Well, my vacation is all over and I had a blast. I was up in northern Wisconsin for two weeks with coming home in time to do an author event at the local mall. I got a lot done, but time to change gears and focus on commissions for a week or three.

I haven't done a “long” vacation in a long time and it was strange. However, with EDM going into school properly (first grade starts in a few weeks and they are seven next week), we can't do the 4-day weekends throughout the year as much. Not to mention, with the drive time, we really need to stay for a number of days to settle in and explore instead of drive up/stay for a few meals/drive home which has been our pattern previously.

It was also the longest either of the boys had been away from home. It was going pretty good up until day ten or so when we started getting a lot of meltdowns. That was one of the signs it was time to head home.

While on vacation, I got a number of things done. As usual, most of them were writing related but not all writing.

I caught up on edits from the writing group on Flight of the Scions. Overall, I think it's a pretty solid piece even though it is older than Sand and Blood, so I can see some places where I've improved over time. Since I've been working on this novel for over a decade, I don't think I'm capable of seeing which flaws are out there. I'm still looking for beta readers for this (it's gone through the group twice now). Patrons can read the entire thing as part of their subscription. Beta readers will get a free year as a patron in exchange.

I managed to write and rewrite five chapters of Second-Hand Dresses, my Regency-inspired romance set in the same world as the rest of my work. I'm pretty happy with the results, though I have a bit of backfilling once I finish the novel. Everyone will see those over time, it is being shown as a weekly chapter with updates on my website (but probably not Wattpad).

I also wrote an autocorrect plugin for Atom, my current writing platform. This handles things like “teh” being turned into “the” as I type along with double-capital words. Something minor, but it slows me down. Eventually, this will tie into Author Intrusion so it can handle the accented names (such as “Rute” being expanded into “Rutejìmo” and “Jimo” being expanded into “Jìmo”). I'll also eventually use Atom's snippets to handle a list of characters in the novel, which would also be fun once I get there.

At the author signing on Saturday, I had a little snafu with my Sand and Blood books being in a different city but it was resolved pretty quickly. I sold a few things, got to talk with 15-20 other authors, and generally had fun networking and chatting for six hours.

I was reminded that I had to follow up with a few things related to ICON this year, mainly trying to get into readings and join a panel or two. We'll see if I did. At least I remembered to get the email in for the Barnes and Noble signing on the Thursday before. Like last year, I have a table so the rest of the Broken Typewriter Press authors and I will be there in addition to any panels we may be on.

In a fit of being overly complicated, I also redid the mailing list for Broken Typewriter Press with the intent of also doing one for Dusty Typewriter Press. I also shut down my forum website because no one was visiting and I'm going to switch that to an announcements-only mailing list. If you want, you can subscribe the BTP one on the bottom of the pages for that website.

Now that all that excitement is passed, I need to focus on commissions and obligations for the next few weeks. I originally said I was going to stop, but two factors came up: three people asked me to write four commissions in the same few weeks; I want to save up to get Flight of the Scions and Second-Hand Dresses properly edited and out the door.

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