How It Started vs. How It’s Going

A glimpse of my writing desk: some Canadian pride, and the relaxed mermaid I aspire to be, lol.

For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a project to properly categorize and tag all my old blog posts. This was quite involved, for various and sundry reasons.

I originally started blogging on a different platform altogether, Blogger. When I started in 2006, they didn’t have a system for adding metadata to your posts when you published. About a year later, they added that capability, but when I imported my posts to Squarespace in 2014, the systems were incompatible. That meant I was looking at eight years of posts I would have to manually retag in order for the metadata to work properly.

Needless to say, this wasn’t exactly the highest thing on my priority list. I did tackle it once in a while and made some progress, but it was only this year that I finally finished the task…

Then promptly decided I really needed a better system of categorizing than the haphazard one that had evolved over the past nineteen years. So I’m still making a concerted effort to revamp all those categories and tags to make this blog useful and easy to navigate for people who find it now—people who may be more interested in my books and writing progress than the cute things my kids said when they were little.

I am, however, making good progress. So if you want to explore some of those more useful categories and topics, please visit my blog archive page.

Speaking of writing progress…

Memoir Idea

While I’ve been wandering through these annals of my history, I’ve had many events (both recorded on the blog and not) come back fresh to mind. The last nineteen years have had some amazing highs and some very deep lows. Needless to say, this blog category overhaul has been an emotional ride.

And it made me wonder if you, my dear reader, would like to see a collection of some of my most pivotal and popular posts along the way collected into a memoir-style essay collection.

The posts I wrote while processing some of those deep lows have been some of my most perennially popular. They’re the ones people would comment about with “You should write a book someday.” Many of these Processing the Dark Moments posts happened before I actually did start publishing fiction books, and it never occurred to me that the commenters may have been referring to a memoir until I started reviewing said posts.

Now, I’ve been pondering the idea for the last month or so. (I even made a cover already as part of the thinking process, and it’s so gorgeous, it almost decided me on its own.)

But would you want to read it?

That’s the real question. Please let me know in the comments.

Current Projects

It’s coming… Rise of the Grigori Book 3.

At the beginning of this year, I declared my intention to try something ambitious (for me): developing and writing two projects at once.

The two projects in question are the third books in each of the Rise of the Grigori series and the Peace Country Romance series.

Some progress has been made on both, but not nearly as much as I thought I’d have made by now. I’ve been devoting a fair amount of my creative time to finishing and publishing some knitting patterns that have been languishing for years, and, as with other humans, I only have so much time to go around. (And, as a middle-aged human, I have a lot fewer creative hours available to me than I used to.)

Also, I’m having to (re)admit to myself that, despite how much I may want to rewrite my brain to work differently, I work best focusing on one creative project at a time.

Ugh. I hate having limitations, but such is life.

At any rate, I intend to spend some time in the next week or two to really sit down with these projects and decide on my priorities, and then go back to my old, much-more-productive way of focusing on a single project until it’s finished. Because what I’m doing now? It’s only resulting in decision paralysis, which means I’m not making progress on anything.

However, after a quick review of my stated intentions in January, I’m actually still on track. So maybe I should just stop being so hard on myself!

How are you doing so far on your goals for the year? Is it time to readjust the plan, or are you on track (or ahead)? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments! (And remember to weigh in on the memoir idea, please.)