yes, I said I would update this weekly. Yes, I failed in this goal and am updating twice weekly instead. Yes, you have every right to ask me what the #$%&@? I'm doing 😂 The short explanation is, I realized I needed deadlines more than usual this month, and that this novella would not get written in a timely manner if I didn't impose those on myself. All that to say, this book is at 10k/35k words, updating on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on track for completion by the ONC final deadline even though I never ended up entering it in the ONC. N/ONC HYPE SQUAD!

As the Crow Falls: Just casually sitting on my hands to keep myself from editing and posting this one before I have the time to do it justice, no big deal. Thanks to life updates, I'm now hoping to dedicate the first half of May to this editing, for a mid- to late-May launch. Now I just need a cover...

Rocks Can Dance: Still paused at 70k offline. I promise I don't drop books—never have, never will. However, my plate is full right now and I plan to dedicate the second half of April (after school finishes) to Song of the Deep to build back my buffer, so this one will stay paused for a little while longer. This summer, all bets are off.

New Book, Who Dis?

Stormrunner: Planning on pause until after Thistle in the Sky. This book is still lined up to be the next thing I write after Song of the Deep and Rocks Can Dance.

Hattu Empire Series (aka Desert Epic): I got hit with inspiration on this early last week, and actually got a heck-ton of worldbuilding and character work done. One entertaining outcome was four consecutive days in which I named more characters than I wrote words, which sounds impressive until I tell you I wrote absolutely no words over those four days. Anyway! I now have a much better handle on key side characters, as well as one of my main characters who was refusing to talk before. I call that progress.

Not going to lie, February was a bit of a tough month for me. If the various communities I'm a part of are to judge, it wasn't just me, either: some of us called it the brain fog or brain rot, and it hit hard. I blame some combination of lack of sunshine, ongoing pandemic, and just the state of a world that never seems to run out of new ways to fall apart. I'm mentally okay (don't worry ❤️) but if you didn't know already, I'm also very neurodivergent, and it has its own... particular challenges sometimes.

Either way, I spent a lot of February wrestling with my own brain in order to get anything done. Schoolwork was a struggle, but I also couldn't force myself to write, even when I wanted to. This is why I upgraded my posting schedule on Thistle in the Sky (I needed the external pressure), and a good part of the reason why I got so much worldbuilding done. My brain tends to scatter when creative conditions aren't great, so I've let it do that. I've got a lot of pans in the fire, and I'm working on whatever I want to instead of forcing myself into projects that I'm just not feeling right now.

The weather is starting to warm up a little over here, so with luck, we'll get more sunshine and more days above freezing as the weeks wear on. I also have life updates about the summer! Summer course offerings are out, they suck, and so I will not be taking courses this summer. Job offerings in my field are also thin on the ground because of the pandemic. This means the balance of "What is most worth my time and most financially strategic this summer" shifts decidedly in favor of writing.

The result? This might yet change, of course, but for now it looks like yours truly will be spending early May to early September being a full-time author. How many books will I finish? Will I break my one-month writing record again? Stay tuned to find out ✨