I have been on a short hiatus (sort of). I am not at home. I had an ordeal that took me away from all my work on @tkwrtrilogy3and@thesecretofthehouseofbourbonbook for some time. I am just now returning to work, as it were. One day, I will tell you what happened when I am ready. For now, I am still putting the pieces of my life back in order and slowly returning to my beloved work. There will be more updates on @tkwrtnewsfeedand@newsfromthehouseofbourbon.
1) A new excerpt will be posted at midnight from @tkwrtrilogy3.
2) The article “Becoming Oropher” will be posted on WordPress in order to prepare everyone for the upcoming story told by Oropher in Part II of “Book I: The Epic of Eryn Galen”.
I won’t go into all the annoying fights I went through with 2 internet companies to get here. I was knocked offline for over a month because one company was too expensive and lousy and the other one was affordable but the equipment is extraordinarily cheap and flimsy. On the upside of the latter, I now have 5G. Aside from now working on two trilogies (the other being @thesecretofthehouseofbourbonbook), we are finally back on track with TKWRT after a death in the family and an ongoing family dispute.
So, until Midnight: Have a Wonderful Day.
Good to be back after several months of “you really don’t want to know”.
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
You’ve probably noticed that over the past month and a half, posts have been really slow. Fear not! I’m coming back this year with more content on publishing tips, writing advice, book reviews, and more of my rambling thoughts. #blog #WritingCommunity
Dear followers of my blog:
You’ve probably noticed that over the past month and a half, posts have been really slow. Fear not! I’m coming back this year with more content on publishing tips, writing advice, book reviews, and more of my rambling thoughts. With my wedding coming up in the next few weeks and my recent positive covid test, you can assume that things have been more than a little…
Coming end of this month: it’s our newest Horror Babies Cuddlbudeezrelease: Baby Crypty!!!
Baby Crypty will come in 2 versions: -standard blue version for general audiences -purple “hooded” version exclusively available to IBTrav Patreon members
Stay TOONed for official release date announcement!
So I tried really hard to get a fic done today; it’s another installment in my Sawdust of Words series, based on an idea I had like the first week I joined Tumblr, and it’s actually going well… but I’m only about 2/3 through, and the last third is the difficult part where the two walnuts need to have an actual conversation.
Unfortunately it’s now after 10pm so I’m also too tired to post something else. I was too ambitious and hoisted myself on my own petard (which by the way means I dropped a grenade at my own feet I’m serious look it up).
So! There will be fic updates in the near future, I promise. (How soon, I can’t say—I’m currently working 2 jobs up to 6 days per week so I’m frequently just too tired to words.) I’m also sharing below the first page of this fic, which takes place 48 hours after “Absence of Words” (Tuesday evening after the Apocalypse) and opens on one demon being completely heart-eyes-smitten over the local angel.
(If I get the chance I’ll reblog this with the typed up text of the page, but at the moment… )
Well, I have the 2/3 written up and now just need to figure out the Serious Conversation. Things got uhhhhh sort of increasingly traumatic with every draft, so that was fun.
Anyway, find below the extended version of this scene, as it will more likely appear in the final version on AO3. Warning: almost insufferable softness to follow.
Tuesday evening, after the Apocalypse
They had been talking for almost 48 hours straight.
Talking. Laughing. Listening to music. Drinking wine. Occasionally kissing.
Crowley had never felt so… “happy” didn’t even begin to describe it. He felt as though some terrible weight he’d carried for thousands of years was just… gone. A knot inside him undone, turned to smoke and dissipating on the wind.
He was free. Not from Heaven or Hell or some Great Plan.
The part of him that always held him back was gone. Crowley was free from himself.
He lounged across the sofa tucked in the east corner, watching his angel move about the shop. It was growing dark, but the last few beams of light caught his platinum curls, dying them ever so slightly golden. Picked out a flush of pink in his cheeks that had been all but absent for the last decade.
He was so goddamn beautiful.
A couple had come in to browse. Crowley had suggested just putting up the CLOSED sign, but Aziraphale insisted that “wouldn’t be very sporting.” So now he followed the couple around, helpful, polite, but firmly preventing them from so much as touching a single book.
When his eyes fell on Crowley, watching from the corner, Aziraphale’s face broke into a warm smile, like sun after a rainstorm, like fire on a cold day. Like coming home.
So fucking beautiful.
My perfect Angel, Crowley thought, watching as Aziraphale turned again to herd the customers as far as possible from anything of interest. Behind his glasses, the demon’s eyes never blinked, never moved from the object of his affection.
One of the customers pointed at something, and Aziraphale turned towards it, shoulders giving that little wiggle of excitement they did whenever he saw one of his favorite things. Crowley couldn’t get enough of it. The smile, the wiggle, the gleam in his eye. What he wouldn’t give to see Aziraphale so happy every day.
And he could. That was the whole damn point of being free, wasn’t it? No one to tell him off, no reports to write, no havoc to plan, no high-ranking demons to send him on secret missions… nothing stopping him from giving every moment of his attention to the being that mattered most to him, from giving that angel everything he wanted.
He longed to say that out loud. Not only that, a thousand things, millennia of emotions and confessions locked inside, the words straining against his chest, yearning to escape.
But that was forbidden to the demon. Couldn’t say it. Couldn’t write it. Couldn’t express his feelings in any way, not if he meant it.
And Aziraphale… accepted that. Understood. And loved him all the same. It was enough to make his heart ache as it rattled in his chest.
Finally, Aziraphale escorted the couple outside, having been thoroughly rude to them while still providing exceptional customer service. Crowley heard the door click shut, the sound of footsteps across the shop floor, and then Aziraphale rounded the corner into the little office, blessing Crowley with another smile.
Beautiful.
“So. Finally got rid of the nosy bastards?” Crowley asked, swinging his feet back to the floor to clear the space beside him. “Never seen a more unsavory pair of characters.”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear. They were perfectly charming, apart from their interest in my Jane Austen sets.” He hesitated for only a heartbeat before sitting on the sofa, hands folded in his lap, eyes downcast. Crowley tugged his glasses down so he could better watch the flush spreading across the angel’s cheeks.
“See? I knew it. Might have been planning to rob the place, or worse, buy something.”
“They hardly seemed the type, really, though you can’t be too careful. Though I confess to getting a bit impatient towards the end, as I wished to get back to… more important tasks.” As he said the last part, his eyes flicked briefly towards Crowley, bashful and demure, and his shoulders gave a little wiggle.
“Oh.Oh.Well,” fighting back an even bigger grin. “Hope you didn’t have to do anything too nasty to dissuade them.”
So I tried really hard to get a fic done today; it’s another installment in my Sawdust of Words series, based on an idea I had like the first week I joined Tumblr, and it’s actually going well… but I’m only about 2/3 through, and the last third is the difficult part where the two walnuts need to have an actual conversation.
Unfortunately it’s now after 10pm so I’m also too tired to post something else. I was too ambitious and hoisted myself on my own petard (which by the way means I dropped a grenade at my own feet I’m serious look it up).
So! There will be fic updates in the near future, I promise. (How soon, I can’t say—I’m currently working 2 jobs up to 6 days per week so I’m frequently just too tired to words.) I’m also sharing below the first page of this fic, which takes place 48 hours after “Absence of Words” (Tuesday evening after the Apocalypse) and opens on one demon being completely heart-eyes-smitten over the local angel.
(If I get the chance I’ll reblog this with the typed up text of the page, but at the moment… )
