I'm Losing My Mind

That's it! That's the whole post!

Hello, friends!

I have been keeping this newsletter since August of 2022. Every month, I have written an (always free!) post about some creative writing resource and how it helped me, or didn’t. Some months — as I’m sure you have experienced your own self — it was harder to hit that deadline, but I always pulled it out.

Today is the day I crack!

I’m in the final stretch of the first round of agent edits for my NOVEL, and to my astonishment, between that and my day job, I literally cannot do one more thing. I canceled my social events in October; after much agonizing, I postponed until January the workshop I was scheduled to teach; I canceled all of my appointments (except therapy, lol); I paused my exercise routine. This newsletter is the latest casualty.

I’ll be in better form for the November newsletter, God willing. In the meantime, all I’ll say is that Pacemaker has saved my tuchus as far as staying on track. I know that Pacemaker has changed their pricing structure since the last time I wrote about them — their free version now only covers 60-day projects — but for me, the Premium version has proven its value a dozen times over. YMMV.

News

Unbelievably, everything else marches on:

My short story “Cassandra Takes the Plunge,” originally published in 2022 in Shoreline of Infinity and recently reprinted, will be free to read on Trollbreath Magazine’s website on November 8. I’ll put a link in the November newsletter.

My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in December 2024 — or sooner, if you join Diabolical Plots’s Patreon! (But the free version comes in December.)

My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will, in actual fact, be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in 2024! It seems the ebook was distributed in the summer, and they’re printing the hard copies now. 🎉🎉🎉

My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in mid-2025. They’re already getting hype on Instagram.

Also, this happened:

OK, BYE!