Linda Nelson

Have you ever noticed that when summer months come along a lot of people seem to disappear for months on end?

I could easily be one of them.

During the summer I really have to work at making sure I post. There is so much going on around the home. Gardens to pick and weed (though much neglected). Peaches to pick. They are so small this year. Blue berries to pick (done that). I got to them before the birds did this year.

And, apple trees to move.

We still have not finished clearing the southern exposure of our hill. This needs to be done before the ground freezes. I think we may have two months left. We will be cutting it close but I’m sure we will get the trees moved in time.

Even when it comes to writing I tend to come close to my deadlines. Maybe because I don’t set them in stone. It is usually give or take a month.

When I said I would finish Road Salt by the first of the year, I came pretty darn close. Then when I said I would finish Along Came Neil by the Fourth of July, that was close too.

I had Road Salt published by New Years and Along Came Neil was out by the end of July. Not to shabby if I say so myself.

So what’s next?

ROW80 Check In:

My goal for this round is to finish up edits and revisions of my fantasy series. I just started working on Aaron & Keja. It will be getting lots of tweeks here and there.

One can always tell when they are maturing as a writer when they take a look at early works and see the stick figures looking back at them from the pages of their manuscript. Don’t take this as a bad thing either. It just means that one is moving forward with their writing skills and now can see the difference.

Every new writer has skill weaknesses. It could be weak dialogue. Or it could be a plotting problem, weak character building, lack of description, or bad spelling and grammar.

When your skills grow and you take the time to look over your early works you can either let them horrify you and never write another word (EXCUSES are USELESS) or get to work and fix them. Make them better. Take that stick figure and turn it into a portrait and grow your skill.

I have a long term plan. Every year I plan on revisiting my earlier works and reread them to see if my skill sets have grown.

I can’t wait for the day when I can pick up my first work I ever published and find it is flawless. But I’m sure thanks to computer cursors like mine, that seem to mysteriously jump up and down the page, that may never happen.

How about you? What are your writing goals for this round?

Do you see stick figures in your early works?

Or do you have a laptop with a jumping cursors like mine?

I would love to hear from you.

For the past couple of weeks I worked almost nonstop on Along Came Neil and the re-edits of the rest of the Wings from Ashes series. Now that the edits are done, I’m taking a bit of a breather before starting up the edits once again.

I have two more works that I want to re-edit.

Aaron & Keja and Witch Book. Once these have been re-edited I will start working on the next book in the Orgarlan Saga.

It will be so nice to be back to writing fantasy.

First thing will be the plot outline. I write so much faster when I have one.

While I was writing Along Came Neil, I did use a small plot outline but not to the extent that I used while writing Witch Book.

Since I decided to take this break we have done some outside work.

We have a hill behind our house and this year we have decided to clear the trees on the South side. I want to make room for fruit trees.

We planted some apple trees about 2 years ago on the North side of the hill. They haven’t been doing well. So this fall we have decided to move them to a new location in hopes that they will do better.

If it works out we will be adding cherry trees and apricot trees to the mix. We already have a peach tree that gives us loads of peaches every year. The great part about clearing this hill is not only the fact that we can plant fruit trees, but we have tons of blueberry bushes up there that have not done well the past few years due to them being over grown with oak trees and such.

So that is what I worked on today.

No writing, but it was still a productive weekend.