It must be progress...

OK. I confess -- this is no way to run a blog. Writing an entry once every couple of months, or even less frequently (alright, it's actually been just under four years)... that's just not how this whole blogging thing is supposed to work. I get that. But life happens, and as it turns out, I've still been somewhat busy. And I do have some news to share, finally. 

For starters, I finished that fourth novel manuscript -- The Assassin's Guide to Water Colour -- including an intensive cycle of editing and workshopping and beta-reading. I've begun looking for an agent to represent it. And then, I got stuck for a time. I had started a sequel to Assassin's Guide, and then I paused to work on some other stories until the sequel (and its characters) began to assert a need to be heard. So now, I'm in a workshopping and beta-reading cycle for manuscript number 5, titled "Gallows Humour In a Season of Mercy." 

At the same time, I did some re-writing and song-writing for a musical-in-progress (A Revolution of Birds) which is probably now in about its twentieth revision, while I think about what the next steps might be to get any part of it heard, by anybody. 

Stay tuned, if you would... I'm trying to make some kind of progress, always. Trying to get better at whatever it is I'm doing, the process can feel so slow.  

Looking back, though, the day-by-day slog to make time for such things (while you also do what you can to earn a daily crust), the time passing can feel as rushed as the scenery passing outside the window of a high-speed train. We're always having to get the balance just right. First this, and then that. Both... and... breathing in and out, living ... while you try to hang onto the fleeting image of a red-tail hawk hunkered down on the branch of a skeletal tree, overlooking a golden stubble of weeds that poke through a layer of early snow, his sharp eyes alert, and beak and talons, poised, waiting for a tiny mouse-shaped opportunity. Meanwhile, the scenery blurs past... our motion through time can feel like progress. Or not. 

Sometimes, all I see is change... but I keep hoping for progress. And I'll wish the same for you, whatever your creative dreams may be. Do what you do, and believe in yourself.   

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