Hi to any and all who happen to be reading this. It’s truly wonderful to have you guys along with me on this journey. Writing is such a solitary thing, it took me years before I ever considered publishing anything. Some of our writing gets so personal that we shy away from sharing it with anyone.

This experiment has done more for me than just hold me accountable for a weekly word count. It has made me more comfortable with sharing my thoughts with the world, which has only made my writing better in the end. So I have you all to thank for that, as well.

And on to the Check-in!

I really squeezed out a minor victory this week. I barely made it, limping over the finish line late last night, finishing with 5,035 words. It’s a victory all the same, though it shies in comparison to the mammoth weeks I had in the prior three check-ins.

Part of me is disappointed in myself for not putting up a huge number, as I was really hitting a stride in the whole month of March; I am my own worst critic, after all. But I’m actually doing okay with this, and I’m learning to be more forgiving when I fall short of my own expectations.

I mean, my very first check-in was a failure at hitting 5,000 words in that first week. The old me would have just thrown in the towel, deciding I couldn’t start something like this with a failing week. But I just told myself that it was okay to fail, that it was all part of this process, and I used it to motivate myself.

In a recent journal entry, I described a little trip I took to La Crosse this past week, which is the main reason I was under the gun to hit my goal for the week. But the little break was desperately needed, for both me and my wife. I could feel the stress of my daily life just melting away as we lounged in the Hotel.

We have spent the last year in lockdown, living in a small rural village in Wisconsin. There isn’t much to do here in typical times, but even less so in this time of Covid-19. So just a night away in a hotel was enough. We enjoyed being away from our sweet, yet tirelessly needy cats. The only other place we went was a restaurant for breakfast the following day, but it felt like a real vacation.

But now the real work begins. The end of this book is on the horizon. I can see the gentle shades of its inevitable sunset filling the sky ahead of me.

And with book two of the Children of Bast series done, it’ll be on to the next. I’ll be juggling the writing and editing even more so, trying to get it all right as rain. Most of the editing will be cutting away the dead parts of this flower I’ve been cultivating, and making sure that continuity is strong throughout the series. It will be an exciting time, especially with this being my first series.

Until Next Time: Don’t let your failures define you; use them to shape the person you want to become. And through it all, we might just find out exactly who we are.