Update Link: Scars – Part 4

Note: Long update blog. If you want to skip around

• P1 – Why I flaked on Wed.
• P2 – Mom & Sister health update
• P3 – Widget update
• P4 – Mad World started
• P5 – Vlog & Patreon Livestream

I hope everyone had a great week! I’m sorry for flaking out on Wednesday’s update to Signs of Life. I was so tired that morning, so I kept putting it off thinking my energy would bump up (I often feel a lot better in the afternoon), but it just didn’t and it hasn’t really in the last few days. I’m at the point where I really should be recovered from the school year, energy wise. My sleeping is better, I’ve been resting and recharging most of the time, but I’m still having some serious energy problems and my neck is still really sore. I made a doctor’s appointment to get blood work done because diabetes runs in the family and I want to make sure I’m not deficient in anything. That’s not until July 12 unfortunately, so we’re just going to have to muddle through.

Mom got the first results for her bone marrow biopsy, and, uh, they’re kind of mixed. It’s not the cancer they thought it was, but it’s a myeloproliferative disorder which is a type of blood cancer. We’re waiting on more firm results that give a final diagnosis as well as a prognosis. We don’t know which type of the disorder she has yet or how bad. Thanks to therapy, ironically, I’m been dealing with the stress and anxiety as well as could be expected. I can’t remember if I told you guys that my sister ended up with Covid a few weeks ago, but, uh, she did. Luckily, she got the very, very mild form and is already pretty much back to normal. June was just…it was a lot.

I did get started on Mad World, Book 4 yesterday. I updated the widgets on the side for July — I’ve added Book 4 to the writing section, moving it from drafting. I also added two in progress widgets — one just for CampNaNoWriMo and the other for the full book. We’re looking at a 200k word count which may or not not take me all of July & August. We’ll see. My July goal is at least 100k. That’s doable.

Yesterday, I wrote a new scene and then started reworking some older pieces from last year. If you guys remember, the timeline for Book 4 was my original timeline for Book 3 (I was going to start with Liason’s wedding and finish off Ric but then I realized we just needed more of the Sonny/Carly story as well as more of a fallout with Book 2’s rape story.) So Book 4’s story got pushed. I did, however, write all of Book 4 at that point. Some of it is going to be useful — early on, some entire scenes can be reworked, and later it might just be pieces of dialogue. We’re at 8k so far, but I don’t think that’s going to be typical going forward.

I’ll be doing a vlog for MW later today that will go live at some point today or tomorrow. If you’re a Patreon, I’m doing a Livestream tonight at 6PM (EST), planning a deep dive into Mad World and Fool Me Twice (and any others that are asked about).

I’m going to try to make up for Signs of Life tomorrow on Saturday, but we might just skip it. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.