Flexibility in the Face of Obstacles

The PLAN was to have a lovely, uplifting post for the year's end, and encourage you to take a look at the Questions for 2023 over on the Goals, Dreams, and Resolutions site.

However, then the computer crashed, on December 13. Hopefully, the post on the 14th went out, and was reasonably coherent; I've had trouble getting into the Substack account from any device that is not my main computer. If this goes out on time, it means I finally succeeded.

Hopefully, the Solstice post went out on time last week, and was coherent.

Fortunately, I was able to get everything on hard deadline out. My trusty old Macbook is too old to go online, but I can still do some word processing on it. Although my tablet is too clunky and no longer recognizes the USB port, so I can't upload anymore from the flash drive to the tablet, I managed to get computer time at the public library and get most things out.

It put me behind in uploading new episodes of LEGERDEMAIN, and working on ANGEL HUNT.  It slowed me down (but did not stop me) from working on THE TREES WHISPERED DEATH. I'm still hopeful to have the first draft done before the midnight on December 31. If it's 11:59, then so be it.

I still do a lot of early drafting in longhand, especially when I'm spinning out ideas. I've had a few ideas, two in a genre I'm interested in exploring, and two that are more in my wheelhouse, but have a little fun with tropes (and one in where I take some of my own eccentricities and exaggerate them). All four of these would be stand-alones. I don't yet know if any are viable to fully draft.

I have another idea on a basic premise I played with a few years ago and decided not to pursue, but this time moving it into a different genre, and layering in some humor and, again, twists on tropes. That might be the first book of a series, but I have to figure out if it would all be from the POV of the protagonist in the first book, or if I would rotate protagonists, the way I do in the Coventina Circle series.

But I'm playing with them, making notes in longhand and writing fragments. One or more may graduate into spiral notebooks.

And I'm back to working on VIXEN'S HOLLOW, the series I'm developing for this platform, although I still have no idea when it will debut. Hazily, I'm hoping for sometime in summer, but it might not be viable until autumn.

I'd planned to take the week off between Christmas and New Year's from client work anyway, and only work on whatever of my own I felt like. With Neptune (the planet of inspiration) turning direct, suddenly, I'm having ideas again. I think I've said it before here, that ideas tend to come in batches, like cookies.

Building daydreaming time into my work day and my down time in order to spin out ideas and see which ones catch fire is vital to my overall process, and spinning new ideas fuels the work on ideas in progress.

It's not about following whatever is new and shiny; it's about creating an atmosphere so that all the projects feed each other, no matter what genre or format in which they fall.

Have a lovely end of year into the New Year, and let's hope I get my computer back early in January.