After two rounds of antibiotics, steroids, and two different inhalers, I’m finally on the mend from my nearly month-long battle with illness. Woot! With the recovery comes a burst of writing energy as I task my characters with fetching a box of weapons while a different character works to build a solution to protect her…
Category: Isto
The Problem with Pantsing NaNo #amwriting
NaNo is the short name for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It takes place in November, and the goal is to write 50K in 30 days. Three NaNos ago, I won. I’m paying the price for that now. Oh, it’s not an issue with the quality of my work. No, I actually still enjoy…
Separated, Together, Separated Again #IWSG
Egads! It’s March already. Since it’s the first Wednesday of the month, it means today is Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. I have an event in my book (*gasp* who would have thought of that?), and it’s giving me grief. I’m presently working on my fifth version of it. Not revisions where it’s just tweaking…
Past Halfway
I’ve reached a magical moment in my life. I’m past the halfway mark. No, no, it’s not my birthday, and I’m not planning on dying at age 70. But I’ve managed to pass some milestones and wanted to share. At the beginning of the year, I started the 10-week long Colonel’s Challenge at work. That…
Sock It To Me, January
Well crud. You might have noticed I hadn’t posted the past couple of weeks. Yeah, I figured I’d let my blog slide while I dealt with offline stuff. It’s the last day of January, and it would seem 2018 is following in 2017’s steps. I had an MRI last Wednesday, and I’ll find out next…
Life’s Hammer Hits Hard
Well that sucked. I got sick over a week ago, and that took me out for a few days. I managed to bounce back a bit for the holiday, and then crashed hard with a different set of illness symptoms a few days later. Due to all the injury that’s happened in the family this…
It’s Gonna Be Huge #AmWriting
I mentioned last week that one of my goals was to map out all the scenes I’ll need to get to The End. I did it! I ended up with 12 pages of scene notes and summaries, 114 scenes, which should finish out the story at a total of 73 chapters. That number includes the…
Wow, October Already? #IWSG
I’m a little stunned that it’s October. I was aware of time passing and all, but dang! Month 10 out of 12 for this year, and I haven’t finished anything. I’ve accomplished a decent amount with book 2 of my big-book series, such as finally figuring out my character, her voice, and making significant edits…
Schedule It, Or It Ain’t Gonna Happen
I intended to post last week. But the first day of school turned into a fiasco where I’d sent my son to school on a bus he wasn’t supposed to ride, on a day when there wasn’t even a session for preschool. To compound my stress, I missed getting my husband to the bus stop…
On Not Killing Characters #AmWriting
I suppose you can’t expect much concentration from a squirrel. I scamper off to my next objective, change my mind halfway, turn back, and turn back again—all the while forcing the considerate people around me to slam on their brakes. Over a month ago, I expressed my utter joy that I got to murder a…






