Newsletter: June 2026 recap

HAPPY JULY! It’s my birthday month, which is always reason to celebrate.

We all survived the end of the school year! We had a wonderful visit with cousins who came up for a week. Their visit coincided with the end of the school year, and I thoroughly approve of it as a way to kick off summer vacation. We’ve only just started our second full week of vacation, but we’re already in the swing of things. The water toys and floats currently live in the back of my car, and things like towels and swimsuits and sunblock are in a bag ready to go at all times. And somehow, my writing hasn’t suffered.

News

I’m reading at ReaderCon! Sunday at 10 am, so if you’re around, I’d love to see you. (If you haven’t yet, check out their program schedule online.)

And for the first time ever, I applied for a residency. It wasn’t on my radar until a couple weeks before the deadline and that spectacular combination of fear and impostor syndrome nearly defeated me, but I got the application in! The whole experience was full of firsts: first artist’s statement, first writer’s CV…

I applied to the family friendly residence at Marble House Project, which is highly competitive so I’m keeping my expectations low. But I’m so proud of myself for just doing it. If nothing else, now I have application materials to build on for next year’s application cycle!

Blog

In June, I posted about the lightbulb moment realized that cons are professional development, which is also helping me feel a whole lot less stressed out looking at the ReaderCon programming and wondering how I’ll juggle all the things I want to do with my kids’ patience levels. I’m not sure why, but I’ll take it.

Stats

This month, I discovered that a piece I submitted back in February…never actually submitted. Something went wonky with the form, apparently. Which is frustrating and disappointing, but it happens. On the bright side, now I have an excuse to go back and work with it some more. It became one thing for that local anthology, and I like it, but it’s not exactly what I wanted to do with the piece.

So that’s a rejection, in it’s own way. No other submissions went out this, and if you’re beginning to see a pattern, maybe you can also begin to understand why I celebrate each rejection (because it’s still proof that I’m doing the work).

I’m focused on this novella revision. I needed to completely rewrite the first two chapters, which I started doing May 13. The first chapter took me about a month. The second took a week and a half. Then I edited three chapters in two hours. The next night, I managed five chapters in an hour and a half. These were short chapters that didn’t need much work, but it still feels amazing.

I’m now just past the midpoint of the story and fixing some things that require more work, which is ok because I love this whole process. I love making my stories better. Once I finish this chapter, I’ll have ten more to go. It sounds like a lot, but it could just be three days, if they don’t need any major changes.

I also have MORE NUMBERS for you! Because this month I actually kept track of my writing work time. For the four full weeks of June, I got five and a half hours the first week, eleven the second week (that week had the deadline for the residency), three hours the third (that was when cousins visited), and eight hours the fourth. All told for the month, I averaged just shy of my target eight hours weekly.

Summer vacation was supposed to make writing time harder, wasn’t it? The kids are with me all day, every day, but the schedule is our own. They’ll be going to camp in the mornings for four weeks, starting mid-July, and I’m curious to see how that will impact writing.

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Currently reading: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Shesheshen is a monster just minding her own business and surviving as best she can, then she finds herself falling in love with a human woman. I love how alien and monstrous Shesheshen is while also being entirely relatable.

Just read: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I know it’s a classic, but I’d never read it. It feels astoundingly prescient and disturbingly familiar. It would be post-apocalyptic, except the apocalypse never happened. Things just kept getting worse and everyone found ways to adjust their “normal.”

*Bookshop.org affiliate links.