Blog Post No. 526
Welcome to the end of 2022. As is tradition, I’ll write a nice long post looking back on the year when I get to the year-end of the blog in mid January. This post is all about looking to the future. The distant future of 2023, to be exact. Will there finally be flying cars and food in pill form? I have no idea, but I kind of hope not. I’ll settle for better healthcare and cheaper groceries. I’d also really like to finally get out of the house more and specifically start attending events again. I’ve been writing these looking ahead posts since the early days of the website and so far my predictions have been unreliable at best. That doesn’t mean I’m not sincere when I state my goals (also, it’s mostly fun to look to the future and dream). Also, the lock-downs have reminded us that the world doesn’t care about what plans you’ve made.
It’s holiday season and my family’s Christmas celebration is happening this weekend, so that’s what this post is going to be all about. But, before I dive into that, I do want to point out that I did manage to get the sixth draft of the Invasion Novel done last Friday. I even sent it out to a couple of folks who were eager do do a beta read for me. I have no idea when they’ll get back to me, but the current word count is under 120 000 words, so I suspect it’ll be some time. While I wait for that, I’ve started on another short story. I’m still shaking off the short story cobwebs, but I’m excited to be back to the format that I first fell in love with.
I sure hope I’m not going to be shooting myself in the foot (since I write my posts before their Thursday release) but if things go according to my current schedule, I should be done this draft of the Invasion Novel by tomorrow. I’m calling it the sixth draft even though I’ve been through the book more than six times. I feel like this is the sixth version of the book, though, so I’m sticking with it. While I’m optimistic that I’ll be finished, there is one potential issue that could make me a liar.
I have a very minor dilemma that actually isn’t a dilemma. I want to do something and I know I shouldn’t and I’ve learned through years of inactivity that there is an obvious solution. Even thought I know that, I still have this want. I think the want is really an amalgamation of fatigue, stress, fear, and maybe a bit of boredom. It’s the worst kind of want to act upon and I know that and to be honest, I already know I’m not going to act on it, but it’s still there while I write this. 
If you thought I was done talking about the Invasion Novel just because I finished it (and maybe suggested that I wouldn’t be talking about it as much) you were dead wrong. I’ve just been in a holding pattern waiting for Christian to wrap up the first review of the chunky book and working on short stories in the interim. (I’m just finishing off the last one that I had started since I’d like to submit it for a collection at the end of the month).
It’s been about a year since I was first called back to the day job. I was off for over a year from mid March 2020 to August of 2021. I feel like I did alright in that time off. I released the third and fourth novellas in 
Now that I’m back into the swing of writing short stories (one finished, one almost finished) I’ve started to get caught up in thinking about the process of writing again. I’ve only done the first drafts of those shorts and I know that there is a lot to fix in them. I’m in no rush to do the second drafts. I tend to have the best results when I wait at least a month before getting into editing. For these stories, it may be longer since I’m going to jump back into the Invasion Novel as soon as the first beta read is back. 
My first love of books came from reading Philip K. Dick short stories in high school. I loved the creative ideas and the tight prose. I had an idea that I wanted to tell stories before discovering those collections, but after reading them, I started to see the possibility of becoming a writer.
The end is near for the fifth and final novella, Snow from a Distant Sky. As I mentioned 
January was tough. All my shifts at the day job were cancelled (as I mentioned 
Ben Van Dongen 