Sorry, it's been WILD, man

I’m a day late with my blog post...and I missed two last week, too...my bad. Anyway, I’m probably going to be posting a LOT less frequently going forward. I’ve already got all the prep work done for my Slavic Warrior Women series (after all, the dissertation is already done, defended, and published), so that will continue as planned, and I’ll also try to keep up with my monthly reading roundups.

We’ve got a lot of work on the house to do still before I can fully unpack, and by ‘we’ I really mean ‘I,’ because my husband already started work. And, since I’m a writer who works from home...yep. House improvements are mostly me. So far, we’ve gotten the floors redone (finally finished as of Friday), I’ve moved all the furniture into the proper rooms (now that the floors are complete), I’ve patched all the drywall (there were a lot of holes since the previous owners left all their nails and screws up plus a few cracks), and I’ve touched up the worst of the dings and dents on our furniture that occurred in the move with wood filler. Next up on house repairs is sanding all those dry wall furniture patches, touching up the stain on the wood, and repainting the walls. They left none of the existing paint (of course, cue eye roll) so I’ve decided to go with a bold array of colors. We’re not planning on selling this house anytime soon, so I have zero concern for boring neutral millennial greige and shall go forth with the colors I want.

Thus, house repairs have been the main distraction keeping me from posting regular blogs or social media.

The other main distraction is because I’ve been immersed in another round of edits and rewrites for book 2 in the series, reviewing my chapter outlines and scene summaries for book 3, outlining some major plot points that need to happen to close out book 4, and beta reading a book for someone in my writer’s group. Ya know, doing writerly stuff.

The last reason I’ve been a little behind on my blog posts (and a little absent on social media), is because I’ll be transitioning to my new pen name probably in the next month or so, which means things are going to start looking a little different around here. I’ve got a new name chosen, a new book title to go with it, and a bunch of social media posts prepped to launch with. I hate that the nature of our world today makes separating my regular life from my work necessary, but here we are; the least I can do is have some fun with it.

And with that: All the fun little references to my adult romantasy work (which will be associated with the new pen name, as opposed to my previous YA portal fantasy books as well as my academic publications) will be disappearing from this part of the site and transferring over to the new one. HOWEVER...it also gives me some freedom to return to that YA portal fantasy series without interfering with the adult fiction, so perhaps, I’ll be able to explore the world of Aorea a little more after all. Which I didn’t think I’d be able to do. Upside, eh?

On that note, all for now. I’ll be back (hopefully) in a few days with a review of Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky Trilogy, assuming I finish reading Steles of the Sky first. I’m about halfway done.