(End of) Second Quarter Update #amwriting #indiepublife

It’s the start of the third quarter of 2019, and it’s about time I update my readers on the progress of each of my pen names. The lull of summer (and the business of it) has, in fact, slowed me down a bit. This is the time of year I spend more time with family and friends, get the car checked out, settle all my yearly maintenance appointments and so on. Just because you know the weather will be okay and it will be easy to get everything done without having to worry if a random snow storm will screw up the commute to or from an appointment in some way.

I am also feeling the stirrings of tackling my office. It needs another good purge. This is the room in the house everything comes to before it gets sorted, which is not good. I have a lot of things to clean up.

I am getting ready to teach classes (3-4 of them at the moment, running between July 14 – September 30), plus I have two things for my writing group + a writing conference in September, and a class for the day job I have to attend. In between there, I have NovelRama and many other to-do’s.

So where does this leave the writing?

Let’s just say it means things are moving slower. A lot slower. I have at least 12 projects in the works. 2 for Anne O’Connell, 4 for S. Connolly, 2 for S. J. Reisner, and 4 for Audrey Brice.

Come October – I’ll be significantly cutting back socially, teaching-wise, etc. to concentrate on writing. In the meantime, I still have plans to have at least one Anne release this summer (two if things go as planned). Two Audrey releases before the end of the year, and at least 1 Connolly release. We’ll see how it goes. I’m almost 3 years overdue on one Connolly project because it keeps changing direction, and I think I finally decided where it’s going, but now it requires a rewrite.

I’ve been seriously considering the role a lot of different things play in my life and career, and I need to start focusing on the RIGHT things instead of spreading myself out so thin to where I barely have time to manage the writing (which is ultimately my Great Work). This means that in 2020 — the Daemonolatry for others is being cut way back, as is my involvement in a lot of public and temple based Daemonolatry related things. It distracts from my great work. I imagine I added so much to my life because my Great Work was getting too hard, or too real – and I needed something to distract me, so I filled my schedule with things that took the focus off of what I should have been doing. Part of that was dealing with grief, I think. (If you recall I lost a few good friends to cancer in 2017, plus a much loved editor who had to move on.)

More meditation required on that. Anyhow, I’m off to finish doing a critique (yet another distraction from my Great Work) and indulge in some family time.

In the meantime – here is a list of projects I plan to have out this year:

1. Tales from Black Lily #1: The BDSM Book Club – O’Connell
2. Seven Lustful Sins – O’Connell
3. Cult of Lucifuge – Brice
4. The Preeminant Curse – Connolly
5. Thirteen Covens: Darkness – Brice
6. Inherited Djinn – Brice (possibly – may be slated for 2020)