Wow. June 2018. What a month. I’m exhausted on so many levels. But still standing (mostly), still fighting the good fight, and still hoping for a better month to come. Also, just returning from a weekend out of town, overseeing multiple house projects, and preparing for houseguests coming at the end of the week. And fighting with my web host over my site they broke two weeks ago and still haven’t fixed.

But that’s no excuse for slacking off on July goals! First, a quick recap of my progress in June. Let’s take a look-see at those goals from what feels like a century ago.

June Progress

1) Finish the first draft of the Women’s Fiction project. Done! I typed THE END on the first draft just this past Friday! Of course, it’s only the end of phase one. Now the real work begins. Writing: It’s a process. Rewriting: It’s a necessary evil.

2) Finish the romance novella and novel 1 revisions. Yeah, kinda sorta. I’m still SO unhappy with the novella, but I think it’s time to let it go and give my editor a cut at it. I’m still tracking to a mid-November release date, but reserve the right to postpone if it means getting a better story out there.

3) Update the website. So, this is how my website got broken. And not by me! By the professional technical support, aka my new best friends, with whom I’ve spent over ten hours on the phone since I asked them to point to my new URL (which uses my new official writing name). At the writing of this blog post, I at least have a site up, but the SSL certificate is missing (meaning it’s an unsecured site). Still, I’m taking credit for accomplishing my part of this goal (so DONE!), while looking sideways with a stink eye at BlueHost.

4) Prep the partial I have of HFF novel 2 for my coach to review in July. Done, and with big dose of fun! It’s still early enough in the discovery and writing process for me to be in the infatuation stage with this book and the characters, so it’s been a nice escape from the finished and almost-finished manuscripts.

July Goals

1) Finish the Story Genius foundational work and revise/polish the first 50 pages of HFF Novel 2. Now I’ll start working with my coach on it, which will necessarily mean looking at all of this story’s warts, flaws, and plot holes. But we had a nice fling in June!

2) Finish the back cover copy for the HFF novella and novel 1. I need to get this text to my cover designers so they can finish my covers, so I can in turn share them with you. Expect to see a post with back cover copy and a request for your input later this month.

3) Turn over the novella and novel 1 to my editor for a final pass. Final pass makes these sound so close to being finished! In reality, I’ll probably need to double my writing output in August and possibly September to address editor feedback and get these stories into the hands of beta readers asap. But that’s August Nancy’s problem. For July, I just need to coordinate email submissions and editing phone calls.

4) Do the first-pass revisions on my WF manuscript. I will especially be tightening the opening scene and my 50-word pitch for this book, as I hope to take part in a WF online pitch session at the end of July. I hope to complete that during this first week of this shiny new month, then give it a 2-wk rest, and then dive back into heavy revisions and polishing (before I get editing letters back on the romance books). Oy, no wonder I’m so tired!

Oh, and I almost forgot –

5) Finish my sneak peeks of the HFF novella, novel 1, and novel 2. These are for the freebie I’ll give away to readers who sign up for my newsletter. And it will include a short story (currently it’s more of a vignette) in which readers will meet the five heroes of the full-length novels, set during their mischievous days at Harrow.

If that all sounds intense and overwhelming, it is. But when I decided to do my writing full time, I knew some months would be a tough slog. I told myself that my day job could easily escalate to 80-hour work weeks for several weeks at a time and, if necessary, I’d find the energy to do the same kind of heavy lifting for my writing. Writers reading this just spit coffee or whiskey all over their computer or phone screen, because they’re smart enough to realize creative energy doesn’t work this way. Still, onward and upward! I hope to have good news to report in a month from now, and the energy to still type up a blog post by that point.

How about you? Have you had any major accomplishments or suffered any setbacks? If it’s summer in your part of the world, are you enjoying some vacation time or using the longer days to get more creative tasks done? And if you go somewhere tropical and sip frozen cocktails on the beach, can you have a couple of margaritas for me? I’ll be here in my writing cave, drinking iced coffee and suffering the effects of Vitamin D deficiency.