Tag Archives: Sable Quill Creations

December

Now that NaNoWriMo has come and gone (which I finished on Monday with 50,888 words), it is time for more pressing matters…perhaps.

I spent most of the day curled up under an electric blanket and a purring Anubis cat because Colorado’s weather decided to drop 40 degrees and bring 7 inches of snow to the Front Range. Factor in a spiffy new bout of the common cold and pure exhaustion, I was happy for a day in a nice warm bed.

About an hour ago, I managed to pull myself away from blanket solace in an effort to clean up the office/living room as I continue on the mass purge of household contents. A purging that I foolishly started during November. So far, I’ve made a decent chunk of change for 30+ books and 15 music CDs. I found a home for around 30 YA books and will be helping make the holidays happier for a 12 year old girl. I’m also sending a lot of bead working items and fabric to her. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve recycled an unbelievable of paper and put a rather embarrassing amount of stuff in the local landfill.

My old office is now mostly cleared out thanks to purging – I still have two disassembled beds and a desk in there that need to be moved. Unfortunately, the rooms for the beds are still “congested” and I need help moving the desk once the beds are gone. Tomorrow begins work on the scariest room in the house – the storage room. I haven’t been able to set foot in there since September 2008 or so…I think. Most of the content are actually boxes of fabric and the intent to donate a lot of the fabric and sell the rest is the motivation for starting that room this week. Part of my brain thinks I should do the easier rooms first and forget about donate fabric but that would be the easy way out, a way to procrastinate. This procrastination is why I haven’t really been in that room for years. No more procrastination.

I was suppose to go somewhere tomorrow evening but may end up opting out. I really do not feel well. I have to keep stopping the cleaning process every 5-10 minutes because I feel nauseated and dizzy. How I am getting anything done is a mystery to me. Being put into a social situation for several hours is highly unappealing. I might feel differently tomorrow but, for right now, I am thinking there is no way in hell I will survive social interaction.

I went to shovel snow from my walk this afternoon. Much to my surprise and happiness, someone was kind enough to shovel it for me. No idea as to who did such a wonderful thing for me but I am most grateful. I loathe shoveling snow so much so that I let the sun do most of the work as I live in a south facing house.

I finished the edits to The Soul of Winter on Wednesday while at the final NaNoWriMo write-in. I plan to start formatting it and get it ready for publishing this coming week. While most of my week involves household purging, I’ve set aside a day for work on my books and apply some more advertising avenues for my editing business.

My goals for December are as follows:
- Get all the content written during NaNoWriMo organized and placed in their perspective work files
- Get the whole house purged and reorganized
- Get a few more editing clients
- Get The Soul of Winter ready to publish in January
- Do more work on Reaper’s Moon, A Hundred Flames and Midnight Red.
- Read the remaining 33 books to get to the yearly goal of 500 books read.


Release Day and Birthday!

Today is the official release day for The Heart of Autumn. Super excited about it because it is has been a long time coming. Poetry doesn’t typically get published all that often by larger publishing houses and self-publishing use to have really bad rap. Nowadays it can be far more lucrative to self-publish so here I am with my first full-length chapbook. Publishing in magazines, newspapers and eZines were fantastic goals but they don’t quite compare to the sheer awesomeness that is the book.

The Heart of Autumn Paperbacks

To make the day more fantastic or more odd – can’t decide which – it is my 30th birthday. Is this where I pictured myself to be at 30? Not so much. Truthfully, I had hoped to have the book sooner and I figured I’d be in a different place socially & personally. Still, I’m shocked to be 30. Where does the time go? There are times where I feel older and then there are those plethora of moments where I think I’m 16-17 although I shudder in horror at my years as a teenager. Those growing pains were harsh as one will discover in the poetry books, The Tears of Spring and The Breath of Summer, coming out in 2012.

I find myself pondering my goals for this next year of life. Goals are always a wonderful thing even if sticking to them is an entirely different situation. I’m confident I can stick to the goals I have so far:

  • Publish The Soul of Winter, The Tears of Spring, and The Breath of Summer
  • Finish and publish Reaper’s Moon, possibly submit it to some publishing houses first
  • Finish and publish Twisted Fortunes
  • Finish and publish Midnight Red
  • Put together another chapbook of more current works
  • Continue to grow my editing business
  • Continue on the ever rocky path to my weight loss goal
  • Downsize the contents of my home

For gifts this year, I actually got some gift gifts from an unexpected place, Devin O’Branagan. Over the past 9-10 months, Devin has become a close friend but still, wasn’t expecting gifts from anyone really. She gave me a copy of Pretty Souls by Julie Particka and a statue of the Goddess Iemanjá that came all the way from Brazil. This year’s other gifts were funds for 2 dental surgeries from my mom and I bought myself a whole heap of books from the three local Borders stores. So sad that Borders has met its demise but I am ecstatic for cheap books. Still I managed to spend way more than I should have. I bought at least 60 books so that should get me through 3 months of reading. Finally publishing a chapbook is a big gift too.

Dental surgery last Thursday and lingering pain aside, it is has been a pretty nice birthday.


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