We've reached my high-intensity writing month of the year, AKA NaNoWriMo. I used October to finally wrap up Nugget #4 - which will be the last Nugget the Space Chicken book for a while. Now that is off to the proofreader and the illustrator and we're on to the next project on my list: Godmother.
Godmother, a YA fantasy stand-alone came to me in a moment of inspiration in 2023. I quickly committed a rough outline to a Word file and set it aside for November. Sadly, I only wrote one chapter before getting distracted by some other shiny new project. Oops.
Now I'm working on expanding my YA book offerings so I need to get Godmother on the page. As of writing this post, I'm on chapter 6. I'm aiming for 60-70K, keeping this similar in length and with the fairy tale vibes of Spindelkin.
Princess Poppy and Astra, her fairy godmother, initially agree to switch places for a few days. Astra is fed up with her life of granting wishes for others, wanting to enjoy life for herself for just a little while. Poppy doesn't want to marry a stranger, no matter if he is a handsome prince or not. The princess scrambles to keep her cover when the godmother council arrives to cite her for numerous negligent duty violations. If she doesn't figure things out quickly, her magic will be stripped and she'll never be able to return to her true life. Meanwhile, Astra falls for the prince. She doesn't want to give up her princess ruse, but if she's found out, it will ignite a war between two kingdoms.
If I manage to get a draft of this book done, I need to get back to one of my perpetual projects: Interface. That one is YA sci-fi, more geared toward boys so it will be a good addition to the book rack. Interface has been glaring at me since 2015 when I got 2/3 through the first draft on another November writing frenzy. It's been partly revised several times and is kind of a frankennovel at this point, but I have made sporadic strides this year toward smoothing it out. The story has promise, it just takes a lot of brainpower to sort out all the iterations of it into one coherent piece. And then there's the writing the last third of it.
Book Signings
I've only got one event for the rest of this year so I can concentrate on writing until March. My schedule is mostly booked for 2027 already. Hooray!
Life Beyond Books
The garden is cleaned up for the winter and I've decided to expand it for next year so that's under construction. The chickens are stocked and the coop is prepped for cold weather. Yard clean up is in progress. The flower hill was 95% completed with my reclaiming efforts this summer. I ran out of steam at the end, but it's back into much more manageable territory for next spring. I also planted a bunch of new plants so we'll see how those hold up.
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