A Bit of Sunday Gardening & Pondering

I woke up early this morning and started watering the vegetables that cropped up from soil that we’d set aside after our attempt at container gardening on the deck failed royally. Two years later, we’ve got them growing in pots in the garden which is probably a better place for them than our deck. Right now, I think we have summer squash although they’re still too small for harvesting and there’s even ginger from pieces hubby had tossed into the ground. Lots of ginger.

We also have a grapevine that used to produce abundant grapes before hubby pruned it almost to the nub one year and I thought he’d killed it. But it survived and this year it started bearing fruit. Now it’s a race to see if I get to it before the squirrels that live in the tree next to it do.

In the writing front, I’ve been productive with naughty pen’s stories although the marketing is a pain because I can’t market her books worth a damn. So basically marketing is nada, zero, zilch. That’s because all my newsletter subscribers and my branding is established with Liz and I can’t cross-promote naughty pen. That was the point I’d started her anyway; she wrote smut and Liz doesn’t (Liz writes “steamy” romance). I just have to remind myself that I started naughty pen because I didn’t want the pressure of an established brand to begin with.

But we all know how ego works and so it’s been a challenge each day not to blurt it out there that I also write smut. Well, “I” don’t but Naughty Pen does.

Actually, instead of whining about the non-marketing of Naughty Pen, I need to start writing Liz’s next books. There are seven (7) outlines already completed – SEVEN—although that includes a few books for Naughty Pen (dark romance, here she comes!)! Can you believe that? I whined and whined for months about the difficulty of following an outline and here I am now with seven of them that I need to start following. Apparently, after all that whining and writing to an outline, I cannot not start without one anymore. It’s like something you can’t un-see. Or maybe it’s just my rational mind saying, see, it worked for the last book, didn’t it?

Anyway, first in the line of seven outlines is a holiday novella for a box set that I secretly like to get out of only because it’s “closed door sex” so no steamy stuff and suddenly I can’t write clean romance. I don’t know how my brain works but somehow, if you tell me to do something a certain way, I somehow suddenly don’t know how to do it that way even though I do.

If I do get out of the box set, that’s $100 buy-in down the drain. It will be the second hundred bucks I’ll be throwing away when it comes box sets (and I really need to stop doing that). I mean, I should just write the darn novella, steamy scenes and all, and then remove the steamy scenes for the box set. Then three months after the release of said box set and when rights return to me, release the damn book with all its steamy sexy scenes! Great plan, right?

Tell that to Miss Ego though…

I’ve also been invited to an author signing… as an author!

Unfortunately, I can’t go. I’ve got some personal issues I need to take care of before I can do anything like that. Like legal personal shit that has a timeline of 6 months to the day. And I cannot take my eyes off the ball on this one. I cannot even dare to fail with this one so everything has to be done right.

So the last few weeks have been a test of priorities. Take care of personal crap (dot those i’s and cross those t’s!), write the stories, and hope hope hope for the best. These are scary times after all.

So that’s my update so far. I’ll write about the books I’m reading in another post. In the meantime, I hope your Sunday is going great!