Summer Time – and the schedule’s a mess

I get so much less done during the summer but there is absolutely no reason for it. Yeah, my youngest is home and much more underfoot while school is out but he’s literally the easiest kid ever. And he’s about to be 17 and pretty much self-sufficient. Yes, it is market season where I actually go out and sell all the things (books, soap, art, etc). Yes, I’m now going to the gym thrice a week and trying to get back to going to my in person writing group. But honestly, that only takes so much time, and all those things happen during the school year and it feels like I get so much more done then.

It’s got to be one of those in my own head things. When I was a kid, summer was peak writing time. Of course, when I was a kid, every time was peak writing time, even schooltime. I probably would have done better in school if I’d paid half as much attention to schoolwork as I did whatever it was I was writing at the time.

I have a ton of ideas and so many stories I want to tell and so many characters I want to tell them with! Maybe it is a little like the problem with all the streaming services – with so many options, it’s really hard to choose!

But today I’m going to open the file and work a bit on Magic Granny #2 (while waiting for news on Magic Granny #1). I can’t wait to get to share Maeve with the world!

Maybe I need to treat my words like my steps – aiming for at least x amount of words in a day the same way I aim for x amount of steps in a day.

Actual Writing

Four days in a row, I managed to get actual words in. I don’t know that the story is any good yet but today, I don’t really care. There are actual words for the first time in months and months. I’ll probably get more words this evening too. The point is less about the quality of the plot or the words right now but just that there are any words at all.

It’s not like it used to be – a couple hundred words here and there instead of multi-thousand word day. I don’t know what has changed for me (apart from that I’m really trying to do too many things at once and all of them take more time than I thought they would). There are a lot of things that feel very up in the air right now and some of that makes it difficult to plan ahead. I really like having a plan in place in every facet of my life except for my writing. It’s definitely throwing off my rhythm and has been since mid October.

Life is weird though and hard to plan for all the little nonsense. Right now, I’m just going to be happy to be writing again. And spend some time getting more words in tonight. Maybe I’ll break the 2k mark and see what trouble I can get my main character into. For right now, her name is Petra and she has a knack for painting dead people. We’ll see where it goes.

New Year, Same Old Things

It’s that time of year when I look at how the last year went and how I want the new year to go.

2022 started with the best surgery ever, even if it did really throw me for a long loop as far as recovery but the difference in before and after is nothing short of amazing. I did learn a lot and make a lot but I didn’t write a lot. I did finish my disabled magic granny saves the world book – currently pitching it to agents but I’m worried it’ll be a hard sell given the age and illness of my main character – only time will tell.

I’m hoping 2023 brings me back to writing on some kind of real schedule and brings me back to blogging on some sort of schedule too. I’m really hesitant to do a real goals lists – it’s been a fair bit since writing was anything like a priority. I’m hoping to change that again this year. I really need more hours in my days, dagnabit.

Hopefully I’ll be around more. Hopefully I’ll have actual books news more often too. Hopefully I’ll have other fun news too – one never knows and there are irons that look both interesting and plausible.

Every year I pick a word – I’ve had maker years, learning years, brave years, prepper years, all kinds of years. Last year was apparently a rest year. I think I might have needed it. I have always said that I didn’t think I was put together correctly and between the rheumatoid arthritis, the fibromyalgia, and the way things have been after the hysterectomy – I’m pretty sure I was right all along. All those years that I could have felt so much better if literally any doctor had asked the right question. Next year is NOT going to be a rest year.

The word for 2023 is really a phrase. Forward Motion. Even if things move slowly, the point is that they move forward. That means writing on the regular again. That means posting more here. That means reading more (though seriously – Braiding Sweetgrass was the best book I read in 2022, hands down). That means maybe hopefully seeing a new thing happen that I can’t talk about yet that isn’t about the writing or the making. That means more soap making (cause I really love it). That means getting back to the things that fell by the wayside in 2022.

I’m shutting the door on 2022. Watch this space. Good things are afoot and this year, 2023, is going to rock.

A Lovely Thing

I had a lovely thing happen today that’s just got me floating a bit. We’ll set aside the fact that the amazing people who work in my local medical lab thing (as I say, the vampire’s office) see me so often they know me by name and like me enough to support me. Today, my favorite of the women who work there (because she’s the only one who can get all my blood without having to stick me 8 to 10 times) asked me a question about one of my books. A really good question at that.

Generally speaking, I don’t really run into people who have read my books that didn’t buy it directly from me at any number of my local events and I don’t think anyone has ever really asked me where a particular element came from. I love questions like that and I thought maybe someone else might be interested in the response also.

The question was about Hunter’s Crossing – where did the gray road come from?

To my knowledge, there isn’t such an artifact in the real world mythology but the basis of it is sort of there, in a way. The foundation of it comes from Greek mythology. The River Styx forms the boundary between Earth and the Underworld. It seems to me, if there was a third plane, the Otherworld, a similar boundary would exist and thus, the Gray Road was born. It is not a place without cost or without danger. Because it was an artificial boundary, designed when magic stepped away from the regular world, it had to have rules. Because it was designed to keep the planes separate and humans are insatiably curious, it had to be hidden. It is a dead space between worlds but the things that lived there when it was created were accidentally granted immortality in the process. Being a dead space, there is no color, time is a bit weird, and death is ever-present. Not the sort of place where you want to vacation but an important place in the story (and later stories too).

Hunter’s Crossing can be found on Amazon, your local bookseller, or direct from the publisher.

Hunter’s Crossing by Sarah Wagner from Boroughs Publishing Group

Why Write

Why do I write? I write because I love to read and there are some books that I want to read that won’t exist unless I write them.

Mostly, I stick to my favorite genres – those fantastical, out-of-this-world, big scary or big science genres I love so much – fantasy, science fiction, horror, paranormal romance. I do so love writing in those genres. Part of it is because, in those genres, the worlds can be what I want – places where the only laws that matter are the ones I’ve made up myself, so long as I can make a logical(ish) enough case for them in the writing.

I do dip a toe into nonfiction sometimes, usually about my parents or my children or my chronic illnesses. But I’m finding myself searching for a book that, so far, doesn’t exist. By the time I figure out the words, it may exist by someone far more qualified than myself but I may give the writing of it a go, even if just for myself. It’s the sort of something I’ve been mulling off and on for very nearly twenty years.

My grandmother would like me to write children’s books (I think she’d find that far more palatable than paranormal romance or (gasp of distaste) horror) but that’s really not my cuppa – I, of course, told my children stories but they didn’t much care one way or another and neither have any recollection of them now, as a teenager and an adult so I don’t much figure they were any good.

I’ll never step away from fiction – its rooted too deeply in my existence and I have stories I want to tell that don’t exist yet so it’s my job to write them. Like my hedgewitch granny book(s?) and my Hell’s Redemption story that’s been percolating for about five years and my bog witch story that keeps trying to find form. My problem isn’t finding my words or finding my stories but finding my audience. But, I’ll keep plugging along and reaching out and doing my best to draw you all in and hope you want to hear my stories.

Mistakes & Regrets

I’ve been writing pretty much since I could put words together – my first poem was dictated to my grandmother when I was about 3.5, just after I got my first cat. I wrote my first book in 7th grade so that would be 13 or so. I still have that one – it’s a fantasy and pretty terrible (though good for my age I was told). I wrote the first half of my second book directly after and this is one of my biggest mistakes and regrets in all my years of writing – I literally threw it away.

I know it took place in the Maldives because I had this oversized illustrated atlas and it was the most foreign, most interesting place in it (this was before I had access to the Internet). I know it was a horror story that contained a series of murders. I know I threw it away because it creeped me out. Me. The girl who spent lunch periods reading Silence of the Lambs (and that one got a phone call to my mother). The girl who bought an extra pregnant shark in biology class earlier that same year to do a proper autopsy style dissection on the table in my grandfather’s funeral home.

I’ve spent years looking for a book that replicated that feeling – being utterly creeped out, the kind of creeped out that crawls in to the blood and festers. Years. And I had it right in front of me, from my own mind and I have very little idea of what it was that got under my skin so badly that I had to throw it away.

I know there was a girl who found the body of her best friend, partly decomposed and explained in as much detail as a child with no access to the sort of research that would make that realistic could do. I have no other recollection of the story. What I wouldn’t give to remember that story – specifically what it was that made it different from all the rest of my stories, of the many many horror novels I read in that year, the following years, that never got to me so badly that I threw it out. Maybe someday I’ll remember but until I do, my biggest regret in my writing life will be throwing that away.

Still here, Promise!

Somehow, time has really gotten away from me this year – for pretty much the entirety of the last year! I’m still writing, still working on books, but I’m also working on my other little business and all the learning, plotting, and creating I’ve been doing for that. The blog took a bit of a back seat to lots of things but life happens that way sometimes.

I’m still working on editing my granny saves the world book – I keep finding threads that need tucked in to make it better, richer. This process is both wonderful and frustrating. Wonderful because it makes the book better. Frustrating because I’d hoped to be agent and/or publisher searching by this time already.

The world is opening up a little bit more all the time. I’ve already done my first event of the year at the Hancock County Parks and Recreation Open Air Market in April and I’ll be back at that in June and July with both all my books and my other business, Crow’s Hollow Botanicals. I have a smaller indoor craft fair this upcoming weekend in Weirton also.

Hopefully, I’ll get back to posting a little more regularly here (and hopefully, I’ll have neat things to post about!).

I hope you’re all doing well and finding excellent things to read!

End of Year Wrap Up

So, 2020 is just about done. I don’t much feel like celebrating, more like watching it leave from between my fingers, just in case it has something else up it’s sleeve. I’m pretty sure none of my goals for this year managed to get accomplished but that doesn’t mean this was a year without accomplishments. I did sort of start a business, after all. And I took a number of classes related to that. And I’m looking at more of them. Learning is fun!

I’m keeping my outlook lifted for 2021. There’s no sense in approaching a brand new year with doom and gloom. I might be being a little more cautious though. Would I like to get to do craft fairs and events again? Yes, yes I would but I’m also immunocompromised so I have to be cautious.

I had a couple of acceptances this year – though one project fell apart and I haven’t heard back on another one – I do have a serial coming… aliens and terraforming, a little bit of intrigue, and the opportunity to use a little bit of all the weird geological information that lives in my head.

I didn’t manage to win NaNoWriMo this year – there were too many things going on and nothing was cooperating. I’ll get back to the story though – it’s got some great potential. I am still working on my hedgewitch story’s rewrite. I am still working on finding the other books a good home. I did rerelease Guardian of the Gods and Hardwired Humanity so that they’re available again – HH has some new stories in it too.

Overall – instead of 2020 being a doing year, it was a learning year. In some ways, I learned more than I ever wanted to about humans and just how many out there lack empathy, common sense, and any sense of responsibility. I also learned that, while I am pretty much made for isolation as long as I have the internet, most people aren’t. I’ve always been a bit of an odd duck though. My house was very fortunate this year – there weren’t many upsets and only a few close calls. I know how lucky we are – so many others lost so much.

I am hoping to do more things outside my house in 2021 and I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m hoping to add new lines to my business (including perfumes!). I’m hoping to get another book written and one or two books sold to publishers. I’m hoping to see my youngest go back to in person school as we’ve done virtual this year. I’m not doing word count goals, weight goals, health goals or any of that. I don’t do resolutions. This year, I’m just going to hope I find new and interesting stories to tell, things to make, and things to learn.

I went in to 2020 with big plans. I’m going in to 2021 with big hope. Fortunately, hope isn’t something anyone can put in lockdown. So long as we can all just wear our masks and get our vaccines when we can and are advised to, we can move forward. I don’t think normal is a thing to aspire to at this point, we’ve all seen how broken normal is now.

I hope you have a bright, happy, and hopeful 2021 too.

Maeve Donovan & All the Changes

Last November, as I poked and prodded at this chatty granny, Maeve, for her story, I had the vague sense that she was, in many ways, the sort of granny my mom might have been, only with the added bit of actual, practical, tangible magic. Writing Maeve’s story made a few things very clear to me and started a chain reaction I wasn’t expecting but it really had very interesting timing.

I didn’t even notice the connection between this story and all the new things going on in my life until I started work this week on rewriting the story and getting it into shape. I always knew reading books could change your point of view, your outlook on certain things. It never really occurred to me that writing them could do something similar. In this case, it shined a light on something else I didn’t suck at doing as a kid.

Fortunately for me, the new direction isn’t one that will try and muscle out the writing part, except for the next week while I’ve got an online conference, a workshop, and the physiology class I’m taking (chemistry math still makes my head hurt – stupid moles). I’m not a very happy me or a very grounded me when I don’t have my stories. I sleep better when I have that creative output. I’m nicer probably too.

The world outside my house is a scary place right now and there’s all the rumblings of it getting worse before it gets better, but we’re just plodding along as best we can, the kids and I doing class work and my husband getting up and going to work. I do miss going places and doing things but I’m not taking chances – it sucked losing a parent as a teenager and as an adult, I don’t want to do that to the kids when I could just keep my immunocompromised butt HOME.

Today, I just decanted and pressed a yarrow/sunflower oil infusion and I’m in the mood to try my hand at a proper lotion and not a balm or whipped butter. I’m plodding along a bit but the new iteration of The Crow & Dragon is almost ready to go. Technically it’s live but it’s far from finished and I’m not happy with the layout just yet. I think I want to do a watercolor background for my listing photos but that isn’t happening this week.

Four Minutes at Every Day Fiction

New story published – it’s a bit outside my usual work as it isn’t genre but I like to stretch my wings sometimes.

Read it here: Every Day Fiction