Well! It has definitely been a year.

I was just rereading my last proper update and I was perhaps overly optimistic about my writing life. It was a rough year and my priorities shifted hard as my cat got sick. She passed in December of 2025. I’d rather not elaborate now, as it still feels very private, though perhaps I shall post about it in a later update. Circumstances did mean, however, that my creativity got set on the back burner, waiting for me to return to it.

Since the beginning of the year, my creativity has indeed returned with enthusiasm. I’ve edited up an old short story that might become the foundation of a future novel, wrote an entirely new novelette to explore the space opera world I’ve been tinkering with, and have been writing informational essays about different aspects of writing for this year’s GetYourWordsOut community. The essays I plan to poke through, modify a couple, and post those up here on my blog. There’s a couple I am pretty pleased with that I’d like to share.

With the resurgence of my creativity, I’ve also been drawn to the book community on Instagram and have dipped my toe in there with an account. I’ve been meaning to create one for a while, though I must admit it’s daunting reading all of the advice on what to do and not do, etc. Is it not enough to want to talk to people and enjoy their work? I’ll figure it out, I’m sure, but I feel like it might take me a bit to find the optimal mix of chitchatting with people and posting my own short nonsense things that don’t necessarily need to go up on my blog proper.

I’ve got a handful of project ideas I’m slowly developing in the background of working on Almod, including (hilariously, at least to me) a screenplay. I suppose it was only a matter of time, living in LA, before I succumbed to having just one really good screenplay idea. The book I got to help me figure out what I’m doing is the Screenwriter’s Bible by David Trottier, and I’m enjoying the tone of it. It’s written with a pleasantly exasperated ‘here are best-practices but, really, use your common sense in applying them’ vibe that feels very relatable.

As for Almod himself…

Well. I feel like I must put down precisely where I am in the process, for accountability’s sake.

• I am on chapter eight of twenty-four, in major revisions.
• My goal, after this revision, is to start sending the thing out in query.

I am very much ready to move on to new projects, but I’m so close to flinging Almod out into the world. My only obstacle is that this revision pass has some major developmental edits and, because of that, I’m redrafting a handful of chapters in their entirety. Every single change I’ve made has been for the better and when I’m done I will have chopped off a good number of extraneous words. As long as I can refrain from writing any more new short stories (…ahem), I will be making steady progress on this until it’s done.

My hope is to blog about said steady progress. 🙂 Hence the accountability. I am resolving, right now, to not vague that I’m ‘making progress’ and ‘doing good!’ and then sit at 8 of 24 for the next two months.

Here’s to posting actual numbers and blazing my way through these edits. Cheers. <3