The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men…

Or my 2022 wrap-up post.

GUYS. Can you believe that 2022 is gone? And here we are, sitting solidly in the beginning of 2023. My brain hasn’t caught up to that yet. I don’t know that I was fully prepared to start a new year, and that was mainly due to the fact that 2022 didn’t go at all to plan.

A Bit of Gold: A Rumpelstiltskin Story

One of my biggest goals for 2022 was to publish A Bit of Gold. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I explained a lot of my reasoning for pushing the publication date in this post, so I won’t rehash it now. However, I did think that there was a good chance I would be able to get it out for Christmas. After all, when I chose to do the rewrite, I still had a good chunk of the year left to work in.

HA.

Life had other plans. Life always does.

By August, I hadn’t progressed very far with the rewrite — at least, not nearly as far as I’d hoped to be by then. And of course, besides being busy with summer and kids and the like, something extra happened that proved a large physical difficulty to writing at all. More on that later. But I was still determined to pus through and complete the rewrite before Christmas by participating in my friend Christine’s Fall Fic Frenzy. (Go to this post if you want all the details on that.)

And how did THAT go?

Fall Fic Frenzy Update

It happened. And I wrote a grand total of 8.4K. Eight thousand and four hundred words. Nowhere near my original goal. But I was strangely okay with that.

I think it wasn’t as stressful to write since I wasn’t under the NaNo banner. I was enjoying my story and my characters, but I didn’t feel the extra urge to write, write, write. I had initially wanted to write a traditional 50K, but as the challenge progressed I kept altering my goal to fit my changing lifestyle. I cut it down to 30K. Then 20K. And in the end, I only wrote 8.4K. I mean, it definitely was not one of my better writing challenges. But I still wrote. I got 8.4K written that hadn’t been there before.

But A Bit of Gold‘s rewrite wasn’t complete before Christmas. I am still holding on to finishing and publishing the book this year, but I don’t yet have a set date for that. Obviously, you guys will be the first to know once a date is finalized.

Life News

On top of homeschooling my oldest daughter, Ani, this year we began potty training our son, Joey. And I 100% agree with all those moms who claim that potty training girls is so much easier than training boys. We had a roller coaster of adventures with our younger daughter, Lacie, when introducing her to solid foods we discovered that she had a fairly severe allergy to both soy and eggs. I’m allergic to soy as well, so that allergy wasn’t anything new for me, but eggs has been a bit more tricky to navigate.

But the big news — and the reason I was physically unable to do much computer/screen work this year — is that I’m pregnant with baby #4. And it’s another boy! It was a complete surprise, but we’re so excited to welcome little Benny into our lives in late spring. My morning sickness this time was much worse, but thankfully, I’m far enough along that we’re past all of that. As with my other pregnancies, I’m struggling to look at screens, since doing so triggers nausea. Blue light glasses have helped some, but it’s been easier just to avoid screens.

Happy New Year!

What are some things that you guys are looking forward to most this year? What were some highlights from last year? Let me know below! And be sure to keep an eye out here for news about A Bit of Gold‘s publication date!

God bless!