Hello from sunny, now breezy with cloud cover, wait now it’s raining, no now it’s hail, back to sunny… Olympia Washington. Mol and I have set up our seed starting area in the garage and popped in 50 tomato seeds (5 varieties), cabbage and a mix of seeds we’re gonna harvest as microgreens. Update: Because…
Hello friends. A lot has happened and is happening, so grab a comfy seat and I’ll catch you up Clocking Out to Concentrate on the Work On Friday the 3rd, I logged off of my work computer, shut down the monitors and began a two week writing retreat. For the first week of my retreat,…
Sad News As many of you know, tragedy struck my household about a week ago. Percy, our sweet fluffy boy, was hit by a vehicle and killed. We only know that because of the kindness of strangers who gathered him up and took him to Animal Services. Because he had a chip, I got a…
Adventures with Words, January 2023 – from CK Combs, Author I used to do New Year’s Resolutions, back when I was younger and hadn’t learned to choose my battles well. I piled up goals and ambitions, listed anything I could think of that I believed would improve my life. And every year there would come…
In this bonus edition of Adventures with Words, I will share what I’ve been reading. I set a goal to read 50 books in 2022. On December 31st, I finished number 81. I use Goodreads to track my booklist. Goodreads (like many other platforms) creates a year in review and from it I have my…
Hello! I’m going to try this newsletter thing. All the cool kids are doing it and I want to be cool. Also, I want to build systems to connect with readers that aren’t dependent on fascist billionaires. I’m planning a monthly schedule, with occasional short announcements if they are time sensitive. Making space for creativity is…
April has become the month for gathering feedback on my work in progress, the YA novel about the haunted amusement park. My partner and muse, Mol, was the first to complete the read through and we had several great conversations about their impressions, ideas and suggestions. Through the course of those conversations, I came up…
I have been hard at work writing, writing, writing toward a major milestone – the first complete draft of my WiP, the YA novel involving enby, queer, black, awkward, ghosts, villains, mystical lady magic, and teenage angst. I set a goal of reaching this milestone by the end of March and I hit it on…
This week, I spent some quality time finalizing the order of events in my haunted amusement park novel. I’ve got 20 chapters planned, many are in their third draft. A few need to be written whole, probably up to about 20k more words to write, then edit. Knowing my final outline, progression and chapter layout…
The first week isn’t even over and I can already report that this is more of a challenge than the last few have been. Not that I don’t have the time to write. And I’m making my word count quota every day. The challenge is in the content. And the approach. The topic is dating…