Good morning! Welcome to May 2025, where I haven’t posted to my very own blog and website for two years now. I honestly don’t even know where to begin. Two years is long enough that…well.

There are two major, long-term things to update on. First is that I gently left Pandamoon’s Editorial Director role and had taken on the role of very occasional advisor and website tech. I enjoyed my time with them immensely, but I wanted to shift my overall career into one of a writer rather than an editor. The second long term thing is toward that end: I finished Almod Book One, have put it through a lengthy beta process, and am currently finishing up the second draft before I query.

Tangentially, may I recommend joining a critique group or two? The lovely people in mine took Almod apart, piece by piece, and I’m honestly a stronger writer now than I was when we started. I’ve been learning to trust my gut, too, as well as learning about how to spot when something of my own isn’t working long before I put it in front of any kind of audience. Also, even if I am not currently doing much formal editing, I do still find great joy in giving people constructive feedback and positive commentary and getting to see the behind-the-scenes work on pieces of fiction. I find that very satisfying in any configuration, so my critique groups are a win all around.

That said, Almod is near completion! This draft has more large changes than I’d hoped, but they’re all good, solid changes that bring the whole thing more in line with how I want my characters to be read. So that’s ongoing.

I have also been reading a great deal about game narrative and design, with the intent of looking into video game writing. I’ve always loved designing games, and I have a couple of small ones that I’m noodling around with. Once Almod is in the query stage, I intended to start letting people playtest some of them. My ultimate goal is to write for games in some capacity, though just what that capacity is remains to be seen.

Other than that, writing-wise, I’ve joined the Get Your Words Out (GYWO) challenge this year, mostly for the pleasure of being part of an active writing community that’s busy all year. I had participated in it roughly ten years ago, and it has just as many delightful people participating now as it had then. Not only has it been a lot of fun to chat with others, the challenge has encouraged me to get back to writing short stories, whether they’re to be posted in public or not. I hadn’t realized how much I missed writing short stories while I was working on my novel until I was knee deep in two of them and planning several more.

I have, over the course of the last few years, also pared down the social media I’ve been participating in. Everyone I followed has dispersed to the far corners of the internet, so there’s no single place anymore to scroll and enjoy. And, honestly, I had a bad habit of losing hours to scrolling. Hours that I wanted to use writing. Since I did actually finish my book, I feel like I made a pretty okay choice there.

The only unfortunate part of having less of a social media presence than I used to is that I have entirely neglected to “platform build” as the kids call it. Such a thing does not come naturally or easily to me. I’ve always been very private. While I do enjoy being friendly and social, I also have very little mental and emotional bandwidth to dedicate to the task. That and, you know, I’m pretty well an introvert. My focus has thus been on writing, because I won’t have anything to set on my platform and gesture at if I don’t.

In setting up my website again now that I’m venturing back into the online landscape, I’ve found myself looking back a couple of decades to when blogging was a big thing and everyone who was anyone had a lively RSS feed. That’s not so much a thing anymore, especially for authors. (Alas.) The general goal for blogging as a writer seems to have evolved into helping people find you first and to be an outlet for writing second. Thus, most of everything is packaged for one of the social media platforms or it’s search engine optimized.

I honestly do prefer more old-school blogging. My blog has its fair share of informational posts and essays, sure, but it also has those status updates and bits and pieces about various projects I’m working on, etc. That’s my preference, blogging-wise, and I’m going to try and keep that up. 🙂 A little bit of accountability in my active projects would do me good, and I have been wanting to make my website seem less dead for, ah, literal years at this point. Now that I’m editing my little heart out on my own project, I have a lot of room in my brain to write, and I really don’t want to distract myself with a new creative projects when I’m redrafting chunks of Almod. I do, eventually, want to finish sometime within the next few months.

Here’s to blogging in 2025!