I hope you have all had a lovely Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. Here in Memphis we celebrated with a stuffed blue pumpkin and it was both strange and delicious.

My laptop computer’s keyboard and trackpad suddenly and irretrievably failed yesterday. I am not sure whether to be frustrated that it didn’t last a full seven years as I’d hoped, or grateful that it chose to tender its notice of resignation on Black Friday. I guess I’ll go for the latter. Had it died just a few days later there wouldn’t be nearly as many good deals. After some research I’ve ordered one of the new iPad Air tablets and an Apple Pencil to replace it, which gives me some additional options I want to have for graphic work and doesn’t seriously impact my writing on the go since I mostly do that in Google Docs or 4theWords these days.

The novel continues apace. I’ve written 15,400 words in the last week in my steamy romance by simply writing minimum of 2,000 words a day. Most days I finish up with 100-200 words over and it all adds up. The novel looks like it will be about 60,000 words in the first draft. I expect I’ll add another twenty percent as I fill in holes that I’m leaving for later research so the resulting second draft will be about 70,000 words. My planned completion date for the first draft is December 21. I’m estimating another month to take it through the subsequent revisions required by this process.

So far, I’m enjoying the process of just writing without stopping to do research, of just telling myself a story that I find fun. If this method works for me, I’ll take it through to another book, one I’m willing to show to people. Which means, for those who are interested, I’ll have a science fiction or fantasy novel to bring to my speculative fiction critique group in late February. Fingers crossed!

I will need to bring something to the group before that. Perhaps short stories. The end of December is also the end of the quarter for the Writers of the Future. I’ve committed to myself to enter every quarter until I become too much of a pro to qualify for the award or until I win. So that last week of December I’ll be working on that while I let the novel rest.

I’ve been making more art. Here’s one of the latest:

Again, I’ll be back in the swim of things on December 23 when I will emerge from my writing/art/no-politics bubble. I hope that wherever you are, the world is smiling on you.

Be well, friends!