Dear Readers,

November is my least favorite month of the year. It’s that point in the fall semester where, though the end is in sight, paperwork, grading, and emails tend to pile up. It’s also the month where we get our first cold spells of the year. As I type this, what we call in Texas a “norther” is on its way. Tomorrow the high will be in the 70s before plummeting 30 degrees in a matter of hours. And Tuesday? Best not to think about that as our low will hover near freezing. The cold is very hard on my damaged spine, and it makes me very stiff, swollen, and in pain. But at least I have a heating pad, right?

November is also National Novel Writing Month which I have taken part in from time to time. I’ve only ever won it once, and that is when I finished So Others May Live two years ago….that’s right two years! I finished the first draft the day before Thanksgiving, 2017, and then ended up in the hospital Thanksgiving night, the first of many visits during that nightmare nine months of surgeries and accompanying misery. Of course, editing, cover design, etc, took time, and so that’s why the book wasn’t published until March 29, 2019. The problem with National Novel Writing month is that you go into it with high hopes of success, and then feel like an abject failure if you can’t get 50K words written by November 30th. Or at least I feel that way.

That said, I do not need 50K words to finish Molly’s Song, and I hope to have the first draft done by the end of the month. Then it’s time for my own edits before it goes off to my editor in March for the first pass, copyedit in July, and I hope to have it out next fall. That’s about six months behind where I originally anticipated releasing it, but still, it’ll go from first draft to print in just over a year, which is faster than my first book. Let’s hope, anyway. As I am well aware, life has a funny way of interfering with our best laid plans.

Though I am plotting my third novel, which I will start writing in May, I actually have a smaller project lined up for December. A short-ish noir novel set in a fictitious town in Texas during the Great Depression. (I am a huge fan of both film noir and noir writing, so it is an experiment I want to try). Since this will come in at around 60K, I can get it written during the month off between semesters.

So I’ll keep muddling along and counting down the days until the semester ends and I can go back to living the full time writer’s life for a month.

Until next time, friends, take care of yourselves. And each other.

L.H.