This Week

Last week I got some feedback on the first 3,000 words from my beta reader group, and I was forced to come to the delightful conclusion that my book...is not actually a romance. My readers commented how much they liked the relationship between mother and child but were unclear what the romantic storyline was going to be, and I realized...THAT IS RESOUNDINGLY FINE WITH ME.

Look, at this point I'm pretty sure I am constitutionally incapable of writing 70,000 words focused on finding a partner, but I guess it was worth a try lol. And maybe that's because my own life has always been about more than that, even though GET MARRIED MAKE BABIES was the loudest goal for a long time. But having gotten married and made a baby, I know that it's my friends and faith community and classmates and library people hosting craft nights and neighbors pushing cars up a hill in a snowstorm who have gotten me through. Maybe someday I will have a partner who actually propels me forward instead of holding me back, but I don't need one because I have all these other relationships.

Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with romance! I enjoy reading them! Queer romance is helping me understand my sexuality better! I just don't think I'm going to be writing one this time.

I'm very, very excited to give more space to my MC and her son and her friends and maybe her chosen family. I'm also not going to do that right now. After skidding my way to 55,225 words last week, I realized that drafting this story felt like a chore, and my life is currently too full of Unpleasant Things I Have to Do for me to willingly add more to that pile.

So my "plan" is to turn in a bunch of stuff for school, probably get a divorce*, and then maybe pick this up again at (undetermined time in the future). I actually feel ready to step back into my well-meaning-bulldozer-mom story, so maybe I'll do that first, idk YOLO

*BTW, I did get promising news on that front this week. A lot of things can still happen, but I think the worst outcome is probably off the table. It's a bit like genetic counseling where you get to tell a patient, "Hey, it's not this definitely terrible diagnosis," and they say, "Great! So what is it?" And you have to say, "Well, we don't know yet," and run a bunch more tests.

What I'm Reading

​Let's be friends on Storygraph, the non-Amazon version of Goodreads that comes WITH CHARTS ABOUT BOOKS!

I am basically only reading YA and middle grade fantasy right now. I had picked up several interesting books from the library at the beginning of the month, but they all seem to have the word "dark" in the blurbs or jacket cover and that...is not something my brain can handle right now. So I've been gobbling up the Wings of Fire books that my kiddo loves, and I'm finishing Marie Lu's Legendary trilogy. (I read the first book in 2019 or something, and just found books 2 and 3 in the Little Free Library, so that's what I'm doing.)

Acknowledgements

I'm drafting the acknowledgements section of my book little by little every week.

Thank you to my beta reader group Christina, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Hilary for your thoughtful feedback on my WIP.