Hi everyone!

First of all, I apologize for my lack of consistent posting in the past few months. I knew that starting grad school would keep me busy, but with work and a new grad assistant position I’m also taking on along with karate and trying to have a social life, I find myself with precious little time to just sit down and write a life update–or just write in general. But in brief, here’s what’s going on for me right now.

As when you last heard from me, I’m still working on my WIP and the second book in the “Camp Ferguson” series, Jack Ferguson Strikes Back. I’ve been writing on and off but made some good progress lately–I’m up to the middle of Chapter 12 out of my 17 projected chapters, so that’s decent I think! For a couple of weeks recently I actually successfully committed myself to writing 500 words a day, every day–and then promptly fell off the wagon when more school work piled on. I guess that’s about as good an excuse as any, but still it’s an excuse and I know it. 500 words is really not that much to commit to on a daily basis, and seriously I would recommend trying to do that to every single writer I know. It feels SO much better when you access your story and characters every day without a ton of pressure to write a lot in one go. I felt like I was really submerged in the world of my story consistently and was able to pick up and write from where I left off much more easily than usual. So I’ve promised myself that after next week–when my school work hopefully calms down a bit again–I’ll get back to it.

In addition, I’ve been learning A LOT from my grad school program at Rosemont College, and I can say with certainty that going back to school to study creative writing was the right choice for me. Already after six weeks of classes I feel like I’ve learned more about writing than I have in the past six years. And shameless plug, I would HIGHLY recommend Rosemont to anyone who wants to write. The faculty are amazing here and there’s so many great opportunities. Anyway, my current two classes are Rhetoric and Composition, a class on how to teach writing classes (I know, so meta), and Novel Craft, on–well–crafting novels. It’s the basic class that comes before novel workshop courses and provides a lot of groundwork in terms of creating setting, fleshing out characters, and giving you a sense of what makes good writing. I can tell you without any hesitation that RhetComp has made me really excited about the possibility of teaching writing someday–add that to the list of potential future careers with editor and literary agent. And of course Novel Craft has really opened my eyes to things about making good stories that I had never really thought about.

With that said, I’m somewhat uncomfortable now looking back on the two books I’ve already published. Given everything I’ve learned and will continue to learn, I know that despite my pride for those stories as a whole, the writing is probably not the best. In fact, it could be way, WAY better than it is right now. I’ve got more people reading my books now and I’m feeling extremely self-conscious because of things I’ve come to recognize as bad writing being present in my books, and the idea of not putting my absolute best work forward really kills me (I’m a perfectionist, news flash). That said, I am self-published, which in this case is a very good thing. It would be easy for me to revise my old books and simply upload new editions onto Amazon, and that’s something that once the current semester is over, I may actually look into doing. Like I said, I wouldn’t change anything really significant within the stories, but in terms of things like character description I know I could do MUCH better with what I know now. So why not do something about it?

I also mentioned that I’m a grad assistant now too–helping the English department here with some faculty projects and whatnot. It’s been a really valuable look into the world of teaching so far and I’m hoping to continue doing it!

Okay, last thing, I promise: after a lot of existential wrestling and trying to come up with new story ideas, I decided that the novel I’m going to work on perfecting as my thesis while I’m at Rosemont is none other than The Showstopper Returns!–the long-awaited sequel to my first book, The Showstopper! While I’m still not sure how I feel about doing a sequel in this program, where no one else will know where my characters came from or the events of the previous story that inform this one, it’s perfect in a lot of ways. One of the primary reasons I was uncomfortable with starting this sequel was due to the various research and sensitivity issues in the subject matter–challenges which I think my participating in this MFA program has uniquely positioned me to overcome in a friendly academic environment. Plus, it’s an interesting exercise to create a sequel that doesn’t depend as much on its source material and can stand on its own, so I’m going to try to create a book that won’t inspire a ton of questions about what happened before and that first-time readers can get right into without even needing to read the first book. I’m at home with those characters and I’ve been dying to dive back into the world of The Showstopper! for a long time–so I’m going for it!

Okay, that’s enough from me for now. I’m sure you have your own lives to get back to. But as always, thanks for reading, and I hope this post finds every one of you well in your own personal and writing lives. You’re all awesome, and don’t ever forget it!