Story Coming Soon. Also, my mom was right about making mistakes.

Here’s a thing I believed in the halcyon days of 17 hours ago: I was nearly done with my first six chapters, my story would definitely launch on Sunday, September 22, and I was going to spend that afternoon at a conference in Toronto happily catching up other people’s blogs and conquering my TBR pile.

The only part I got right was that I will be at a conference in Toronto.

But it’s okay. I can now say with confidence that real date my story will start updating is Sunday, September 29th. (which, even as type it, feels like a failure because that part of my brain that is trained to use perfectionism as a tool to punish me and keep me from trying new things is chattering away).

I’m gonna ignore that voice.

Sunday, September 29th! And what will I be doing in the meantime? Oh gosh, I’m so glad you asked:

Redoing every single post!

Uh. Yeah. I learned the difference between a png and a jpeg y’all. And it might seem like a small difference but when it comes to having a billion images load for your story, it like matters.

After I finished internally (and let’s be honest, externally) screaming, I realized that the only thing I could do was fix it. And this is where this blog is teaching me some life lessons and has 100% been an amazing journey even if no one reads it. See, in the process of fixing those images, I started taking a closer look at my writing.

Might as well do a proofread for no reasons whatsoever because a lot of what I wrote is like, fine, I thought.

But it turns out, after writing six chapters, I had done a decent amount of tweaking and character development. Now, I have a chance to go back and layer in that development. Nothing major, but here and there were places where I realized: oh dang! What this character would actually say is different because two chapters from now, I built out more of their backstory.

And I mean, excuse my hubris, I certainly did have typos to fix.

Anyways, I could have (and once upon a time, would have) wasted a lot of time wallowing in self-pity and frustration. But damn it if my mom wasn’t right: there are opportunities even in your mistakes. So, I’m coming down the homestretch and putting the finishing touches on things.

Ultimately, I feel like all of this will be worth it. I mean, this is not a sustainable pace whatsoever but I needed to get a bunch of chapters in the bank. Once I start the story on Sunday, September 29 (jeez, how many times am I going to mention this date?), I’ll be able to slow down and write one chapter at a time. That’s the dream! Then this becomes a nice little creative outlet that I can work on a little bit at the time.

I won’t say that I’ll always be six weeks ahead or that I won’t have any interruptions because life happens. I don’t need to set myself up for feeling like a failure by creating impossible to maintain standards (Did you need to hear that? Honey child, me too).

But I do think I’ll be able to manage pretty well.

Okay, back to editing (omg just kidding, I have a 9:30am meeting so literally, time to drive to my actual job).

When your characters are just hanging outside of the soundstage you built, in the rain, waiting for you to work some teleport sim magic. (not pictured: the moment when the sun came up and I forgot to cheat and give one of the vampires protection from the sun so they burst into flames).

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