It has been, as usual, a busy week. Weekish. Week plus? One of those. There was (another) heat wave, I dug a trench in my backyard, we had a visit from a fox, the fireplace had its annual maintenance inspection, a noisy holiday occurred, and—big shoutycaps achievement here—I HAVE FINALLY COMPLETED A REAL MAP OF MY FICTIONAL TOWN, along with a numbered list key for all of the important locations in both present-day and ghost-occupied states. It took a lot of drafting and I kept getting distracted by research into things like street naming conventions, and the history of Illinois, and picking up Proceate and spending time playing with digital pens and pencils.

(I totally don’t need Procreate, but it was fun to draw dopey little sketches of cats and dragons on my iPad as a break from squinting at the map.) ANYWAY. Onward…

I’ve been doing some blog housekeeping, repairing or deleting old, broken links, removing reviews of indie books that aren’t available anywhere anymore, and fixing formatting glitches that happened when I exported from the janky old Wordpress site. And in the course of that work, I’ve noted some commonalities in my writing over the years.

First, the number of blog posts with the word random in the title was a ridiculously large number I am not going to share. Yes, I’ve been blogging a long time (since 2006, if I count LiveJournal, which I do) but proportionally, It’s still an absurd number of “random” observations. I’ve been recording diary-ish entries and musings since LONG before 2006, but LJ was the first effort in the blogging format.)

ANYway. Second, I like lists a lot. Shocker, I know. And third, I cyclically get in the way of my own writing by making things more complicated than they need to be. I will blame the ADHD, as the complications are almost always tied into me finding a New Shiny Thing. Distractions are real. The worst ones are the Shiny Things I don’t even like but can’t ignore simply because they’re there. Those are usually Shiny Things the Online Success Experts insist are important, so there’s an extra heft to them, mentally, that makes it hard to set them aside.

But eventually I do get disgusted with them, or the annoyance of dealing with them outweighs the Shiny Distraction of poking at them to see how they work, and I get back to the reason I made the bog in the first place…

It’s a few days past midsummer, and I’ve been an absentee blogger.

I spent the last two weeks mostly buried in the worldbuilding for the Ghost Town book and its sequel. I had a great Zoom call with my co-author, going over all kinds of details and continuity issues that needed hammering out.

I have a master list of ALL the character names, present, past, and ghostly. I have a list of all locations mentioned. I have sketches of important locations. And maps. THERE ARE MAPS. Not finished ones, but I’m proud of the progress so far. OH! And character descriptions. Etcetera. So much etcetera.

It feels good to be going into the plotting and drafting stage with a solid foundation of who lives where and who does what. It’s very unpantser of me, but with a mystery that involves a treasure hunt, it kinda needed doing.

And I finally remembered to confirm he’s okay with me sharing specifics here, so expect future infodumps about the world of our small-town cozy fantasy/mystery with ghosts. I do love it a whole lot.

I’ll save shares for the next post when I’m not playing catch-up. Maybe it will even get posted in less than a week. Maybe!

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