Jem Spears website is live!

As much as I love writing poetry under my own name, a big genre shift requires a pen name that’s up to the task. You’ll find my upcoming contemporary queer romance under Jem Spears, and today, it’s all more real than it was before, because now that pen name has its very own website!

Click here to go there now!

The first book in this romance trilogy, Starlight and Cinnamon, comes out September 9, which feels both impossibly far away and also way too soon. But final edits are concluding this weekend (by hook or by crook, goddamit), the cover is almost finished, and I’ve got the next two books in the pipeline.

I’m going to be looking for you, dear reader, to help spread the word. If you can buy it, ask your local independent bookstore to get it for you, or buy directly from the links I’ll send once pre-ordering is set up. Whether you can purchase it or not, ask your local library to stock it! Tell your friends about it! Hell, tell your enemies about it, it’ll at least pique their interest and the web traffic won’t hurt.

In the meantime, I’ll be doing an exclusive cover reveal for my newsletter subscribers next month, and in June, I’ll have figured out how to send them a sneak peek at the book. I’m thinking chapter one. And of course once I’m a pro at that, I’ll send chapter two in July, chapter three in August, and then you’ll be ready to read all of it on its September publishing date! If you’re getting jealous and also want these first looks, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

So take a little tour of my new website and start getting excited! You’ll have Starlight and Cinnamon in your hands before you know it.

An Update Ten Years in the Making

When I started on this whole self-publishing thing ten years ago, it was spurred by—as usual—spite.

Spite can get you far. In my case, spite can get me anywhere.

And after spending who knows how much time and money submitting my poetry to “contests,” I finally said Fuck It I’ll Do It Myself. Took my master’s thesis, edited it one million times, started an imprint, got a website, and self-published the collection. Got the bug and published another work the next year. Fast forward eight years to two more published poetry collections and a trio of romance novels on the way, and it was finally time to update my website.

It didn’t look terrible. But it did look amateur. It had been ten years since I launched it, and my grandmother left me a little bit of money and I think she would like for me to use it toward my authoring, so...here it is!

All the content is the same, but now it looks like I’m a professional person who does professional type writer stuff. Go click on things! Check it out!

In your clicking, you’ll find lots of links to my pen name website, jemspears.com, which will be up and running in a month or two. Since I write in so many genres, I needed a separate name and place for what will be the bulk of my books: contemporary queer romance. Totally different vibes require totally different spaces, or people will get confused (It me. I will get confused).

I plan to release more poetry collections, though probably not for a few years. That’s ok. In the meantime, reread what I have out now. Then jump over to my alter ego’s site and read some romance. Follow me on social media. Send me an email. Just reach out, you know. I’ll always have something for you.

My Contemporary Queer Romance Series is Actually, Finally Getting Published!

It’s been a while. It’s been so long that maybe you’ve forgotten I’ve been over here writing away and editing away and surviving away. Maybe you thought I was doing nothing. Which is fair. Sometimes I’m just playing Assassin’s Creed or reading or catching up on shows and movies. But not this time!

I’m very happy to announce that the first book in my queer contemporary romance series, International Love and Misadventure, will be released September 9, 2025, with book two coming out December 9, 2025, and book three on March 11, 2026! And the title for book one is…

Starlight and Cinnamon.

A love-obsessed spy and a therapist with a hero complex fall for each other while working to take down a nefarious Silicon Valley tech lord.

Do you know how long it took me to condense it down to one catchy sentence like that? Longer than it took for me to write the whole damn book. Cover reveal is coming in a month or two, and I’ll share the other titles as we get closer to their pub dates, but it’s all happening!

I’ll also be revamping this website and creating a brand new one for my pen name over the coming months. Rest assured, I will send you a newsletter when that happens so you can check it out.

In some personal news, I started Zepbound in November and it went really well! For two months! Before I had a significant allergic reaction to it and my doctor said omg stop it completely immediately! In better news, I’ve been going to the gym regularly and my arms have, like, definition? To them? And I can do half a pec dance? So things are going well.

This place is a mess and Ohio is a mess and I calculated how much it would cost to move to Norway permanently and unfortunately I need another $400,000 or so to make it work. So you’re stuck with me. At least you’ll soon get to start reading the stories that have been keeping me busy for the past few years.

Finding the Path

It's been really hard to focus the past month (year? years? decade?). So much is undecided, and I've been between projects for most of 2024, waiting for certain things to happen and dealing with people health and cat health. But by New Year's Eve, I had come to a number of decisions, giving me a clear path forward for 2025.

You're hearing it here first, folks: I'll be going the indie route and self-publishing my first romance trilogy this year! The first book will come out in the last quarter of 2025, and the rest will be published in 2026. The date is still soft, since I'm hiring professionals for all the stuff I can't professionally do myself, and their timeline is my timeline. I'm very excited and have a ton of stuff planned, from revamping my website, linking it to my new, pen-name website, getting real author photos, submitting my books for review, etc. I can't wait to share the titles and covers in a few months.

Most exciting is that these books will be available at YOUR local bookstores and libraries! All you have to do is ask those bookstores and libraries to get you a copy! It's like magic!

So this is the main focus of my work right now, getting this first romance trilogy all together. But once I'm mostly finished with the final edits, my time is just large chunks of waiting for other people to finish their parts. And those large chunks of waiting are perfect for...

Starting to write my next romance series! I've hammered out a theme and I think I can get at least eight books out of it, which is wild to me, someone who always wrote but never thought they'd actually finish any novels.

Communication from me may be spotty, as you have probably surmised. I promise I'll keep you updated every time there's something exciting, or something you can help me with. In the meantime, send me good vibes, and maybe a tip via Ko-Fi to keep me well-rewarded with the little treats that get me through the day.

A Little Review, a Few Wishes

A few days ago, my husband was talking about playing board games last New Year’s Eve, and I had no memory of it. He had to remind me that of course I had no memory of it because I was visiting family out of state last year. I hadn’t forgotten that trip, or the many I took the rest of the year, it’s just that time all runs together now without any demarcations.

I visited Boston many times in 2024, Toronto, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and finally Sweden, after years of trying to get there. I finished the final drafts of all the books in my trilogy and published two more poetry books. Years ago, my reading goal would have been over 100 books, but since I hit my goal of “1000 books in 10 years” I cut back, realizing that I could read a lot or I could write a lot but I didn’t have time to do both. So I wrote. That drops my total books read in 2024 to 20. Right now, I’m in the middle of the Lady Sherlock books and they’re all I want to read.

Our household was plagued by illness and injury—so it goes with age, I’ve heard—for both humans and felines. We lost Boone a few weeks ago, his heart failure catching up to him twenty months after his initial diagnosis. Phoebe is in the middle of an eye problem that might need surgery, if her current therapy doesn’t cut it.

A thousand other things happened and I’m too tired to review any of them. Someone online said that it feels like everyone is limping toward the finish line of 2024 and that is unfortunately accurate.

I’d wish for a better 2025 but that kind of thinking hasn’t worked in over a decade. I’ll paint my wishes in broad strokes and maybe I’ll catch their edges: with my trilogy basically finished, I want to get covers and publish them. I have a dozen ideas for what to write next but haven’t started anything substantial, so that’s a big goal. I would love to get to Scotland, preferably in October (I know it’s cold, I like the cold, have you even met me?). Will visit family again for a milestone event as long as they figure out what they want to do for it.

End of list. Just a few things, the important ones, with smaller goals sprinkled in. The past few years has taught me to not dream as big, and I hate that. So let’s add that to the list, too: learn to dream big again.

It's Halloweeeen Week!

“…All Saint’s Day Month!”

I love the fall and I love October and I love Halloween, but despite all the spookiness, the chill and chimney smells, spices and la-la-la’s of the annual Gilmore Girls rewatch, saying “It’s Halloween” will forever remind me of Community. I’m sorry, my favorite holiday, but that’s just the way it is now.

It’s been a busy month and a half. Productive? Oh no, I didn’t say that. Just lots of doctor and vet appointments, a never-ending house maintenance list, and ill cats. I redecorated my bathroom and it’s gone from “spooky” to “unsettling,” which is what I was going for. Our closet got a makeover that should be finished by tonight. I spent a whole day making burritos for the month (that’s a long story). And a hundred other things.

Maybe Sweden broke me. Maybe I went there and spent almost three weeks walking an average of 18,000 steps a day, eating amazing food, being social and spending time with friends, going on adventures and generally loving life, only to come back to the States and its…drama. I’ve never felt more crushed by the gears of capitalism than having an immediate comparison to Scandinavia, and I don’t even have a job!

But at least I got to a good point in one writing-related project: I realized that the RPG campaign I’ve been working on isn’t just a quick one-shot, and isn’t something I can make up as I go along, but is actually a huge beast of a story, and one that deserves my dedicated attention. Meaning I would have to commit to it as though it were another novel. Under certain circumstances, this wouldn’t be a problem, but doing it for fun, instead of working on something that I can sell, just isn’t a good choice right now.

I’ve been brainstorming my next series, another contemporary queer romance, and I think it has the potential to be at least eight books. An ensemble story, and every couple gets their own novel. But as Jacqueline Carey says, “Writing = Butt In Chair,” and I have to get my butt back in my chair. Day-to-day, I’m frustrated that I haven’t been able to find the block of time I need to sit down and really get into it, but when I look up and back at what I’ve done this year, I know I should be proud of what I’ve accomplished. I finished book 3 of the first series, got it all edited and read by a sensitivity reader. I literally published two poetry collections that have been sitting around for almost a decade. I traveled more than any other year, to places that have been on my list for as long as I knew they existed. It’s been a good year! I shouldn’t feel so bad about not jumping right in to a new series.

Believe it or not, I’m traveling again next week. Unsure if I’ll get any new series work done, but I’ll be sure to enjoy myself. Sometimes you just need sea air, even if it is in Maine in October.

Let's Pretend It's Fall

I don’t remember August. I know, it just happened, it was existing a few days ago, but I have little memory of it.

I came home from Scandinavia and crashed. Looking back at what I had planned for the past month, it’s clear that delusion must have struck me while carving out my schedule. Draft Block for the first book in a new contemporary queer romance was supposed to begin two weeks ago. To give you an idea of my current chaotic mental state, I’ve rescheduled it to begin in NOVEMBER. Finishing my next two poetry books is still on the calendar, but now it’s hovering around Spring of next year.

Between now and then, I plan to do a few things. A query push for my finished romance trilogy, maybe devote one day a week to that. The rest of the time (that isn’t taken over by home maintenance and improvements) is what I’m calling “Project Downtime.” New romance series book is the primary project, and when I’m not actively working on it (like when it’s set aside after the first draft, or off being beta-read or edited, etc), my focus will be on a secondary project of my choosing. This could be the homebrew Tales from the Loop campaign I’m working on, or those upcoming poetry books, or any of the several horror or fantasy novel ideas that I haven’t had time to flesh out.

It's a gentler approach than I’m used to, which I suppose I simply have to accept in my old age. Feels right, though. Coinciding with the quieting of the seasons.

In the meantime, you can always read my poems! A Year Without a Season is out now, and it’s my favorite collection of poetry so far. You can find it on Amazon in paperback and ebook. I know it’s not much, but hopefully it’s enough for now. Before you know it, we’ll be celebrating Halloween (some of us are ALREADY celebrating Halloween), then Thanksgiving, and we’re into the holidays and everything gets gummed up anyway. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you, like me, find yourself floating, if that’s what it takes not to flail.

A Year Without A Season

It’s that time again…publication day!

Some said I was mad for scheduling my next book release a day and a half after returning from Europe, but you know what? They were right. This was a terrible idea. I don’t know what I was thinking. Not about jet lag and withdrawals from lack of pastries, that’s for sure.

The good news is that there’s a shiny new book all ready for your reading pleasure. A Year Without A Season is a collection of poems from the most isolating part of the pandemic, when it was just me, cats, and nature, trying to figure stuff out. I’ve got some gems in there. Make sure to check it out!

You can find the paperback version here, and you can get the kindle ebook here. If you have time, I’d love it if you could leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you leave reviews (maybe not, like, Hinge, or Yelp, etc).

If you want a signed copy, reach out to me through any of the social media apps below, or drop me an email via my Contact page.

Happy reading!

A Midsummer Break

Sometimes I disappear from friends and social media and life in general without any warning and with no way to know what I’m doing. But I didn’t want to do that to you this time!

I’m going to be away from all computer-related things for the next month while I track down ancestors and swim in cities’ canals and eat pastries and bask in sun that doesn’t try to kill me for simply existing outside. You might see the odd post on Instagram (my NEXT book is coming out mid-August, so I have to hype it a little before then, I think), but for the most part: disappeared.

You don’t have to be good while I’m gone. Just don’t get caught.

See you in August!

Happy Pub Day to Me!

The Fish, The Twins, The Ram is out TODAY!

Nine years is a long time to get a collection of poetry together. Even my first collection in 2015 only* took six years between my poetry thesis to (an admittedly edited) publication. But it’s ready, finally, and I’m so excited!

What can you expect with these poems? Let me tell ya…

Matriarchal bonds! Family fights! A couple dreams! And some of the saddest poems I’ve ever written. All wrapped up in mystery and astrology and inexplicable connections.

Also, the cover is so pretty. I made it all by me self!

You can order it from Amazon in paperback or ebook here. If you could leave a review at Amazon and/or Goodreads or anywhere else you’d like, I would appreciate it! And if you’d like a signed copy, message me on any of the social media below or go here to shoot me an email, and we’ll work it out!

* “only” lol

"The White Stairs" Rerelease Available Now Because I Learned Canva Real Quick

Like, embarassingly quickly.

I set aside an entire day to learn how to make a book cover in Canva, and two hours after opening the website and signing up, I had ALL FIVE book covers finished for e-books. Fifteen minutes later, I had the paperback cover finished for the re-release of The White Stairs.

But why stop there? I went and assigned ISBNs to FTR and AYWAS and made those paperback covers, too. That took less than thirty minutes to finish.

FF and TBU both require a lot more poems before I can do anything else with them, but here I was with most of a day left and this ridiculously easy website to make pretty things and…I made mini bookmarks for the first three books and brand new business cards for myself.

I know. I KNOW.

So The White Stairs in all its new, recovered glory is available through Amazon right now! Or you could wait a week or two until I have author copies in hand and you can buy them directly from me, and get some little bookmarks for your trouble! Either way, it’s a great way to start this new series of new poetry collections. Everybody loves a matchy-match.

Pools are Open, So It's Summer

June first is summer, I don’t care what anybody says. It’s the first month that schools are let out, it’s when neighbors bring out their plastic pools and sprinklers, it’s when my lawn becomes a swaying, yellow sea of dandelions. It’s summer.

Which means, as usual, I’m already behind.

But! As NOT usual: I’m not behind by much, compared to my revised calendar of about a month ago. Compared to my original calendar of January this year, or January two years ago…well, that’s a different story, and a boring one, so let’s leave it in the past, and take a look at what I’m currently working on now.

Romance Series Update: Books 1 and 2 are being queried, and agents are reading the full manuscripts for both. My brilliant and talented editor gave me notes on Book 3, and I should have beta readers’ notes by June 10th, at which time I’ll start the next round of edits on it. I’ve given myself almost two weeks for revisions, which in theory should be enough time. If it isn’t, no worries, since the three following weeks I’ve booked myself with “Flexible to Finish,” which just means I can use that time to catch up on either of the two projects I’m actively working on right now.

Poetry Collections Update: These four new poetry collections are the second project I’m working on. Let’s use their initials. First up is FTR, which I’ve been trying to publish since just after the first and most recent collection I published NINE YEARS AGO. Damn. The good news is that it didn’t need much editing, and the next step is formatting. Next is AYWAS, my pandemic poems, also ready for formatting. Then FF, full of form poems and including some previously published ones. I need to write more for this one, then edit all of it, then format, etc, and same with the last collection, TBU—all love poems, many of which are unhinged. I gave myself permission to be as wild and violent as I could with these, as long as they’re not cringe. “Unhinged but not cringe” is my motto.

Besides formatting for publishing, I need to get covers for these. I’ll have to hire someone or learn Canva real quick. I want them all to match, and I’ll be re-releasing my first collection, The White Stairs, with a new and matching cover a few weeks before FTR. I expect all this publishing to start mid-Sept, with FTR the first week of October and the rest of them monthly after that. I need that time to do cover work and figure out the damn formatting (as I told my editor recently, I’m in a constant battle with technology, and formatting is like 70% of it). But don’t worry! You’ll be the first to know when they’re available for purchase!

Next Series Update: I have an idea for my next contemporary romance series, already started brainstorming, and have the main characters and loose plot ready to go for its book 1. When I get back from Scandinavia in August, I have a few days of outlining, then I’m jumping right into a Draft Block until mid-September. Draft Block is when I block off six whole weeks to just word-dump a rough draft. It’s like if NaNoWriMo were 50% longer but I have to write 100% more words.

Other Writing Updates: I’ve been outlining a homebrew campaign for Free League’s Tales from the Loop. I love the game mechanics, and the sci-fi aspect is perfect for the story I want to tell. Once I started writing it, I realized it’s going to end up being eight or nine mini-campaigns leading to one long, overarching story, and I need more than one day to write it. In fact, with the science fiction stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a lot longer. I think it’ll be a lot of fun. I’m working on this whenever I have a few spare hours.

Life Updates: Boone was in the hospital for the last blog post, and he’s feeling sort of about the same. He has heart disease and is on a bunch of meds to stave off heart failure, but he was in for a new GI issue that nobody could figure out. Since he’s been home, we updated his meds, but now he refuses to eat wet food at all (even treats, even fish), so I have to mix his crushed meds with a little bit of fish oil and squirt it into his mouth with a syringe. He’s eating dry food though, which is something, though that makes him drink more water than the rest of the cats combined.

And because one actively sick cat isn’t enough, we’ve taken in our extended family’s cat, Phoebe, because she had an eye issue, needed a lot of care, and couldn’t be around other cats. Her problem has turned out to be chronic, though, so she’ll be living with us from now on. We call her Poopsmith due to an incident when she was a kitten that I’m sure you don’t need explained.

Between now and the next update, I SHOULD be finished with Book 3 edits, have two poetry collections basically ready to publish, and have all my poetry covers or at least have hired someone to make them.

I’m so good at being realistic about my projects.

Celebrating Life

I’m going to take a break from writing about writing today. Instead, with my grandmother’s Celebration of Life this weekend, I thought I’d talk a little about her. Because fuck if I can talk about these memories in person, and hopefully this’ll get the emotions out because I have to lead the damn ceremony and I can’t very well do that if I’m crying the whole time.

Most of my memories are amalgamations of the many, many times Mormor and I did things together. I slept over frequently as a child, and I still have dreams about that house. It was tucked back in the woods, small like a cottage, with bright forest creeping in from all sides. And it was always bright, always green, full of birdsong. Deer would sometimes wander into the backyard, and one notable time, she found a cow out there. Everything smelled like old house. We sewed together, and she taught me how to make clothing from patterns. She made the best macaroni and cheese and I have yet to figure out how to replicate it. I feel the secret must be, like, swiss cheese or gruyere or something else an adult would never tell a kid is in their precious mac and cheese.

All the Christmases at the old house blend together, and all the Christmases at the new one. I wasn’t good at cooking but I helped, and I skipped all the dinner-style Swedish food and went right to the spritz butter cookies and pepakakas and mini cupcakes, the tiniest cupcakes you’ve ever seen, with buttercream frosting and questionably edible silver ball sprinkles that could break your tooth.

Every time she came over for a party. Fourth of July. Birthdays. Lobster dinners (that I again wouldn’t eat, and would go straight to the dessert). Every time we went to the beach. Every dance recital when I was a kid, and every school play and musical when I was less of a kid.

I could list a hundred specific memories, ones that don’t get lost in the jumble of dozens of Christmases or lunches or theaters. But I’ll tell you about two, real quick. Maybe two and a half, since it’s related.

When I was about 12, and had a crush on every boy, a certain relative made fun of me for it. Morm, in her infinite wisdom, gently told them that there was nothing wrong with that. That I could love whoever I wanted, and I should, and it was never anything to be ashamed of. She wasn’t talking to me, but she made sure I heard her. I don’t know if that relative felt properly put in their place, but I did. I was given permission to feel what I felt, and even if I still had to mask it from some people, I didn’t have to hide it from myself. Or from her.

More recently, she had done some spring cleaning and found some items she wanted me to have. It wasn’t a pile of knickknacks that she presented to everyone and urged them to take what they wanted. It was just a few things, wall hangings, Swedish stuff, that she had set aside because she wanted me to have them. Most of it made sense. The Scandinavian books and decorations for sure, since I was the only relative interested in that part of the family history (I mean, I translated a book about it, did you know?). But one item…one item was something of a puzzler. A wall hanging: circular like a plate, but made of clay and carved, like a bas relief, painted in a dark teal. The scene was a basement or tavern, stone walls, wooden table, big beer keg. A pirate-looking guy sat on a bench with a lady in his lap, facing him, and another guy stood behind her. All three had steins of beer.

“Morm,” I asked, “what even is this thing?”

There are no universes in which I would have guessed what she was going to say. I could live a million lifetimes and still not have a clue. She said,

“This is my favorite piece of art. I just love it. And I want you to have it.”

“But…what is even happening here? What is it? Where did you get it?”

She cocked her head at me. “They’re having a good time, Jackii!”

That’s all the explanation I got.

I suppose she had already explained it to me years before, when a few days after my wedding, she told me I needed a boyfriend. Thinking she was having a senior moment, I explained that I had just married my boyfriend. “No,” she said. “I know that. I mean you need more boyfriends.”

I could share more memories, but I’m selfish. They’re mine. I have a couple more in poem form, in my upcoming book, The Fish, The Twins, The Ram, which I’m trying really hard to publish this summer. There are so many obligations between now and then. It’s a little overwhelming. But Mormor would believe I can do it. So I will.

Travel, Work, Tattoo, Rinse, Repeat

Three whole months gone by and one of it was spent traveling. Not a bad way to pass the time, though it’s sort of thrown off everything I planned to do in the first half of the year.

After Toronto two weeks ago and visiting family this past week, I really need to get back on some kind of schedule. To do that, I need to finish all the little loose ends and nitpicky things that will distract me otherwise. I wish I could say that I’m just procrastinating finishing my poetry books and editing Book 3. Alas, it is not avoidance, but necessity. Brain wired differently and all.

So I’ve pushed all my work-work out a week to give me time to do things like mend my grandmother’s decades-old cardigan, build the Tallneck Lego set with LEDs, start and finish reading at least 3 books that aren’t authored by me, do all the annual spring housework, figure out the light-up face mask thing I got for my birthday, organize closets, etc.

I’m hoping that I’ll be so motivated, I’ll finish everything early and get to FTR and AYWAS (the two poetry books) before next week. Otherwise, my writerly plans overlap the slightest bit with going back to New England for my grandmother’s memorial.

But my motivation has never been consistent.

I had a wonderful birthday, thank you. I threw sharp weapons and hit things with a club, ate a bunch of cheese, accepted gifts with grace. Got a gift certificate for my next tattoo. Still never entirely sure what age I am at any given moment. But it was a fun week.

Editing of the two poetry books should be done before the next newsletter in May, and maybe I’ll even commission covers for them. First draft of Book 3 should be mostly done by the same time, as well as brainstorming my next romance trilogy, which I already have ideas for. I’m also trying my hand at a homebrew RPG campaign I’ve had in my head for about a year, but haven’t had time to write out.

And in the next week, I’m going to learn how to use Atticus, so, wish me luck!  

Book 2 Is Done!

I had planned for Book 2 to be at this final, polished, finished stage about a year ago. But then 2023 continued being my “Crisis Manager” year, and everything was delayed. The book is undoubtedly better now. It ought to be, I let it stew for months longer than I intended.

I have a chocolate cupcake waiting for me, a nice little reward for completing this manuscript, but I’m waiting on it because I realized I had to make several major changes in Book 1, which I thought was also finished-finished. The books in this series don’t need to be read in any particular order, but they do take place in different years, and I have to go back and fix some details for continuity.

So today and possibly tomorrow, I will be making those changes to Book 1, then eating that cupcake. After that, I’ll prepare my two books of poetry for publication (edits, formatting, hiring someone to make covers that match, etc). Once I’ve gotten as far as I can with them, it will be time to do my first read-through of Book 3’s rough draft. I’ve been querying for Book 2 while editing, and querying for Book 1 never stopped, so that’ll continue.

Just like last month and the month before, I have travel plans smack dab in the middle of all these work tasks. Toronto for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (starring my favorite hobbits (don’t tell Sam or Frodo)) and some amazing vegan food, then back just in time for my parents to visit. So, as usual, my work flow is fractured. But it’s broken up by vacation, so I can’t be too upset.

I also did some brainstorming for the next contemporary romance book/trilogy and I have a good idea of the story for it. Every time I do this, I realize I have to go experience something new (in this case, um, an LGBT strip club? if that exists?), and I end up doing things like karaoke and axe throwing and traveling to New Zealand for a month. If there’s one thing I would change, it would be that the money to do all these things would come from an income related to why I’m doing them: writing books.

Forgive the bare-bones update, Boone is demanding my attention and the fluffy boi has heart failure and I can no longer deny him anything (was I ever able to?), so I’ll catch you in April.

The Writer Goes to Iceland

Ninety minutes of sleep in 36 hours, a five-hour time change, totally different currency, and a language I don’t speak. What could possibly go wrong?

If this were 2023, the answer would be: everything. Everything could, and would, go wrong. Luckily, it’s 2024, I have a brand new chance to make nice with the universe, and the worst that happened was getting slightly cursed by the Icelandic mountain gods for pocketing a few sea-smoothed lava rocks…

The trip happened smack in the middle of Book 2 edits. It couldn’t be helped. Illness, unexpected work, family almost-emergencies, a vet appointment I forgot about. I’ve been pushing things to the next day or week and I’m running behind on these edits. I’m trying to look at the bright side, which is that the story has more time to cure before I really dive into it one more time.

It was also good to take a complete pause on the work. No wi-fi, no laptop, no iPad, and no time to read or write anything anyway, with the action-packed five days we planned. I was always present, living in the moment and appreciating it in a way that would be more difficult if I knew I could be getting work done instead.

Now that I’ve returned to Ohio, (mostly) unpacked, showered, and organized, it’s back to the grindstone. For a few weeks, anyway. I’m still querying Book 1 and have a few dozen pending responses. I should finish Book 2 edits this month, and barring further illness, unexpected work, family almost-emergencies, and vet appointments I forgot about, I hope to start edits on the two poetry books I’ll be publishing this summer. Next month will be more poetry and starting Big Revisions on Book 3.

It's gonna be a long month, a long couple of months, a long first half of the year. But at least I have these Iceland memories to hold me through until the next time I can escape it all.

Oh, I Have No Time? Here, Publish Two More Books.

I love starting things.

ADHD? Bipolar disorder? Aries? Who can say! At least this time I can pinpoint it to the exact moment when I decided, “Yes I see. I’m going to publish two books this year.”

I attended the RWA conference for indie authors a few weeks ago, and since it inspired me to release two books into the wild in 2024 (as well as working on the three books I’m writing/editing/querying/generally trying to publish traditionally), I suppose the cost was worth it.

Near the end of the first day, after hours and hours of receiving solid, specific information on how to self-pub, I felt an impending dread. “Oh no,” I mumbled. “Oh. Not good. This is all…doable…like, I can do all of this. I don’t have an excuse anymore as to why it’s too hard for me to accomplish. I’m going to publish a book of poems that’s been on my mind for the last year, aren’t I?”

Nope! I’m not! I looked at my WIP folder, moseyed down to Poetry, and discovered that I have TWO collections pretty much ready to go! *upside-down smiley face emoji*

I have no dates set for any of this. I leave for Iceland in a few weeks, and a few weeks after that I’m in Toronto to see my favorite hobbits in one of my favorite plays, and then my parents are visiting, and then I’m officiating my grandmother’s memorial a few weeks after that. Would love to sneak off to San Francisco for Pride, but either way, I’ll be in Sweden later in the summer, and this all sounds like bragging, doesn’t it? I apologize. My point was that all these plans force me to schedule things and then—in a shockingly un-Jackii twist—do them.

So. Two poetry books this year. Keep querying book 1 of my series, edit book 2, get to a polished draft of book 3. Visit all the places. Finish writing up my RPG homebrew. Brainstorm a bunch more contemporary romance stories. If nothing else, I’ll be busy.

Oh yes, and I’ll be starting a newsletter soon because all of that just isn’t enough, you know? Watch this space, and sign up when you can!

2023 in Review

Well. At least that’s over.

I thought for a bit about leaving my review at that. Succinct. Relatable. Funny. But I like sharing with you all, and if I don’t voice at least some of the milestones that occurred in the last twelve months, it will feel like 2023 won, you know? Like it made itself so goddamn awful that no one speaks of it anymore. I’ll skip the world events (others have said more and said it better than I ever could) and focus on the personal stuff.

Let’s start with writing and career. I took a lot of classes and seminars, and got my work critiqued by a couple of my favorite authors. I did a lot of research in New Zealand. I finished the first sort-of decent draft of book two (SC), and started writing book three (PR) in November, just under the wire. Book one (CQ) spent the year being queried to agents, and it was certainly a learning process. I started out slow, up to 10 queries out at a time, since it was my first time doing it and if it wasn’t working, I needed to be able to use the feedback to refine my pitch to others. This approach became invaluable once I realized that everyone asks for the first ten pages, but only the first half of my book is epistolary, while the second half is regular-type prose with paragraphs and whatnot. I had to choose between sending sample pages that represented only half of the book’s style, or deliberately not giving agents what they specifically asked for. It was a tough call. I’m still figuring out if it will work.

Next was my home. Everything that could be maintained, fixed, replaced, and upgraded this year was. Part of the reason for this was that our hot water heater CAUGHT FIRE while spouse was laid up. So we replaced the rest of the major appliances and had all the different systems examined and fixed. Including installing a radon mitigation system and putting on a whole damn new roof.

I was able to travel a little bit, including the nerd cruise in March that we didn’t want to go on but had to unless we wanted to eat the $5000 we paid for it in December of 2019 lmao. New Zealand in May, as I mentioned above, and that was absolutely fantastic. Besides all the research for book one, I got to go to Hobbiton and Taupo, and visit my friends in Auckland. I would call it the trip of a lifetime but I want to do similar things again and again. I spent the holidays back home, a few weeks at the end of the year, which leads into another theme of 2023, which was…

Death. My grandmother, the matriarch of the family, died in November. One month before I was set to fly out to visit. It was unexpected. She had moved into a new living facility literally the day before. Her loss is something I’m still dealing with, and it capped the year after another death, of a long-time family friend, in August; as well as one of my in-laws’ cats, and my oldest and dearest cat, Tempest. It was a fucking awful year for deaths, y’all.

It was a fucking awful year for health issues, too! I started out New Year’s 2023 recovering from a surgery just a few days before, and at midnight my spouse woke me up and I discovered I had a raging throat infection from intubation. Spouse had ankle surgery in April and spent a month in bed with his foot up, so for about five weeks, I was me, him, personal chef, 24/7 nurse, emergency manager (see “house stuff” above), and sole household manager. My in-law was hospitalized for their own infection in July, and was hospitalized again the day before I left to visit family for three weeks, because they were in a terrible car accident. One of my surviving cats was diagnosed with heart failure (he’s still kicking and pretty healthy, considering, as I’m writing this), and yet another cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism.

And about fifty other lesser crises that, nonetheless, were dealt with while all this other crap was going on.

So 2023 wasn’t ideal. My hope is that 2024 is better. I started it in New England, which was nice, though I didn’t get much work done. But I had about ten years of in-person, family stuff to go through, so I’m not criticizing myself much. My Chinese horoscope for this year doesn’t include the words “crisis manager,” and says health challenges should be minimal, and that’s such a turnaround, I might get whiplash.

In the meantime, I’ll get back to work.

1 Likes

It’s Been a While, NaNo

A dozen years ago, I attempted my first NaNoWriMo. For those unfamiliar, that’s National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to start writing a novel and get 50,000 words finished by December 1. That’s novel length, so theoretically, you will have written a whole damn novel in one month. It’s an ambitious goal, even for people that write novels regularly. I “won” it, back then, finishing at just over 50,000 words, but nowhere near done with the story.

I wasn’t happy with what I’d written. It was a story I’d had in my head for years, and the execution just didn’t match my expectations. Also, I was working a full-time job, and finding those several hours to write, in addition to all the house chores, self care, cat stuff, family things, making food and finding time to eat it, etc, was all too overwhelming. It was a process that was stressful in a way that made sure I didn’t make good art.

I know other writers work like that, getting up before their family is awake or staying up late, rooting out moments to write, and that’s how they get it done. But I can’t work like that. I think it’s my neuro-spicy brain. If I have ten minutes, I can’t write. I can’t get into the right headspace to put coherent words on a page that relate to the many other pages of the same story that I’ve already written. Give me a block of four uninterrupted house, though, and hooo boy. I’ll get that shit done.

I’ve been trying to start writing book 3 of my trilogy all year but, as you may know, I’ve been beset by chaos, crises, and calamities since literally midnight on New Year’s Eve. I got in a few pages here and there, and lots of notes. Traveling to New Zealand gave me time to make notes. But here I was on October 30 with a year full of trials and no book 3 and I thought: fuck it. Everything can take a break next month. I’m writing a goddamn first draft.

It's been phenomenal. All those pages of notes I took? Lifesavers. I think the outline was always there. I just needed to sit down and tease it out, and it took an hour at most. It’s day 6 and I’m something like 5,000 words ahead of schedule.

The major difference this time is, of course, I don’t have a day job. Sucks for my bank account. Does wonders for that “huge blocks of time” that’s necessary for me to be able to create. This will be my third novel that I’ll try to sell, and my fourth completed novel. I have so many abandoned ones they could populate a haunted orphanage.

I guess the lesson here is that sometimes you have to say “fuck it” and abandon your cat duties to your spouse while you scavenge for pizza crusts because you’re on a deadline and don’t have time to cook for yourself.

At Least OFMD Returns This Week...

Hey y’all, just a quick update here. Mabon has come and gone, marking the technical arrival of fall even if the weather doesn’t cooperate. I’m built to live in a chilly clime, a perpetual autumn, and if I were rich, I would own multiple properties across the planet so I could always live in this season. But I’m not, so I’m stuck in swampy Ohio.

Biggest news is that we’re fostering a cat and it’s taking up a lot of my time. She was in a situation rife with neglect, bullied by another cat in that house, unspayed, unvaccinated, generally uncared for. She’s thriving in our house, loves the birds and sunlight and laser pointer. What she doesn’t love is our other cats. I’ll keep her here if we can’t find her home, but I don’t think she’d be happy. Since she’s deathly allergic to vaccines (found that out when she was surrendered and the vet spayed her and gave her the first round of vaccines), she has to be in a home where neither she nor any other animals go outside. She just can’t be put at risk of contracting any of those illnesses. We’re just getting to know her, but she’s a total sweetheart and a bit of a weirdo, very affectionate and talkative, making biscuits everywhere, even when she’s just standing around. If you’re nearby and this sounds like the perfect cat for you, email me and tell me so!

There have been other crises to manage since the last update, but I won’t go into those. Rest assured my writing is still set aside to deal with everything, as usual, thank you 2023. And my tarot spread for this month says it won’t improve. Generally, I would sit around stewing in anxiety about everything, but luckily, my spouse and I started an in-person RPG gaming night, so there is some social stuff happening, and we joined the local axe throwing league, which is a leaving-the-house sort of social thing that apparently is necessary? for my mental health? Grocery shopping as my primary out-of-house experience just wasn’t enough anymore.

I can’t predict what this month will look like in any capacity, except I’m willing to abandon everything to watch new Our Flag Means Death and Loki, and when I have to wait for new episodes, I'll fill all my waking hours with Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. Ooo, maybe I should consider writing some Basim fanfic. If I have time, of course.