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Quarter 2 (Plus)

View from a hike in Shenandoah during our biannual sister trip

When I last posted about my annual goals, it was March.  Since then, real life has been full to bursting, between a death in the family, instability in the day job industry, some very exciting personal news, and the general sense of living through the apocalypse. Combining all of those stress-inducing factors...I lost track of the months. At the end of each of the last few months I went to sit down to write up the Quarter 2 update and had the sense that I was off count, and it wasn't time to sit down and provide an update yet. 

It turns out, I was off, just not in the direction I intended to be. So, here's my update on what I've been working on for the last 5 months (oops) 

  • April. Re-outlined Beekeeper, and tried not to drown at work, while dealing with some health challenges. Survival was the goal for April, and we met that mark, if only. 
  • May & June. I revised Beekeeper over 45 "working" days. In an effort to be gentle with myself, I just removed the weeks that we spent camped out in the hospital with my family and didn't count those days towards my self-imposed deadline at all. All in, I added 15,700 words between this and the prior draft, which ended up being only 900 less than I projected. While the obvious win of the situation is that I ended with a draft that I was really proud of, I'm also fairly happy with the math I did to anticipate the amount of time and overall expected growth of the novel! 
  • July. In July I took my annual summer vacation from writing. Instead of writing every morning before work, I read a bit of non-fiction and took a walk. As always, it is shocking how much more together my life gets and how much better I feel physically when I'm not spending every spare minute spinning in story-land. And yet, the moth ends, and as usual, something pulls me back... While on my break, I didn't completely disconnect myself from writing. I also used this time to beta-read 3 excellent books by friends and colleagues. 
  • August. I spent August processing my own beta feedback on Beekeeper, and doing my annual short-story exercise. This year I switched up my process a bit. Instead of generating a new random prompt each day, I only started a new prompt for the first week. Then, as the weeks went on I cycled through those 7 initial story prompts to build out a series of 7 short stories. At the same time, I used Elements of Eloquence as another way to challenge myself, selecting one type of rhetoric to incorporate into each day's session. It was fun, I learned a lot about grammatical figures, and I ended up with a few stories that I'm excited to come back to, too! I ended up with just over 10,000 words of short story, and a bonus 4,000 in revising my Beekeeper outline and character maps. 
The bush that convinced me this house was meant to be ours, captured in full bloom during one of my walks during writing-vacation


All of that translated into this year's goals: 

  1. 👍 Finish and query Predacide. I'm going to mark this one as complete! There's still a few more queries that I may send out on this one, but for the most part I am content with where this novel stands. 
  2. 👍 Draft Beekeeper. This goal is also complete. Since setting this goal I've done two complete drafts of this book, and collected beta feedback from 4 wonderful writers. I'm still aiming to get one more draft of Beekeeper done before the year is out, but if you were to ask me if I felt good about what I've accomplished in 2025, I would say I'm pleased with my progress here to date. 
  3. 👍 Beta read 4 books. I've done 380,000 words worth of beta reading, most of that this summer. I've met my 4-book goal, and am trying to be really honest with myself about my bandwidth to take on any more given my other fall commitments. It's very likely that I don't do any more beta reading this year, because there's no worse feeling in the world than promising someone a read and not delivering. 
  4. 👍  Generate 2 new ideas that excite me. My August short activity left me with 7 new stories, a couple of which I could feasibly spin out into something longer. I'm letting these rest a bit more before I consider whether I want to revise them in their current format or hold these in the inspiration bin to see if they pair up with anything else. 
In short... even though it feels like I haven't done much writing over the last few months, I've managed to complete all of my annual goals for 2025! I'm anticipating a busy fall and early winter, so I'm challenging myself not to set any new goals and just to let the writing bug take me where it will. After, of course, one more draft of Beekeeper.
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