Short on days, may chaos reign! (Patreon)

Hi friends!

For the shortest month of the year, February sure is proving pretty hectic for me! So far, there's been:

• the INCREDIBLE Prime Writing Weekend to kick it off (thank y'all again SO MUCH for all of your suggestions and participating, it was so much fun),
• then my friend and I celebrated Galentine's Day early,
• the double whammy weekend of Tet and the Super Bowl,

And finally -- my siblings are coming into town TOMORROW. I'll be driving up to Austin to hang out with my brother and his girlfriend for the day, and then hopefully spend the rest of the weekend checking out nearby Fredericksburg and hanging with everyone at my parents' place. :)

This is the kind of month that makes me so grateful for this incredible community, for my family, and my friends, truly a month of love for me (even if I'm a Valentine's Day hater 👀). 

That said, when all the festivities are over, I'm going to take the longest, deepest breath and relish the quiet sanctuary of No Plans, No Pants. My introvert meter is close to reaching its tipping point and I need some alone time to refill the well.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I've had an influx of plot bunnies and story ideas bounding around my brain. It's like a new one pops up each day! (A different way of refilling the creative well -- trying new things, having fun conversations with people you don't see every day, interacting with the world and discovering places, etc.)

The lesson of balance being an illusion REALLY tries to drill its way into my head during these times. As writers, we're supposed to take inspiration from real life, from the books we read, from popular culture, from the news and world events, from our friends, from our ancestors, from beta reading, from fan fiction, from the foods we try and the languages we learn, and literally everywhere else; we have to be little sponges to soak it all up. But then....we also have to write. And how do we find the time to do both? (We sneak in the time, we carve it out, we set up our routines, etc. And then we accept that sometimes we're in our Inspiration Sponge weeks vs. our Producing Words weeks. BALANCE IS AN ILLUSION bahaha.)

Anyways, I'm tamping the plot bunnies 🐰 down with promises that I can go crazy as soon as I finish up this draft of A Closet Full of Cauldrons. During the PWW, I hit a bit of a snag on the last day, but I think I've got it all sorted now, thanks to an old method: scene cards!

Right now I have "basic" scenes, clues, red herrings, and the deaths (dun dun duuuun) color coded. I'm excited to finish these up this week and write the remaining ~25,000 words or so over the next few.

And my favorite way to do that? Sprinting with y'all!

Our first Double Stream Day of the month will be February 28th at 9:15am CST.

Double Stream Day #2 (and our book club discussion of ON WRITING) will be the following day, Leap Day!, February 29th at 1:45pm CST. (I'm very excited to spend my Bonus Day with y'all!)

I'll be back before then to send out some reminders and let you know what ✨fantasy✨ craft book will be for March, in case it's harder to grab than ON WRITING.

See y'all soon! And happy writing!