It’s fall. I’m so happy. It was a long summer and I spent most of it driving around, listening to podcasts and waiting for the opportunity to close the windows. September and October was that crazy limbo between getting nothing done and getting something done.
And I got something done! Two somethings, actually. The first I’ll talk about a little later. The other is this:
Yep, that’s the cover to the companion novella to my historical YA Shadows May Fall (which reached 10K reads in October.) My short story about Robbie turned into a novella. Initially it was supposed to solely focus on the last few chapters of SMF, but since I started motoring through it the story has equally focused on Robbie’s past before meeting Dorothy. It’s an interesting twist which has allowed me to explore relationships that were only scribbles in a notebook stashed away.
This has been a good exercise leading up to finishing the sequel to SMF. It’s let me reconnect with characters I’ve stepped away from and silenced over the past few months as I mess with other things. I won’t be putting the story up all at once like I did with SMF but instead I’ll be putting up two chapters at a time beginning on Monday, and that should take me through November and possibly December. I’m not even going to attempt to be ambitious enough to try Nanowrimo – I have a few other things I want to wrap up this month so I’m more about the words on the page than trying to write a novel from start to finish.
So that’s autumn so far. I love this time of year. I love the sweaters and the hot drinks and the creativity boost.
Annemarie Hartnett 