Here I am! But where am I going?

It's been... well, it's been a LOT lately! But you probably already knew that, because I'm betting it's been a lot for you, too. This is going to be one of those posts in which I kind of ramble my way through things. Organizing them into neat little facts and announcements just isn't the point I'm at. 

So what point am I at? That depends on what you're asking about. The various points do all connect on a map of my writing, though.

It's spring, and that means plants are waking up. I've been cleaning up the ones that come inside for the winter because it will be time for them to go back outside any day now. The ones that always live inside don't need as much cleaning up, but there has been some trimming and preparing them for another growing season. A few of them needed to be repotted. It won't be much longer before it's time to get the vegetable garden going for this year, so the preparation process for that has already begun.

There are also some new plant friends this year! I am now the honored caretaker of a baby fig tree! It was given to me by someone who knows I have wanted to grow a fig tree for many years.

Little green shoots popping up on a couple of twigs planted in a red pot.

I'm going to give it at least one year growing in the pot before it goes into the ground. It's so small right now that it probably wouldn't survive this year if I put it in the ground now.

I've also started an aquatic garden in the 2 gallon tank that was once a home for brine shrimp. I'm not adding fish to the tank. Doing it with only plants is easy because I just need to add a little water every few days. It's really interesting to be able to see what's happening below the surface!

A 2 gallon tank with a foundation of carefully prepared mud and rocks, with a little castle for decoration. A spider plant is growing at the surface of the water. A pothos and lotus plant are growing under the water and reaching out above the surface.

The pothos is named Ted because it's a cutting I took from my big pothos, Keanu Leaves. So the spider plant became Bill because the S in William S. Preston, Esq. can stand for "spider plant". That meant it was already decided that the lotus plant would be Rufus before it was even time to move him into the tank. They are on a most excellent adventure together, and you'll make me feel old if you ask what any of that means.

Getting plants ready for growing season is a lot of work, but it's work I enjoy. While indoor plants, and even the outdoor plants that come in for winter, don't need a lot of maintenance, the vegetable garden will require regular work. I'll enjoy that, too, but the plants have been my first clue about how my writing schedule is changing.

It's not just the plants. It's a collection of things. The plants made me stop and really look at what I'm doing, though. And, no, this isn't a long, winding build up to me announcing that I won't be writing. I'm absolutely writing! Things are just shifting in some ways that have been moving slowly enough that I didn't see it coming.

I started publishing my work last spring with things already written and waiting to be put out there. There was a little finishing up with this, a good amount of editing with that, but multiple works were ready to be published in a fairly short amount of time. Little Things, my cinquain collection, practically built itself. I was writing them here and there without being committed to it, and realized one day that I had enough of them to go through and decide which ones to put together in a collection.

I've been doing a lot of writing while getting those works out into the world. Remember when I said I was working on something inspired by the Lovecraftian Mythos? I restarted that twice because I couldn't get a feel for whether it should be a novel or a collection of short stories. Truthfully, I'm still not sure. I'm not ready to say I've given up, but it has moved from the back burners into storage.

That's fine, because I did have something else flowing a lot more smoothly to work on. That would be my fairy tale retellings. This is not a collection of short stories. The retellings all weave together into one bigger story, so this is a novel. I think I'm starting to understand why authors talk about how many years it took to write a specific novel. I'm doing as much research and making notes to map things out as I am writing the actual story!

I love this story, and I will finish it. I don't want to ruin it by forcing myself to finish it before I can do anything else, though. I have so many notes, and so much mapping things out done, that I feel confident about being able to walk away from it for a while and easily pick it back up when it's time to work on it again. 

There's a part of me that says, "Nobody's going to trust your work if they see you wildly hopping around! Finish one thing, then start the next!" 

Another part of me says, "Nobody cares if you shift between projects. They care that it's good storytelling. Nobody wants to read something you were forcing yourself to continue writing." 

I often say I don't need other people to argue with me because I can do a great job of arguing with myself.

So, okay! I'm feeling like shorter projects might be better for me, at least for the next few months. What am I going to write?

I had not intended to do another poetry collection. Then I started thinking just because I wasn't planning it didn't mean it wouldn't happen. I didn't plan the cinquain collection ahead of writing it, after all. I'm sure some of you saw this coming, but I swear I didn't. Not until the past couple of weeks.

I'm doing another poetry collection.

It's not going to be a collection of one type of poem. It has a theme that tells a story, but it's not quite a story in verse. My inspiration for the collection is the tarot deck. I'm not sharing any of the poems ahead of time - I want them to be read together - but I'm really hoping readers will trust me with this.

I'm also regularly writing other poems, some of which I do share, and that may or may not result in another collection. But there are also a lot of things going through my mind because of the poetry and fairy tale retellings that have me thinking I might be going back to the Forest sooner than I intended. I can't be sure that would result in a sequel to Forest Tales being published before the end of the year. It might just be me getting started with writing a few stories.

This is probably a good time to remind you that you can read one of the stories from Forest Tales for free online.

A lot of my writing that has been shared with the world over the years has been articles and blog posts. I always had that "I'm gonna write a book someday!" fire burning deep inside, but I never had the experience. I've learned a lot over the past year, and I know there will always be more to learn. I have to adjust my expectations of myself as my writing grows.