Life
I still can't decide if this has been the longest or the shortest month of my recent memory. To put it simply, this professional program is a great deal more intense than I expected. In addition to the expected 8-4 M-F, which I was prepared to handle, I have been needing to spend several hours a night to keep up on the reading, studying, and other homework for the program. It has really taken its toll on my energy, and in some cases my sanity, at least until I got over the hurdle of adjusting my expectations and retooling my brain to be ready for it day after day.
Fortunately, I believe I am steadily approaching that equilibrium. For many of my courses, they front-loaded assignments that could be done at any time but which weren't due until mid to late July. Over the course of this month, I have carefully crawled my way forward on these assignments as I also kept up on the more immediate work. It's been a lot, but I think the fruits of that effort are close at hand, as I will discuss in the writing section below.
On the home front, my family is doing fairly well, all things considered. My sudden relative absence has definitely added a lot of stress for my wife, but so far she is handling it like a champ. She has been working with the older two boys on school workbooks to make sure they are ready to start their new schools in the fall. Griffin, my eldest, will be starting kindergarten, while Tiber, the middle child, will be starting preschool. They are both really excited and I expect they will both do very well when the time comes. It's crazy to think that baby Malachi is already 5 months old, and even crazier to think that he'll be well over 1 by the time I am done with this program. He is likewise doing very well, growing on pace (although he is a lot smaller than our other two were at this age), and hitting all of his development milestones.
Also, he's super cute.
Writing
As I mentioned above, I have been pretty strapped for time this month. Even so, towards the end of this month I managed to get my head on straight enough to push forward on an outline for the next book I plan to draft, Book 1 of my Neon Arcana trilogy. I managed to finish the outline the day before yesterday, which should allow me the next six months or so to complete the draft, with the goal to complete it by the end of the year. Assuming a "normal" length of the draft—around 90-100k words—I will need to maintain a pace of only about 500 words a day, on average. This is only about half of my typical word count goal when writing under more amenable conditions, so I think and hope I will be able to manage this in spite of the insanity of my current schedule. Since writing is something that I find incredibly edifying and satisfying, I suspect that trying to keep this schedule will actually help me maintain a healthy and positive life outlook.
On the less good side of things, I am becoming increasingly doubtful of my ability to release The Damned Earth this year. Though my initial responses from my alpha readers have been positive, there is a fair amount left to do and I don't see me having the bandwidth to do it before the bulk of the professional program is behind me. I think it is practical to go ahead and adjust the expectation of that release from Q4 of 2023 to Q2 of 2024. Hopefully this isn't too crushing for any of you (at least it isn't the sequel to a book that ended with a cliffhanger, right?), but I really only want to put books out there when they are as ready as I can reasonably get them. So thank you for your understanding.
Thanks for reading, and I wish you all a lovely July.
L.A. Morton-Yates