The family at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, my happy place.

I just figured out that we have eight days left in this Round of Words in 80 Days.

I’m okay with that. I didn’t do so well this round, and unfortunately that’s been my refrain for over a year now. Yes… “real life” does get in the way and our family faced some hefty challenges since the move in early 2016. But hubby has been in a new, much better job for a month now, Bunny finally got into the GREAT charter school she’d been on the waiting list for, and Tallchild is doing her Senior year of high school. There is still more transition to go… we hope to move out of this tiny apartment in a few months, but we won’t be able to buy yet so it will probably still be a temporary rental. Tallchild will move on to a transitional program for young adults with special needs after graduation.

With all three of my immediate family ensconced in safe, nurturing places all day, I’ve finally been able to get the writing time I need. It’s been a little like floodgates opening, with the number of words that came rushing out over a few days! I came to a revelation regarding Twenty-First Century Airship Princess that I can’t resolve the conflict without a Deus ex Machina, and I desperately do not want to do that. Also, the pacing is off and I switched from single POV to dual about 10k in. It is temporarily on the shelf, but I plan to rewrite it after it steeps a while.

I have two new WIPs in the same vein as 21CAP. One will probably be a novella, and the other is a novel. Hopefully, since the two stories are in the same universe and time as 21CAP, they won’t compete against each other in my head and writing simultaneously will work. The novella is being typed into the computer, as is “normal” these days. That means I have to be home near my laptop (Yeah, I can move it or access the story online through Dropbox, but…) to work on that one. The novel is being handwritten, as was 21CAP. I want and need to get both stories out of me as quickly as possible. That is one thing I have learned about myself as an author; if I don’t get the story out in a reasonably short time, it crashes and burns and sometimes isn’t worth cleaning up.

21CAP is worth cleaning up. And there is a deadline, if I want to enter it in a certain contest this fall.

So…who’s got deadlines?