Life: Hi! SO….. sadly (from #HermitLife point of view), life was once again full of social fun things this past week. I know, I know, the weird writer life of craving hermitness is odd, but true! So on the upside – spent some time downtown, spent time with awesome friends, and had barbecue/fireworks/brunch madness. But on the downside… Not quite as much time as I would have liked writing.

But (and I know this is going to sound terrible that I’m viewing this as a good thing, but bear with me) my mom’s car broke down last week (sorry mom, I know you’re still mourning!), so she needs mine to get to work, soooo I’m stuck at home, and now I have that awesome excuse to not be pulled out of the cave!!!! <<< Yes, you can laugh, but no shame ;-). Love excuses to live the #HermitLife!

Reading: Finished Erica O’Rourke’s Torn Trilogy, which culminated in Bound – I loved this series. Such well fleshed out characters who I totally felt invested in, a super real love triangle, and it was overall a superbly planned out trilogy. Can’t wait to read her next series – Dissonance and Resonance (which was just released). She’s also a local Chicago author so I get to see her at her launch party at The Bookstall on Sunday!!!

Writing: Oh dear. But really. So to attempt to not be overly melodramatic (haha ,not my normal style if you haven’t noticed)… this round of revisions is going better than last round. I read through my printed (still smiling about that :)) manuscript last week, took notes, totally tore the book apart and put it back together again. I ended up cutting more than ten scenes and adding a few as well.

Grand total – I now have 50 scenes, and 20 of those need to be written from scratch or heavily rewritten. So I have my work cut out for me. And while I was totally psyched to be jumping back in… attempting to write a new intro had been a mess of a five day disaster. I now have like… seven? ten? different versions of a first chapter, and I’m not happy with any of them.

So I think I’m going to jump to another chapter and deal with my beginning later! And hopefully it’s just the pressure of writing a fabulous intro to pull in all future agents/publishers/readers that is giving me writer’s block, and not a me problem – but we’ll see how jumping around works tomorrow! Writer friends – have you had intro rewriting freeze-up before?? What do you do about it? Would love to hear your thoughts! Until next time,

❤ Maddy