Hi, friend! It’s been a minute. I have the best of intentions to post here more regularly, but I’m still working out how to make it happen. After all, I update a lot of outlets regularly, and putting up posts on my personal blog often drops off the bottom of the list when the energy has run out.

At any rate, I think it’s been nearly a year since I did a proper blog update that wasn’t an essay of some kind. (Yikes.) And just a few things have happened in that year!

Mostly, I’m going to skip them and tell you what’s happening in my life right now. (I mean, you don’t really want to read a play-by-play anyway, do you?)

Let’s start with a writing update.

Every Bell that Rings is in Revisions

I’m almost finished my first round of revisions for Book 2 of my Peace Country Romance series, which goes to my developmental editor next week.

This book is the follow-up to Every Star that Shines. I began writing it in late 2022 after launching Every Star, with plans to publish it for last Christmas season. But the many challenges of last year that I mostly skipped over (but which I hinted at in this post last December), plus taking several months to move My Secret Wish Knitting to its own website, meant that the drafting process got interrupted early on, and I didn’t really start work on it again until late in the fall of 2023.

However, I dove back into drafting in earnest at the beginning of this year (in conjunction with my new reader community, the Books and Tea League, which I’ll talk about more in a minute), and I finished the first draft several weeks ago. I really love how this sweet Christmas romance is shaping up, and I’m excited for my readers to get to know Noel and Stephanie better.

Here’s a little more about the book:

Can his Christmas spirit banish her ghosts of Christmas past?

Stephanie Neufeld despises Christmas cheer. How can she get into the spirit when the season only reminds her of a childhood she’d rather forget? But when the nurse agrees to cover a co-worker’s shift to avoid the town Santa Claus parade, she doesn’t expect her first patient to be her high school crush—the guy who once ghosted her after a single date.

Noel Butler can’t just sit around for the holidays with a busted leg. Instead, he concocts a new challenge: make the attending nurse he almost dated fall in love with Christmas. Since she won’t speak to him, playing Secret Santa won’t entangle his fiercely guarded heart. Will it?

While Noel’s selfless dedication to helping some fostered teenage twins melts Stephanie’s icy reserve, she can’t help but feel his Santa hat isn’t his only secret. When old wounds reopen, will fear keep Noel and Stephanie frozen in the past… or can they discover a warm new reason to celebrate the season?

Every Bell that Rings is the second standalone title in the sweet and clean small-town Peace Country Romance series. If you like second chance interracial romance, heartwarming stories of healing, and joy-filled white Christmases, you’ll love this wholesome love story.

New Reader Community Launched

Last November-ish, after working on it for nearly four months, I launched my new reader community: the Books and Tea League (BATL). I envision it as a place where I can spoil my readers and really get to know them better.

One of the primary benefits for readers so far has been getting early access to the first draft of Every Bell that Rings as I wrote it. I’m also creating a digitally narrated audiobook for Finding Heaven, and those chapters are also being posted in the membership as they are created. Free followers get access to several stories and previews of all my other books, and premium members get access to my entire catalogue, as well as some other fun perks.

The membership has already gone through a couple of iterations. I originally hosted it here on my site, but due to the cost of the service I was using to gate content (since the native features of Squarespace at the time weren’t suitable for my needs), I moved to the Ream platform in January. Ream is a baby company, “designed by authors for authors and readers.” It’s got some awesome features already, such as a built in e-reader app, and it’s constantly introducing more. (Their constantly improving Discovery feature is a great way to find other authors and their work.)

I’m really excited about Ream, and I’m excited about continuing to grow my community there. BATL members get news before any other channel most of the time, and I’m always thinking of ways to make the benefits even better. (I’m particularly looking forward to the community group features they’ll be releasing sometime this year.)

If you want to learn more, you can check out this page on my website. Or click the button below to explore the Books and Tea League on Ream.

What’s Coming Next

As per usual, I’m keeping busy with client work for editing and copywriting, and have especially been enjoying some recent author coaching projects. Besides my indie author clients, I’ve been regularly writing book descriptions for a major publisher since early 2022, and I now also get regular work as an editor for nonfiction from a small Christian publisher, which has been super fulfilling.

I’m grateful for that freelance “day job” work while I continue to explore my own creative projects and expand my book and knitting pattern catalogues.

Actually, earlier this year, I almost decided to close down My Secret Wish Knitting, but I have since changed my mind as my health has improved. Which just goes to show you, you should never any make major decisions while you’re feeling poorly that could be postponed until you have no choice. :-) (I’m not actually sure how wise that is, but it worked out in this case, lol.)

As far as writing projects, I’m very excited to be diving back into the world of Rise of the Grigori to work on Book 3 in that series. Because mermaids! And magic! And high-stakes epic fantasy! Woot!

I also hope to finish my plot structure book for writers this year, and am attempting to also work in regular updates on my Author Alchemist blog (formerly my Writing Tips blog). So you can see why I’ve been neglecting this one a bit, lol. (You can sign up for my Word Wizard Academy newsletter to get updates about the book, the Author Alchemist posts, and a free plot structure booklet, if you’re also a writer or aspiring to be one.)

Exploring Other Art Forms

In addition to writing, I still knit once in a while, of course.

I’m also developing my digital art hobby, especially since the explosion of AI-generated art. I’ve been working on improving my skills a great deal, and I’ve even been eyeing up a few courses to help me become an even more skilled digital artist. It’s been awesome for my mental health to have this outlet, and I love improving my skillset in this way.

You can see a few of my images around the website and in this post. I even sold a piece of art as a cover image recently for an upcoming issue of Mythulu magazine!

I’m trying to figure out if there’s an actual market for my work somewhere, like maybe selling greeting cards or prints here from my website or in an Etsy store. For now, I’m mostly just posting my images in the Books and Tea League and playing around so I can learn and make beautiful things. I also love completing smaller creative projects with more immediate gratification than the long slog of a writing project or knitting pattern.

Here’s a piece from a series I’m working on of personified nature fairies. I finished it to include with an article I also wrote for Mythulu about my process. The piece is called First Frost.

What do you think? Would you like to see an option to purchase images like these in some form?

Side note:

I just noticed some imperfections remaining in this piece that I didn’t clean up completely during the finishing process, but now I’m trying to decide if I want to. Part of the interesting thing about AI-generated art is that it’s not perfect.

I think a lot of the angst I see in the creative community is that people are both upset with how well AI generators can do (so they feel duped that the heavy lifting was done by a machine, not a human), but they’re also upset with the AI’s shortcomings, and glory in pointing out the flaws in the final images. I think the way forward with these machines is to use them to assist us in our work while not expecting them to be able to replace a human eye and artistic skill completely.

The errors I see in this image were actually introduced by me while fixing other errors the AI had created in the original image. So yes, I’ll probably go fix them, because I can.

But also, I might leave them. Because, overall, I’m far too focused on creating something flawless, and this is my hobby, not my job. It’s healthy for me to have something like this that doesn’t require me to hone it to perfection to enjoy it.

And it would be healthy for the critics to recognize that art, even AI-generated art, is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which means there is a place for all types of art in this world.

For more about my position on using AI to assist in the creative process, see my last post, “Finding My Voice in the AI Wars”.

(Note that I’m approaching AI images from the point of view of a creator. There are other issues related to people using these images to deceive, but that, unfortunately, is a human problem, not a machine problem.)

Personal Stuff

Time continues to move on, and my family continues to evolve. My oldest son, Jude, is nearly finished his combat engineer training in the army. We’re thankful that he’ll be posted to Alberta when he’s finished in May. After most of a year where he’s been far on the east side of the country (with a trip home at Christmas), it will be nice to know we can see him more often.

My other two boys are living at home, working, and figuring out their next steps.

You may remember that I posted about our bad fire season last year. That didn’t just happen here—Canada in general had a bad fire season in 2023.

This year is off to a roaring start—literally. Three days ago, a fire only a few kilometres from my town and only 17 km from our home required a two-day evacuation from people only slightly closer to it than we are. We had barely any snow this winter and it melted early. Our yard and field are dry and brown, and we desperately need moisture.

I’m doing my best to hope for the best, but I’m also preparing for another bad year as much as I’m able and making evacuation plans with my family. I have a feeling this year will be another exercise in learning to trust God for the safety and well-being of all those I care about around the country.

It’s a lesson I need to relearn often.

How are you handling the anxieties of our current world condition? Everyone’s emotions have been running high for years, and I feel like I’ve forgotten what a less-distressed world felt like. So I try to only focus on the things that affect me, and only the things I can control about them or do to prepare, for my own mental health. I often don’t have bandwidth for more than that.

How about you? Any tricks to retain your peace of mind in troubled times like this?