May 24th

It has been a busy week, readers!

A new episode of A Secret in the Thorns was uploaded Monday. You can’t catch up on my queer Beauty and the Beast retelling here: A Secret in the Thorns

I printed out the entirety of Lore for my editor to go through. It’s a huge stack of paper full of potential. I am excited and overwhelmed with the prospect of trimming down the 130,000 words to make a debut novel. We’re going to salvage certain scenes for the sequel I’ll start work on in a few months. It’s a project that now looms on the kitchen table.

My other big project got it’s official name this week. Phoenix Fantasies is scheduled to go live June 2nd. Four episodes will be dropping on kindle vella. Be sure to follow along here and on Instagram @adreecewriting to get all the latest news on this spicy paranormal romance.

In other news, the wife and I have spent our evenings playing the latest Zelda game. I finished an embroidery project. I’ve started a couple of paintings. The laundry managed to get hung up.

Life as a writer is all about finding the profound in the simple act of living. It’s balancing a thousand voices in your head telling you to start a new project while there’s still work to do on your main stories. I wash dishes and listen to Ashby tell me about Lucy. Every song that comes on the radio finds a way to tie into my characters, the greedy personalities crawling over each other to be the one in the spotlight for just a moment.

It doesn’t always look like progress. Most of the time, I do something exciting, like submitting a short story to a competition, and then numbly stare at the dim laptop screen. There’s nothing to solid to hold or take a picture of. We have to celebrate our little moments with a deep breath and an expectation that all of this hard work is going to pay off in the future.

So, I wrote a few thousand words today and patted myself on the back. It’ll be time to make dinner here in a few minutes and then I’ll collapse on the couch for a few hours and watch my wife do a much better job of playing video games while I enjoy the artistic details the creators built into the layouts or the story building the writers left for me to relish in the cut scenes.

Life as a writer isn’t glamorous. It’s not always flashy or exciting. Today, it’s full of hope for what’s to come. I’m going to hang onto that for as long as I can.