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What Am I Working On?

The Witch of Myrwist Wood: I have finished draft 3 and it is currently sitting with Phill. I’m really happy with how this one has turned out. I wrote it as a stand-alone book, but I might write a sequel… Maybe? I haven’t decided yet. More on it below.

Untitled Ghost book: I’m over 52,000 words in now and am liking the way this one is shaping up. With any luck I’ll have the first draft done by the end of this month or sometime next month.

What Have I Been Reading?

I recently finished Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs, which was a fun read. It’s about magic books and family and secrets. I’ll have a post about it up on my Patreon in a couple days for those who are interested.

Now I’m rereading Something Rich and Strange by Patricia A. McKillip, one of my all-time favorite writers. It’s been fun reading back through her books and seeing how they hit differently from when I first read them. I highly recommend her books if you’ve never read them. She mostly wrote fantasy, and some of my favorites include Od Magic, Ombria in Shadow, Alphabet of Thorn, and The Bell at Sealey Head, but really, they’re all wonderful.

What Have I Been Watching?

We finally finished What We Do in the Shadows and have moved on to Resident Alien. We loved What We Do in the Shadows, but Resident Alien has been fun, too. It’s about an alien (Alan Tudyk) who crash-lands on Earth. He’s on a mission, and to complete it he has to pretend to be human and interact with the locals. This leads to some really awkward conversations and situations which have me both cringing and laughing. Definitely worth a watch.

What Have I Been Playing?

I cannot emphasize enough how much I love Wytchwood.

I came across it quite a while back and finally gave in and allowed myself to play it. While I expected to love it, I didn’t realize just how quickly it would suck me in.

In this game you play as a witch who wakes up to find a goat in her house. He’s not an ordinary goat, though. Some sort of demon or other entity has possessed the goat and tells her that she made a deal with him. She can’t remember anything, so he says if she’ll complete a few tasks for him, he’ll restore her memories.

From there you get to start exploring, starting with the Forest. There are multiple other areas, including the Fields, the Swamp, the Village, the Market, the Docks, the Graveyard, and the Mountain. As you can see from my screenshots, the artwork is gorgeous.

Like in any good witch game, you get your own grimoire, which fills out as the game progresses. You cast spells and make reagents to interact with the various creatures and people you meet.

There were tons of laugh-out-loud moments for me, either in the way the witch interacted with something or in the dialogue, or simply in the way things were described (or the characters’ names, such as the guards I came across: Dingus and Dongus).

More importantly, this game was a HUGE source of inspiration for me. The whole time I played, I was itching to get to work on my own books (an urge equaled only by my desire to keep playing. 😅 )

In particular, this game made me want to work on a sequel for The Witch of Myrwist Wood. I left things open to continuation, as I usually do in my novels, but I truly had no plans to write a sequel to that book. Now… It’s a definite maybe.

Anyway, as soon as I finished the game I had the desire to play it again (always a good sign), but I switched to Baldo once more. I finally finished the main game last week, followed by the sequel DLC (which should’ve been part of the main game, honestly). While parts of it were fun, there was definitely room for improvement.

Prepare Thyself for Merriment!

It’s Ren Faire time again! For the next several weekends Phill and I will be at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival, my home away from home. Come find us in the Cave if you drop by!

Language Corner

In this section I like to share words from languages I’m learning. I decided on more Irish words this month.

What’s up with all the language stuff?

I don’t suppose I’ve ever explained this section. I’ve always been fascinated by other languages. My only option in high school was Spanish, so I continued with it in college since I was already familiar with it.

One semester I took an elective class, just because it seemed fun: Introduction to Linguistics. I absolutely fell in love with studying how languages work, and ended up switching my minor to linguistics.

Perhaps a year or two after I graduated, I came across Duolingo. It hadn’t been around long at that point. I tried French first, and completed maybe one or two lessons before I realized I could learn a language I really wanted to learn: Irish. (Yes, Irish is its own language, and was spoken in Ireland long before English arrived. I refer to it as Irish rather than Gaelic because there are actually three Gaelic languages: Irish, Scottish, and Manx.)

Anyway, long story short, I studied Irish for years through Duolingo, finished the course, then moved on to another app called Drops. I finished that Irish course as well, and more recently I finished the Irish courses offered by Rosetta Stone and Mango Languages.

Learning languages has become a bit of a hobby for me, and I’ve dabbled in several of Duolingo’s courses, including German, Welsh, Dutch, Hungarian, and Esperanto. For the last several years, though, my main focus there has been Norwegian. I also focused on Finnish for a bit, and am trying to start it up again. More recently I started learning Japanese, which is very different from the languages I’ve studied before, since it has its own syllabaries.

I also recently decided to try a new language app, but since this is getting long, I’ll talk more about that next time.

Patreon & Ko-fi

I post once a week on Patreon about all sorts of things: writing, books I’m reading, things going on in life. Once a month I also share sneak peeks at whatever book I’m working on. It would mean the world to me if you considered joining.

I am also on Ko-fi, which is sort of like Patreon, but with one key difference: you’re not locked into a subscription. Ko-fi allows readers to donate however often they’d like to creators they follow. No subscriptions if you don’t want them, no commitments, and you have control over when and how you donate. I don’t post quite as often on Ko-fi, but I’ve been having fun sharing little micro-stories there, if you’re interested.

Get in Touch

Thanks for reading!