First Day of Summer Post

Hello all! Pardon me for not posting yesterday. Me and my littlest sister took an impromptu shopping trip, then watched movies all evening, and I wasn’t feeling in the blogging groove.

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But here I am today, and what better day for a blog post than the first day of summer! Although I must say, with the triple digit temperatures and major thunderstorms we’ve been having here the last few weeks, it felt like summer already

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Today I’m just going to give you a bit of an update on where I’m at with life and writing, as I feel like lots of neat things have been going on, but I don’t know that any of them were of a large enough scale to merit their own blog post.

My middle sister, Emily, graduated on Saturday, so I spent a few days helping mom get everything ready, since Emily skipped all the work to volunteer at Bible camp. Freeloader. It turned out beautiful though, and it ended up being a really good day.

 

We went to my parent’s house for Father’s Day, and they ended up bringing a movie over to our house the next day. If you haven’t seen I Can Only Imagine yet, you definitely need to do so, post haste. I’ve seen Mercy Me before in concert, so I had heard the short version of the story behind the song, but it was incredible and inspiring to see the entire thing in detail.

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We’ve had about 5.7 inches of rain in the last three days, and I’m thrilled to report that my garden has withstood the storms like a champ. My basement on the other hand, is rather soaked….

On the writing home front, things are looking good. I’m all but finished with edits for Red as Blood. I’ll admit, I thought I was going to die at the beginning of this process, but it actually wasn’t nearly as hard as I anticipated, and I couldn’t be happier with how the story has turned out. As much as I loved it to start with, I love it even more now, and it has definitely made huge improvements from the original version. I am so excited for all of you to be able to read it in December.

Besides working on Red as Blood, I also sent off my second contest entry, Code White, to an editor. My plan is to work on revising it while the team at Rooglewood is working on the things that don’t involve me, so hopefully Code White can come out on Kindle sometime early next year. Stay tuned on that one.

The 100 for 100 challenge, hosted by Go Teen Writers just finished its fourth week, and I’ve been doing pretty good. I had to use my grace week, but overall I’ve been able to write at least one hundred words every single day. I’ve been continuing on with the Bad Boy story (which really needs a real title) and have added 5,796 words to it. Not a terrible lot, but I’m keeping at it at least.

I'm really enjoying how the story is unfolding, and to top it all off, Mirriam Neal commissioned a painting for me of the main character, Brass.

 

Isn't it just gorgeous??

I also got ambitious and signed up for Camp NaNo. It’s like NaNoWriMo, in that you work on a writing project for the whole month of July, but instead of trying to make 50,000 words, you can choose whatever word count you want, and you can work on a story that is already started, instead of starting from scratch. This year I want to work on my 1868 historical romance, and I set the word count goal for 25k. I think I can do it. If not, at least I’ll have got some work done on it.

So it looks like my summer is shaping up to be chuck full of writing, plus I plan to fit in other things like swimming, visiting friends, and hopefully riding some horses.

 

What about you? What do your summer plans look like?