Chit-chat and outlining novels

Hello friends!

If you follow the Youtube channel…how did you all do on the Cozy November Writing Challenge?

I think I did hit my goal of writing 30,000 words in November. Yay for that! But I utterly failed the specifics of the goal, which was to finish the Una and Varrie story. Instead I got a large chunk of the Potion Dealers finished, had a breakthrough on the Broken Queen sequel and wrote a large chunk of that, and even messed about with a new project like the fickle girl I am. Was that really a win? Well, I have mixed feelings, but at least it was more writing than I've done in a while.

Generally, December has been a month where I feel like I’m struggling to keep up with anything at all. December usually IS like this, to be fair! Most years I give up on writing in December and just enjoy the festive season. It’s not the time to lose yourself in an introverted fantasy world when so many events will pull you out of it, and when I’m home I usually just feel like December is the month to read and play video games like a kid on Christmas break.

This year, I’m very busy with Ebay. In September we both made a commitment to pare down our collections by a LOT. Dade, in particular, has an overwhelming amount of stuff. When his mom died, part of how him and his dad coped was that his dad bought them both a lot of stuff. Talking about their shared hobby of model building was a way for them to bond. Dade’s dad wasn’t much for expressing emotions—he was as much of a “Silent Generation” sort of guy as you can imagine. So I think it was pretty important, and rather sweet, that they had something they could talk about and do together.

But, on the other side of all this, having inherited his dad’s overwhelming collection and also managing Dade’s overabundance of stuff, oh and add in that we both did quite a bit of pandemic stress-buying…it’s gotten to be more stressful than enjoyable. I’d only enjoyed about six months of having my house back before we started filling up the living room with Ebay boxes again! But now the piles are diminishing, really and truly for good, and I’m hoping by the time the Christmas shopping season is over I can start fresh with less stuff. It will be much easier to film vlogs in the house! I’m very excited for this shift in the new year.

Anyway, none of this is very GLAMOROUS, but it all feels like big changes in the air in the past year that continue.

This week we watched season 2 of Rings of Power. I felt like it really clicked around the halfway mark of season 2 and I started to get that old fantasy mojo back that I remember from watching the original trilogy in theaters. I have epic fantasy on the brain, so I’m dying to get back to Atorra and Harrai’s story.

Alas, tomorrow is about my only day home this week and I’ll be spending in scrambling to get some Youtube videos done. But I did want to share, in text, the template I used in my outlining video for the Una and Varrie book. This is from Take Off Your Pants by Libbie Hawker, a book I very much recommend! I used it to whip the book into shape, as I had reached the 1/2 mark but a lot of things weren’t clicking. Here is what I wrote in my notebook to start: