Crazy, Good, Creative

Scrub Jay On Mount Mulch

This last week has been crazy in a good, creative way.  Last Saturday, I woke up with the full tune and the opening lyrics of a song in my head.  I held onto them, singing them softly to myself as I showered and went about my early morning chores.  By a few hours into the morning, I had the eight lines to go with the melody.

For my birthday last year, Jim gave me a mini-digital recorder, so I was able to save the music as well.  That was a lot of fun.  I also started recording some of the songs I’ve written for our animals over the year, starting with “Snowdrop’s Lullaby” and “Holler When You’re Hungry.”

Also fun was the arrival, completely unexpectedly, of Mount Mulch—the result of an order placed over two years ago with a local tree service that will drop off mulch if they have a full truck and are in your area.  They were, they did, and we now can’t get my car out of the garage until we finish moving it.

Mount Mulch (Shovel for Scale)

Mount Mulch started out close to six feet high (the pictures were taken after we’d removed some) and is being hauled a wheelbarrow at a time into our back yard, where we’re going to use it to cover the ground wherever is needed.  Give how hot our summers have been lately (last July we had a peak temperature of 113), this is pretty much everywhere.  The end result won’t look fancy, but we’re really pleased.  Reworking our mini-ecosystem is a creative act, one that stimulates my storytelling brain.

A couple of weeks ago, I touched on some of what last year’s projects had been, but I didn’t finish, nor did I get to talk about what’s up and coming

2020 was a busy writing year for me.  Early in the year I brought out new e-book editions of my three volume “Breaking the Wall” series (Thirteen Orphans, Nine Gates, and  Five Odd Honors).  This year, now that Jim is more available to me as an assistant, I’d like to get a bit more of my backlist available in spiffy new e-books.

 In May, Wolf’s Soul, the eighth Firekeeper novel came out, concluding the tale began in Wolf’s Search.  I also wrote and sold a couple of short stories.

Immediately after finishing Wolf’s Soul, I started in on the fourth Star Kingdom/Stephanie Harrington novel (aka SK4), written in collaboration with David Weber.  The manuscript is now in at Baen books.  Before Weber caught Covid-19, he and I were brainstorming what would be in SK5. We’ll be back to that as soon his health permits.

Perhaps, the most crazily creative part for me of late 2020 and early 2021 is that I went back and started working on the rough draft of a novel titled Library of the Sapphire Wind. I began this back in April of 2017, and finished a very rough draft in October of that same year, with a word count of something over 150,000 words.  I then put LSW aside while I wrote Wolf’s Search, Wolf’s Soul, and SK4.  Over the last several months, as I’ve been proofing, I’ve expanded it quite a lot, and it looks as if it’s going to become two books…

I think I’ll get back to my proofing and reviewing of the second draft.  Catch you next week!