Heya,
Let’s get the business out of the way, first.
We’ve entered the last week of Write-a-thon 2022 and, if you haven’t already, I beseech you to please make a donation to Clarion West in my name. A thousand thank you’s to those who have already donated to this great organization. It’s a great time for me to gather strength and motivation from this shared writing community, my family, and friends. Also, there’s nothing like sharing goals and needing to achieve them.
To that, on Friday, I passed the 20k mark in my word count! Thus I’ve achieved my writing goal for Write-a-thon 2022. Now let’s see how close I get to 30k… But, I haven't achieved my fundraising goal of $2,500. The fundraiser ends on Saturday, July 30th at midnight, but you can make me work more. Because if someone donates another $75, I have to create and post a full-color character illustration on my website. And if you’re particularly generous, or cruel (no judgement), and we make it to the $2,500 mark, I’ll create and post on my website an original full-color annotated galaxy map for the series. So, my work for Write-a-thon 2022 may be far from over.
Clarion West is an organization dedicated to support emerging and underrepresented voices by providing writers with world-class instruction to empower their creation of wild and amazing worlds. I’m fortunate to be a well-represented creator, with an amazing network, but I am aware there are so many who need the safety and support that Clarion West provides in order to express themselves. This is why I support this organization through my writing and cheerleading for these six weeks—every bit helps. They are good people doing good work.
Business concluded.
Following a patchy week-and-a-half without my laptop, I picked my computer up from the repair shop on Tuesday at 12:02 PM, raced home, and got the blank machine running in time to host my Drafting Sprint Session for the Write-a-thon 2022 at 1PM. (With seven minutes to spare.) The session was one of the best so far, and I look forward to the last one this Tuesday with excitement and sadness.
I spent the rest of the week restoring my computer files and software, writing my book, and recording the first two podcast guests I met at HeroesCon earlier in the month (just in case you missed that newsletter, here’s the link) The big downer was learning that the external drive with all my data could not be recovered and may be dead. Whatever was not in Dropbox, or on a second back-up hard drive may be permanently lost. Photos, music and work files from 2019. Not the end of the world, but pretty frustrating—I don't think I’m allowing myself to feel the loss.
This week I’ll be in full-on writing mode and working on a long overdue side-project for a patient quartet. In all this confusion I’ve been developing my streamlined digital/social platform plan, and will continue this. If you consider yourself knowledgeable in this arena, shoot me an email and I’d love to share my ideas with you for some practical feedback. I’ve earmarked some of you already for this, so don’t be surprised to hear form me.
Tuesday, I’ll post the next episode of my podcast with Andy Bennett, a phenomenal pen and ink illustrator. Look out for the link to the audio version, or catch the YouTube version here.
Wish me luck on this last leg of the fundraiser and thanks for reading.
Till next week!
Alex