Holy End of Summer Break, Batman!

Tomorrow, I go back to work, which means it's time to evaluate whether my summer was as productive as I had hoped.

65 Days of Summer - Writing Challenge: I think we can all agree that I failed. I wrote a prompt nearly every day for about a month, then I dropped off. Admittedly, not my best effort, but I don't consider it a failure. I learned a lot from that month.

I took the challenge while I was querying "Cody," and as we all know, querying is hard. Soul crushing kind of hard. I was trying to switch gears and focus on "Alyssa," but I couldn't get "Cody" out of my head. The challenge helped with that. Thirty minutes of writing on a specific prompt every day got me out of my funk. It was a good exercise, but not one that necessarily needed to continue for two months. After a few weeks, I was entirely focused on "Alyssa," which meant I couldn't focus on anything else. Yay! I love when I get too caught up with my characters to care about anything else!

In conclusion: 65 Days of Summer - Writing Challenge was a success.

My main goal for "Cody" was to successfully query it. And I did!

Speaking of "Alyssa," another goal was to get through my first round of big edits. I got about two-thirds of the way through. It's been a bit slower process than I expected. I keep going back and revising the same things over again.

In the personal life, I had hoped to deep clean the house and clean out the basement. Possibly even rebuild that broken down deck of ours. These things did not happen. Well, the deep clean partially happened. Then, within two days, my kids wrecked it. I'm starting to wonder what the point of cleaning is when children just destroy your efforts. I can't wait until they're old enough to push a vacuum around!

All in all, I'm calling it a productive summer. I didn't think about school at all! And that is, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing I've ever written!