Upstream Updates: Checking In, Mid-Year!

We are more than halfway through 2025, and I thought everybody deserved an update with how I'm doing!

Life Stuff

2025 is proving to be a pretty intense year! The school year ended and I felt more relief than I had in a while. I don't know what made it so difficult this year but I admit I struggled a lot more than in years past. But summer arrived and we didn't have to go too long into June, so I am grateful for that! Regardless of the fact that I am able to sleep better with a CPAP after my sleep apnea diagnosis, I can confirm that I am still NOT a "morning person", so those 5:30 wake-up times just to be able to be at work when I was supposed to were no joke! Luckily that expectation will ease up in the next school year, so I won't have to be so stressed out over it.

That being said, outside of work times I had so much fun being an auntie to all my "niblings", and participating more in things with family and friends over the year than I had been in the past when battling that near-constant fatigue. Right now we're into blueberry-picking season at my house, which is my favorite berry to pick! The bushes in our backyard got absolutely fried in the heat wave of '21, and every year since I've been waiting and hoping for the bushes to recover. The last few years have been rather slim pickings, I especially got discouraged last year when it took almost the whole season just to pick a few dozen pounds of berries, whereas in years past I could pick several pounds a day for weeks! This year, I'm happy to report that the bushes are loaded! I've harvested nearly thirty pounds, and with this heat we're having, there are still so many green berries ready to ripen, I am pretty sure we can stock up pretty well at this rate!

Writing

Last year, taking a break from novel-writing to work through new and old short stories was really fun, but it just stings not having anything to show for it by now. (They were only limited-run anthologies anyway, so now all I have are a few short stories that are indeed publish-worthy but nowhere to house them...) But now that they're done, I still wasn't really ready to dive into editing Fugitive of Crossway yet, and I needed something else to hammer out...

Enter Fairies Under Glass. I'd started rewriting it in 2022, again after finishing the first draft of Fugitive, but stopped when interest seemed to wane and I knew really ought to focus on other things. But randomly this year I got inspired to get back into it and finish off the project, because that's something that I think I ought to get better at: finishing things. It's just refreshing when I don't have things hanging over my head like Damocles' sword. Plus, I started reading it to a writer friend of mine, we're sort of accountability buddies. She motivated me to finish the second draft of Fugitive, and it's largely through reading that to her that I realized how much I definitely needed to tweak, and what I could do about it. So as I was going back and reading through Fairies Under Glass with her, I pulled up my notes, opened up the draft, and finished the thing! I know I haven't been very consistent in posting it, but you can read the latest part >here< by clicking the hyperlinked text, and trust me, the end is coming! If you haven't read it yet, you can find the first part of the story >here< at the hyperlink, and read it all the way through from the beginning. (I try to link the parts together at the end of each post, so if you encounter a post without a link to the next or previous part, do comment there and let me know!)

Now that I've finished Fairies Under Glass, I felt ready to take on Fugitive of Crossway. I'm almost halfway through the book, and much to my chagrin, it doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. And the few notes I could remember from reading it through with my accountability buddy, weren't altogether that helpful. (When I've noted that a particular scene is "too vague, needs fixing".... Where exactly did Past Me expect Present Me to go with that supreme lack of information?!?!?!?) As much as I feel like I need a third party to tell me what is needed and what I can remove, I was hoping to at least achieve the bulk of that myself, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Either I'm too close to really know what needs to be said and what is redundant, or the story is too complex and I need to just embrace the complexity and give up on trying to have consistent book lengths for the Undersea Saga. I've spent almost a month now arduously trying to rephrase things and tweak it to bring the word count down, and I've only been able to pare down by the hundreds, not thousands of words. Either it means I need to hire an outside editor to restructure the story to be shorter (like maybe the way I swapped between the two plot lines could be done better), or I just need to embrace the fact that this book is absolutely going to be DOUBLE the length of Princess of Undersea, and let you all have at it! Either way, this is definitely the hardest part of the process, but once it's done, I'll feel so much better about setting my sights on finally publishing!

Meanwhile, I'm still open to the idea of finishing A Writer's Tale and/or The Last Inkweaver. Especially the latter, I'd been stumped on a certain part of it, and it took discussing it with another writer (and an enthusiastic supporter) to make the breakthrough that might yet prove helpful. One of the most basic points I needed was to be able to write the male secondary character in a believable way, not make him completely unlikeable, but just very much clueless at the start, so that I can build his character arc in a way that actually helps the reader like him as the story unfolds. Only time will tell if I have what I need to pull it off, so wish me luck!

In Wattpad news, I finally returned to regularly updating things, I've started posting Fairies Under Glass on there, and I'm thinking about all the other half-finished projects (the ReBible series, Merely Meredith, etc.) I could start adding as well, just to motivate myself to complete them! One issue I've noticed once I started posting regularly, though, is the rampant slew of scammers leaving solicitous comments on my chapters. They are lavish in their compliments but then follow it up immediately with contact info, usually via Discord, Whatsapp, or Telegram--all platforms known to be used by international scammers. I would, of course, respond with questions as to the veracity of their interest. I caught two scammers using the exact same script. The second one, I asked point-blank "Are you really interested or are you just a marketer scraping recently-updated posts for clients?" and they responded "a marketer scraping for clients" and then deleted their profile mere hours after creating it. That's usually the red flag for me, if I receive a comment and click on the profile, only to be greeted by a blank page hours or days old, with no engagement--that's a scammer.

My personal goal of "FOCUS" is yielding some satisfactory results, and lots of things are coming along nicely, so long as I don't get distracted on my way through to the end of the year!

Reading

Now we come to the exciting part... I had been discouraged by the gradual decline of books I was able to finish reading over the last few years, compared with the rate I continued to acquire books through book sales, free libraries, gifts, and bookstore gift cards. I had a list of more than 50 books, and although I had planned to read at least three books a month last year, it didn't happen and I found myself constantly restructuring the list and adding books and taking them off... I needed a new solution to visualize my TBR and a way to motivate myself to keep reading!

Enter social media video clips, and in particular one that showed a reader who had filled out a grid with the covers of all her TBR books and covered them with scratch-off stickers. Each time she finished a book, she could scratch off to reveal the next one. I really liked that idea and immediately started searching for the cover images of every book in my TBR. That's when I ran into a snag: I couldn't use a grid system like the one in the video, because my reading style tends to be more haphazard than just a straight grid. I didn't want to completely randomize my TBR, but at the same time, I craved a sort of variety. I rarely consent to blaze through an entire series consecutively (much to the chagrin of indie authors waiting for me to finish reading the epic series they've spent so much time on!) but I also wanted the option to either "branch off" to continue through a series, or keep it sort of "controlled randomized" by not overloading my imagination with too much fantasy, an abundance of sci-fi, or too many whodunnits in a row. That "branching off" inspired me to arrange my scratch-off "chart" more like a map, a map of my Reading Journey.

Feel free to zoom in to see the books I've read so far!

I had already discovered a monthly reading challenge shared by my local library that happened to list categories into which I could fit books from my TBR, so that was a straightforward given, but the rest I arranged along a winding path. The branches are series. Some of them are complete, sometimes I'll have a book on the "main path" that happens to be the first in a series, so I left myself room to add to its "branch" if I choose. The empty line on the right of the page is called "Library Lane": these are books that I want to read, that I would want to borrow from the library. Once I finish the book closest to that branch, I can start placing those holds, and as the books come available, I will check them out, add their covers to my "map" and keep on reading! As you can see, it's done wonders in keeping me on track and continuing to read! I'm already 16 books in, and I've got a few more that I aim to finish before the month is done, which means I'm already miles ahead of how many I'd read by this time last year or the year before! Out of those 16 books, there have been a handful that were sheer delights to discover and read--I can't wait to give the rundown at the end of the year! (Have you read any of the books you see in the picture? Comment below to tell me if you have, or if you've been interested, and I'll let you know what I thought of it!)

So that's where I'm at so far. Thanks for coming along with me for the journey, and I hope to keep you apprised of my progress as things unfold. Leave comments if you read anything you'd like to respond to, I make sure to respond to each comment as it comes in! As ever...

Catch You Further Upstream!