STATUS – 1.13.2025 –

Hello and good morning.

It is 30 degrees, presently, in the greater Phoenix metro, and nothing makes sense.

I was considered stopping my Morning Pages journaling practice just last week. Not permanently, mind you, but just for a while. I felt like it was a stopgap for me to get to my actual work. 15 minutes of writing may not seem like a lot, but when you only have roughly an hour and half every morning to get to it, that 15 minutes or so could be important to making something that might actually get you paid some day. So I was thinking, “Just for a few weeks. Just until you get going on this new book and finish this pitch and send out one more query for Project NESS and…”

And then this morning, during my Morning Pages session, I stumbled across a brilliant aspect of the next book I want to write (*NOTE* Brilliant to me, not necessarily that the thing I thought up was objectively “brilliant.” I’m not that egotistical.) [*NOTE 2* God I hope I’m not…]. This aspect could be a driving force of the book, something I hadn’t foreseen or thought up during the initial planning of the thing. A way to help me frame the story.

And it came to me.

During journaling.

Okay, maybe I don’t know anything.

PROJECT UPDATE:

#AMQUERYING – It’s the second week of the year and I haven’t sent out one query. What am I doing with my life? The start of the year was a little slow in some regards, but a lot of it has been spent planning, to make sure there is time to do writing. To do querying. That changes this week. We’re in the groove, we have our schedules, and I’m ready to start pitching NESS again.

BIANCA – Progress on the Pitch and the Synopsis are going okay. I need to break down the synopsis into bullet points of every key part of the book later this week. From those bullet points, I’ll add on a little more in new document and try to shape it into something coherent. That’s the trick. Never start blank.

CITY – This is the new codename for the next middle grade book I’m starting to write. It gets it’s story bible notebook later today. Very excited.

CURRENTLY LISTENING: I routinely forget that I love Weird Al and every few months or so I binge a couple of his songs all at once.

I’m sure this song has nothing to do with my revelation at the beginning of this post…

CURRENTLY READING:

I have not stopped thinking of this Jason Pargin book since I began it last week. I’m about 60 pages out from finishing it and it might be my favorite book I’m going to read this year and it’s only the second week of January.