first, my apologies to jessica w and anyone else who struggles to read these when i don’t capitalize anything. that’s what happens when i write them on my phone and i can’t prioritize fixing it because if i try to, i will never send a single email again. ❤️

my brain loves a shiny new project. i suspect most brains do, but it might be largely a neurodivergent brain thing. (i have never sought a diagnosis, but peer review suggests quite strongly that i have adhd.)

in may i completed a fourth draft of mmmbook (as an aside, i cannot believe i called it mmmbop book for nearly a year before portmanteau-ing it), the second whole-book revision for my agent (i did one big revision before sending it to her). in theory, this one was less in-depth than the prior one, but in practice my brain can’t see much difference. both involved changing a huge plot point to be, well, an actual plot, and then again to be a better plot.

it’s been very upsetting to learn that i don’t know what a plot is. that the things i value in a book are not enough, that my writing skills aren’t what i thought they were. i had some very dark nights of the soul during the previous revision, but the more recent one at least felt like something i was capable of—we’ll see what kate thinks. my hope is that i will only need to do some light line edits before this book can go on sub.

trying to sell a book is a terrible thing.

between edit rounds, i started a new book. my working title (which is absolutely not the real title!) is tinder is the storm (or tits). yes i do amuse myself. i plotted this book out at a level i never have before and possibly never will again. i built it from the center out and i didn’t worry about the love story working, only about the plot. i know i can write interiority and feelings—it’s all instinct for me. but can i write a solid plot?

(as an aside, i read a lot of historical romance while plotting tits. contemporary doesn’t tend to be quite as madcap—i’ve yet to read a contemporary where a kidnapping is interrupted by pirates, for example, though for all i know it exists—and i wanted to see if i could pull it off.)

i wrote about 10,000 words before going back into mmmbook (which also has a real title, and i love it and i want to tell you what it is but i’m too superstitious to put it here) and when those revisions were done again, it was time for 1000 words of summer.

i finished that challenge at about 25,500 words and immediately took a few days off, because i am not built for writing every single day and i was tired. i spent a little time reworking the outline for a historical novel i’d been planning to work on before mmmbook took over my brain. i spent a lot more time sitting on my porch listening to the birds, reading, and smoking the devil’s lettuce. my plan was to do nothing and i almost succeeded.

well. guess what happened (again). i got a flash of inspiration for a vague idea i’d jotted down months ago, and i just…started writing it. on my phone, no outline, just writing. i have an idea of where it’s going, but no road map.

it’s not like this is the first book i’ve just randomly started writing when i meant to do something else. it’s more like the eighth (i didn’t count; this is a wild guess). i’ve even finished a few of the others! but not all of them. my detour from last year, the mfa novel, is still waiting for me to come back to it. so is my time travel novella, also from last year. and my family saga from 2023. and the rocky horror book. these partially abandoned projects are all sitting at somewhere between 4,000 and 40,000 words. why not add in a celebrity comeback story?

you know, i think that peer review might be accurate.

i both thrive and flounder in chaos. right now i think i’m floundering a little bit. maybe a lot. i know what i should do (pick something and stick with it, preferably the historical) but i doubt i will do that.

do you write? how many projects do you work on at a time? comments are open.