Hey! Long time no blog!

So, if you’re not feeling chatty, I’m going to cut right to the chase and tell you I’m posting because I’m teaching a 4 week online workshop about productivity and getting stuff done for writers which starts on Feb 5th, the details of which you can find here

Get Stuff Done: Productivity and Goal Tracking for Writers

4 Week Online Workshop
February 5 – March 1, 2024

You want to write more, but there are only so many hours in a day. Everyone’s trying to do more with less time these days and writers are no exception. But there’s no one size fits all method because creative work isn’t always linear and we’re all unique with our own strengths and challenges.

What you really need is a personal solution. A way to work with your brain instead of against it. That’s what this workshop is about: rethinking how you write best so you can go with your own individual flow. From day-to-day administrative tasks to juggling long-term goals, we’ll cover simple tools and strategies the working writer can experiment with to keep the words flowing and their writing dreams on track. ($30, Free for RWO Members)

Note that while Romance Writers Online is the host, you do not need to be writing romance to take this workshop. Writers of any genre including non-fiction are welcome.

I’ve always taught writing workshops in person but this is the first year I’m branching out and teaching some classes online. This one is offered via message board but I’m also planning on doing some Zoom, streaming or even email courses once I feel the situation out. I’m hoping if there’s enough interest I can expand it to other more Whine Seller adjacent topics so drop a comment if there’s a topic you’d be interested in seeing me run.

Even if you’re not interested in this class, if you could do me a solid and share the link to my blog post with your various socials, I’d really appreciate it!

So, now that we have dispensed with the news portion of this post, how’s everyone been? The last few years have been kinda crazy, huh?

Me? Well, I had my requisite existential crisis and breakdown I think we all had during lockdown. I’ve been kind of gradually picking up the scrambled bits of my life and trying to figure out how they all fit together again. Somehow I have much much less time than I used to and I don’t know if it’s the kids being older and higher maintenance or if it’s because I just keep adding more to my workload but it’s made me realize I can’t really keep doing everything I was doing pre-lockdown and I need to rethink some things.

In the immediate, the creative half of my life has taken more of a focus and I’ve gone from pivoting from writing plays to writing for streaming at the start of lockdown to expanding into entirely new genres and pen names which is an adventure… but takes up a lot of the time I used to have for writing about e-commerce.

Blogging has also become an awkward thing because of the specter of AI. I used to use this blog as a way to test out material I would later put in books and also just blog my books post by post but until we have some kind of protections against AI scraping and author’s rights to consent to having their materials used in data training, it’s really not a great idea for me to do that. So it limits what I can post here because I can’t just queue up a bunch of excerpts from my books like I used to.

A quagmire, honestly.

I’ve been spending far less time on social media than I did in The Before Times. A good thing in the big picture because it’s freed up a lot of time for other projects and pursuits (I’m teaching myself digital art in my desperate attempt to find a hobby I can’t monetize and it’s been a ton of fun!). But also a bad thing because I’m not really connected to the wider eBay and selling community like I used to be. I sometimes miss having that water cooler to log into every day, even as I don’t miss doomscrolling and the endless onslaught of too much news in my face every day.

But the biggest takeaway from the last few years has been that I need to prioritize what I’m doing if I’m going to continue to wear this many hats (my workshop is going to touch on this a lot, honestly). So that means admitting that the days when I could blog here three times a week are behind me and that I’ll have to become one of those people who just blogs randomly when I have something to rant about. At least until AI legislation gets its act together and I can share bits of my books here without fear again.

But for now, know I haven’t died and I certainly haven’t forgotten about all of you. I’m still selling, still whining, and still doing way too many things at once. And still shilling my wares so if you want to learn how I manage all these different aspects of my life and still write over a million words a year, well i have a workshop for that. 😉