The Estate of Waiting

We've waited to build for years. As in we're eight years behind when we'd originally planned to start. Then finally the planets aligned. I've become quite practiced at waiting, not that I enjoy doing it, but it seems to happen a lot. Hence the name of my new home.

While I'm busy waiting to hear back on submissions - I just added another ball to my submission juggling act last night - I figured I'd share progress on the house project.

This is what the site looked like last fall.

This is what a small portion of the site looked like at the beginning of April. My dog loved the freshly turned sand. He couldn't get enough of running on it. It certainly beats running on snow, so I can't blame him for celebrating the thaw, though I let him do the running for both of us.

And then we have the hole. And lots of sand. We did come across someone's trash pit, which contained a lot of broken glass (mostly jars of Peanut Crunch and Heinz 57) and one neat old perfume-type bottle that wasn't broken.

The basement walls were installed in one day. This sounds really speedy and productive but then there was two week delay with excavation issues and the geothermal crew and me spending an entire weekend out there leveling the basement dirt and digging footings to make things right.

Which brings us to where things are currently. The garage is going up today and the second story goes up next week. Can't wait to see it all framed in. Of course, that means more nights and weekends on site for me because that's where the work we're planning to do ourselves starts. 

Until then, I'll do some more editing, submitting and...waiting. 

May Summary

Wow, May sped right by.

I knew A Story A Day In May would be a challenge thanks to my busy schedule, but it was really a challenge this year. Previously, there were days I could blow off work for an hour or two and get into a story that might be taking longer than my one hour morning writing break allowed. But oh no, not this year. Most mornings I didn't even have that single hour to create thanks to other writing obligations such as the critiques I owed to people and editing the novel others are critiquing, and sometimes, the work phone demanded to be answered and rush jobs required my time instead.

What I did get accomplished:
Sipper for a proposed colonization anthology.
Space Commander for the IWM time travel anthology.
And the following that need titles yet:
Cat
Dare
Treasured
Spell

Then there are the few story starts that didn't quite pan out but might become something later.

So thank you, A Story A Day In May, for helping me birth six stories that have promise and to all of you supportive folks who stopped by to comment on my update posts throughout the month. Also, a big thank you to everyone who offered up prompts on X day during Blogging A to Z in April. Those prompts were a lot of fun to work with! I do want to get to a few more of those as time allows.

What's next for me?

Back to work on:
Editing Sahmara's novel
Editing shorts: Mother, Justice and Mary's Garden and the May stories
Submitting shorts: Giving Chase, Healer, Devolution and Late
Submitting novels: Trust and A Broken Race
Contemplating edits on: Not Another Bard's Tale, Jackpot and Angelic Intentions

May stories update #4

May 22: Ugh.

May 23: Progress on Colonization 2.0

May 24. Yes, a Saturday, but its done!!! At 6,100 words, Sipper (Colonization 2.0) is now complete.

May 25: Sunday was head out to look at entry doors for the house that would totally blow our door budget and then shop online at home for ones that we can afford. I also managed to get Sipper and Space Commander edited and sent off.

May 26: Memorial Day, which means up early for the parade and running the boy around for marching band, but I got some critiquing done before heading out to haul branches and logs at the construction site.

May 27: X marks the spot prompt contemplation day. I got the story mostly ironed out in my head, but after 14 hours straight of work and running errands, I find myself lacking the ability to REfreakingLAX enough to write.

May 28: Treasured is complete at 500 words. Contemplating whether I'm happy with the title or story.

May 29: Really want to get to Braine's ear flap hat prompt, but work and bills and house stuff had my brain scattered all day. Did some editing on Treasured (still teetering on the might be good or shelf scale) and played with tweaking my blog during writing time instead.

May 30: Lost cause

May 31: Saturday. There seem to be a lot of weekends this month. Well, weekends that would seem to lend themselves to some quiet time where I should be able to write. But that doesn't seem to happen. I should stop being even remotely optimistic about this and avoid the guilt of getting anything writing related accomplished.


Current tally: Shorts that worked and might become something good: 6
Shorts that I set aside for later: 4