Hay is for horses

Is it just me, or does everyone seem to be talking about horses lately?

Every so often I'll notice that there's a recurring theme in my life. Call it coincidence or fate or whatever you want, but the same idea or word will pop up repeatedly within a short period of time. (I'm sure this happens over long periods of time, too, but I don't notice because too much time passes between events and my memory isn't that great anymore.) I have several of these recurring themes going on in my life right now, one of which is horses. It's weird when your friend, whom you've known for 15 years and have never associated with horses, is suddenly contemplating quitting her office job to go work on a horse farm, right? Right.

Anyway, one of the horse-related news items is particularly exciting: My friend Kiersi Burkhart (different from the friend mentioned before) announced that she and her co-author have a book deal for their middle grade horse book series! Woot! Congrats, Kiersi! And exciting news for me, too, because I've known about this for a while and can FINALLY invite her to talk about it here on my blog. Yay! (She said yes, by the way, so stay tuned.)

[On a side note, when Kiersi first told me about her book deal, I said to her, "Two things. First, fuck you. Second, I am so happy for you!!!" You're allowed to be simultaneously bursting with joy/excitement and pea green with envy when your friends reach benchmarks of success before you do.]

As for my own writing progress, I'm happy to say that my strategy of letting myself get some rest is paying off and there has been some progress. Any progress. More on this in my...

ROW80 Update 

"A Round of Words in 80 Days is the writing challenge that knows you have a life."

Show up to writing 2-3 hours/day. Yes! This is being done. My progress is fairly slow and so far a fair bit of my writing time includes staring off into space, but I am showing up (have been taking myself to coffee shops away from the house/dogs) and there is progress. Woot! Have been working on a short story and a creative non-fiction piece. (In fact, worked on the cnf piece this morning and was able to reconnect with it to the extent that I cried. This is very exciting.) Also did some freewriting and finally wrote this travel blog post about my nightmare return trip from Europe back in September, which brought up all the feelings of stress, panic, helplessness and frustration again, but I'm hoping that means I furthered processed those feelings and can move on from them now.

Be an active ROW80 sponsor. Yes! Also happening. Checked in with peeps on Monday and am scheduled to do so again tomorrow. It's also been great to get so many comments on my goals post for this round. I love the community! My inspiration post for Kait's blog is due on the 17th, so I need to get that in my to-do list for next week.

Read for fun. Yes to this also! I read The Book of Life (All Souls #3) by Deborah Harkness and am currently reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, characters and metaphors in Harkness's trilogy, and the third book is a satisfying end to it. That said, I feel sorry for her about the hack editing job they did on it. I would've been super upset if someone had published one of my books like that, with scenes obviously mashed together, characters appearing out of nowhere who were supposed to be in other locations, and a weird three-day interlude between Jack's invitation to dinner (for the same night) and his actual showing up. But I guess if the book sells, they probably don't much care what shape it's in. (Though I imagine Harkness does.) The Ishiguro book is a retelling of a premise I'm familiar with from other stories (Parts: The Clonus Horror, The Island), but since it's a premise I'm fond of, I'm happy to revisit it. Ishiguro's story is also well-told, has an engaging female protagonist (the other two stories have male protags), and there's a new twist where the clones care for each other while their organs are harvested over time, so I'm interested in seeing what new light this book can shed on the familiar moral questions. Just goes to show that a book doesn't have to be 100% original in order to be very much worth reading.

Continue posting twice a week on this blog. I'm posting today (obviously - you're reading it), so if I post again on Friday or Monday then I can consider this goal accomplished for the week. Not sure it'll happen, but I'll try.


This is a blog hop! Click here to see other ROW80 participants' check-ins for this week.