Where have I been?

You may have noticed that I vanished into thin air for about three months. I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t intentional. It just kind of happened. Why did I poof? For a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that my life has been hectic for the last year and, somewhere around July I just couldn’t juggle all the balls I needed to keep in the air. I felt crushed beneath an ever-growing pressure to keep up with way too many things. Something had to give. Somewhere, somehow the burden had to be lessened. Tumblr ended up being one of the things I had to set aside. Not forever, just for awhile. Why Tumblr? To be honest, I’ve never been entirely happy with the kind of content I share here. It took me a long time to get a sense for Tumblr and the kind of content people are interested in ingesting here. And while I do feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on that now, I’ve never felt like I quite managed to provide the right kind of quality or depth of content. It’s always been my intention to change my Tumblr feed to suit that vision of what I feel is good content for this site. But for a long time I felt like I just needed to keep posting - that speed, that any content at all was better than quality content. I thought, perhaps, if I walked away for a little while, it would be easier to come back and do something new. I never meant for the hiatus to last as long as it has. I would like to say it’s over now, but I’m not entirely sure how long it will take me to start posting the kind of stuff I really want to post on a regular basis. What does the future look like? In terms of how things are going for me, personally, outside the interwebs - my husband and I finally found a house. It took us a year and it was a long, grueling, frustrating process, so we’re really quite happy to be at the end of it. BUT that also means that November is going to be a high-stress month full of painting, renovations and moving. So while things are going well, and I do feel like I have my writing and publishing work back on track (it teetered for quite awhile), we’re not quite in the clear as far as extra and stressful things we need to tackle. But I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d like to do for this blog moving forward. I’m thinking I’d like to do themes every month and make everything I post relate to them. Obviously, I’d like them to be writing / creative related, since that’s always been what this blog was supposed to be about. I would really love to feature some Inktober stuff next month, if I get the chance. (This will all depend on how things on the moving front are shaping up.) I’ve also got a re-release of Eternity’s Empire coming up, so it’d be awesome to talk a bit about that while it’s happening. November is, of course, NaNoWriMo, so I’d like to have a lot of novel planning and writing info on the blog for the month for anyone who is participating and looking for information or tips. Not sure how that will shape up with us moving (and me trying to participate o_o;) but I’ll give it a shot! After that I might like to focus a month on planning. A month on maps. A month on first drafts. Stuff like that. That way I’ll really feel like I’m posting useful things the bulk of the time instead of filling up with memes just to keep the blog running. For anyone who may have been worried when I vanished, I apologize. As I said, it was never my intention to vanish without a word, things just sort of happened that way. I hope I’ll be back soon, and I’m looking forward to re-connecting with all of you <3

Just a couple of quick notes this week.

First, I’ll be away next week, entertaining friends, so the blog will be silent.

Second, it has recently become apparent that I’m spending a lot of time and effort producing content that isn’t the most beneficial. With everything going on in my life this year, it’s hard to keep on top of two blog posts every week, and I think one usually ends up getting lost in the cracks. So after speaking with my Facebook Group and friends on Twitter, I’m going to be pulling back to one post a week. Starting when I return, the blog will update only on Mondays. The next post will be a regular blog musing, and the post after that will be more free fiction.

Don’t worry, nothing is actually going away. I’m just going to try a little harder not to work myself to death. In light of Monday’s post, that should make sense ;) . . .

When I asked my Facebook group which character they’d like to hear more about, they almost unanimously chose Rose.

After my Seven Deadly Domerins series, I played around with the idea of another series of Heavenly Virtues prompts. I only ever did one in the past, and they’re an interesting group of traits to consider. But I write a lot about Domerin (as you may have noticed) so I wanted to dedicate the project to someone else. At first, I wasn’t sure if I had enough available Roses to make it work. No one has quite as many incarnations as Domerin. But after considerable thought, I managed to find just enough.

The first Heavenly Rose featured the virtue of chastity. The next one tackled humility. Next came patience. This week we’re looking at temperance, which is defined as: moderation or self-restraint in action, statement, etc.; self-control.

I will admit to a tiny bit of cheating here. This Rose comes from the same world as the one featured in the humility tale. But she’s not exactly the same, and much further along the timeline. Someday, that will all make sense. But for now, I hope you’ll enjoy this glimpse at the future. . . .

On the outer edge of a distant galaxy sits an isolated star, orbited by a single, lonely planet. Oh, there are other celestial bodies in the near vicinity. Asteroids, moons and dead rocks aplenty. But the star and its planet are the only signs of life, cut off from the rest of their neighbors by a thick field of celestial detritus that makes navigating the surrounding space both difficult and treacherous.

Somewhere on the northern and western most continent of that planet, can be found the most brilliantly beautiful caldera lake. The water is so blue, it resembles the sky at noon on the brightest, sunniest of days, and so clear that a person standing at its edge can peer clear to the base of the lake bed some thousand feet below. Mountains ring the lake on three sides but, on the fourth, it is surrounded by several miles of forest, before the final set of mountains completes the ring.

On a clear day, the breeze often rustles the leaves of those nearby trees before sweeping the lake’s surface, causing tiny waves to lap against the lakeshore. Light glistens off the water’s surface at varying intensity as the bright orb makes its trek across the sky, and every puffy white cloud that wanders by seems to stop briefly to examine itself in the blue mirror’s surface.

So it was easy to understand why Valin frequented the area, sometimes even braving autumn rain squalls to take in the breathtaking nature of the lands surrounding his new home. That the caldera lake had been born from one of the most destructive forces any planet had ever known was of little concern to him. The fires that carved the lake’s indentation had long since burned themselves out. And while he was aware of the galaxy that lay beyond the bright dust cloud in the hazy night sky, and the politics practiced by most of its planets’ inhabitants, he mostly tried not to think about it. Keep Reading.

As always tagging: @merigreenleaf, @dreameronthewind and @ilioneus If you’d like to be tagged when I post these, please let me know!

I *finally* got started on Book 4 of Eternity's Empire! (Can I get a HELL YEAH!) Here's a peek at the first draft of the opening:

While Aeternitas and her guardians huddled in the Earth queen's palace, waiting for doom or salvation, her mother's distant realm seemed like a dream.

But now that she had returned to the stars, it was Earth and not the empire that felt like a dream.

She still loved the Earth as much as she loved its queen; that was indisputable. She saw nothing but potential in its rolling green fields, jagged mountain ranges and rolling plains. But now that she was back among the ease and technology that permeated every aspect of life in the empire and its surrounds, the time she spent there seemed more like a fantastic camping trip, a venture through the wild, untamed reaches of the galaxy.

In other words, it had been a vacation. And it was time for that vacation to end. Learn more about the Eternity’s Empire series here!