Dawn of the First Day 2026

Here we go! The first day of the school year is upon us. This past summer flew, and not in a good way. We started off with a major health scare with our youngest that cost her emergency surgery and the first six weeks of summer vacation to recover. She’s doing much better now, but it was decidedly not a pleasant time.

With the school year comes changes to everyone’s schedules. Sleeping in and random adventures are relegated to weekend luxuries. Homework and emailing teachers become a regular occurrence once more. And so dawns a new routine from now until June.

In many ways, I welcome the end of summer. I am decidedly not a summer person. I have absolutely nothing nice to say about the season of heat, humidity, and (yuck!) bugs. But more importantly, it provides me with a more predictable routine to base everything off of.

At the start of summer, I had set a goal for myself. As I’d noted in my last post, I wanted to revisit my old manuscripts, polish them up a bit, and release them. Better to succeed on their own than to collect dust and all that. The Secret of Hidden Creek was the first such manuscript to get that treatment, and will be released tomorrow (tonight, technically/locally speaking since the release schedule is based on GMT ±0). But that wasn’t the only goal I’d set. I had set myself a goal of 3-4 novels per year.

Now, technically, between Tir na nOg, Ebon Maw compilation 1, and Hidden Creek tonight, I’ve hit that minimum goal. But what about the stretch goal? Well, guess what idiot decided to go and revisit an incomplete project that they’d only written a few pages of last summer…

I’d had an idea for a spooky fun middle-grade novel. Nothing dark or gritty. No intense violence. No traumatic events. Just a monster academia story inspired by that wildly successful series from the 1990s: Goosebumps, crossed with a web series from South Korea, Spookiz.

I am deep into the first draft of this story now. A full third and change is done, and that’s considering I was fighting through my summer slog. But a third is not the finished manuscript I’d planned for. The fact is, I gave myself a deadline for this draft of yesterday. Quick math shows that 0.35 ≠ 100%.

Am I annoyed with myself? Oh, absolutely! But at the same time, I’m trying to give myself some breathing room. Again, summer and I are not friends, so even getting this far is a small miracle unto itself. That does, however, mean that I have to let my editor and cover artist know that the project is delayed, which I am not looking forward to.

Looks like I’ll be missing my October launch window for the story. Oh well. That gives me a full year to polish it. Just because R. L. Stine could bang out a book in a month doesn’t mean we all can.

My focus now shifts to getting back into school-year rhythm with the kids and implementing a new writing plan/program for myself. My goal is to finish this work in progress, complete Arc II of Ebon Maw (and figure out what the heck is going on with it over on the magazine!), and revisit (see: rewrite!) my urban fantasy that desperately wanted to be paranormal romance in time for release in February.

The only question I have for myself now is: will I have the energy and bandwidth to get all this writing done? Only one way to find out!