The holidays always seem to be a crazy time of year. Shopping to be done, family to spend time with or catch up with, Christmas cards to send out, decorating and tree hunting....in other words, a bit chaotic. And because of this chaos, it's so hard to remain focused on what needs to be done.
So, in some ways, I blame the chaos for not having accomplished more in the past few weeks. But, if I'm really honest with myself, I feel as though I'm floundering just a bit. I'm on the brink of wrapping up
The L & L Mysteries with the final book, The Butterfly Connection. And even though I'm excited to finally have this series done, I'm a little saddened by it too. After all, L & L is the first series I've ever published and it has a very special place in my heart. But, I also recognize that I'm ready to move on to bigger, better, and more challenging writing projects, two of which I've already begun.
One of these projects is a collaborative effort with my Muse (aka, hubby). It's a sci-fi/adventure series called Galactic Dynasty. I'm really looking forward to putting more of my focus on it and hopefully having the first book published sometime in 2013 (no specifics yet on that and the book doesn't have a working title yet).
The other project is called The Soul of Arial. If you've been following me on Facebook or Twitter, you'll know that I've been working with this story over the last week or so and am making really good progress with it. It falls in the fantasy/paranormal realm (more fantasy than paranormal) and I'm absolutely in love with my two main characters, Arial and Rayner. This is geared towards adult readers, just like Galactic Dynasty is, but could be read by mature teens as well. I'm hoping to have Arial finished in the next month or two and then published, but we'll see how that goes.
With all that said, I do have some exciting news to share. I finally got my bookcases delivered (2 months after ordering them) and I have some lovely pics to share with you!!
Here's how they were delivered before the shelves were put into place:
Here they are with the shelves:
And now, here they are with books on the shelves:
The bookcase on the left holds all of my adult and classic novels (mystery, thriller, romance - historical and contemporary, paranormal, sci-fi, and high fantasy);
The bookcase in the middle holds my young adult collection (contemporary, mystery, and paranormal);
And the bookcase on the right (the top two shelves anyway) are my TBR books.
The cases are made with pine wood and were stained to be as close a match as possible to my writing desk. And I've got a pic to show what my writing area looks like, since I don't think I've shared that before.
So, that's what I've been up to for the last few days. The bookcases arrived on Wednesday and it took me a couple of days to gather up all the books and put them on the shelves. Then, of course, I had to organize everything! Yeah, I had way too much fun with this project! And, of course, that was just another thing that added to the normal chaos of the holidays, which in turn distracted me enough to not work on things I should have been working on these last few days. Sigh.
Oh well, life goes on and I'm very happy to finally have bookcases to show off my books. And, now that I've got everything arranged the way I want it, I can shift my focus back to what I should be working on...finishing up The Butterfly Connection and writing more on the two new projects.
And I guess that wraps things up for this post. I'll try to post again soon with some updates on how these writing projects are going. And, if you just want to see how my word count progress is going on Arial and Galactic Dynasty, I've got word count meters located on the
Stories in Progress page (they are the first two stories listed...the rest of the stories are more ideas at the moment). I do try to update the word count meters after each day that I write on them, so feel free to check back periodically to see how those are coming along.
Happy Friday to everyone and I hope you have an enjoyable weekend!!
