Progress Report June 2026

I have puttered about a great deal this month.

I had my husband hide my iPad from me, which helped significantly with my YouTube addiction. Sort of.

A little bit.

It’s complicated.

I’ve excavated the Shed of Craftiness. Not completely, mind you, but enough that I know the yarn is . . . Over there.

Somewhere.

And then the excavation stalled, and … There’s a path. I can get to things  but I renewed to reduce the things.

I have started reducing my projects list. Every year, I tell myself no more projects–finish the ones you’ve already got in the queue. And every year, I add new ones to the list. This year we’re trying to reduce the list by 10%. And yes, metrics sound weird for something like this until you realize that I have actually made a physical list of projects.

I built some cover art props, and started on what I think will be a decent marketing project to drive traffic to my website, but we’re still a year or two out for implementation. Which is good,  because I need to get more books published before I even think about opening the marketing worm can.

Which brings me to another issue: writing/formatting.

This summer I planned to work on formatting the next romance novel, get the cover art pictures taken in October, and be ready to go live Spring break-ish 2027. I would spend the school year wrestling with the manuscript for the third fantasy novel (which is still viciously resistant to my efforts).

However.

This month has been all about being available at the drop of a hat for everyone else. Not just one kid’s internship. No, no.

Every time I have gotten to my desk, I have not been able to write or edit or anything like that, because I know, that I will have to drop everything to prioritize something else. The repair guy appointment. Driving my kids to volunteer event X. Sorting out driving teaching time. Chores. Errands. The dogs to the vet. A third party agency falsely reporting to my insurance company that both my kids have their full driver’s license  (this one I’ve been working on for a week, so far. The first 1 hour was just verifying the DMC had submitted no such report to anyone. The next 2 hours were me grinding down some poor level one call center kid until they finally revealed where the report had come from. The last week has been submitting proof of identity paperwork and waiting for holidays to pass and processing of said documents before I can call back this afternoon to try and get answers. Again.)

Basically I have to be able to shift gears on a dime, which is really hard when you’re trying to focus on finding the adjective for a single scene in a story.