First: December. I finished the first draft of Hunter’s Redoubt on the 24th of December – in time to panic about Christmas tree & presents & Christmas eve dinner. It’s 303k words long, so… the longest first book in any series I’ve written T_T. It has gone off to the editor. Hopefully, it will go off to artist, too.
I did not finish Shards of Glass, but I’m working on that now, in the lull between submitting a draft and getting editorial feedback.
My hope was to work on both books at the same time – as I do for most of a book’s life. But usually when I hit the end of a book, I put the other on pause. I eventually had to do that with this one, because the end of a book eats all of my creative brain, and it took me four hours to turn that brain around and work on anything else >.<.
On Christmas day, our fridge died. Just before Christmas, our dryer died. Both are older, and both require expensive repairs. So: Boxing day sales, which meant the 26th was not a relaxing day. Our dryer arrives tomorrow. Our fridge arrives the day after. In the meantime, we’ve been using a large picnic cooler on the back porch – but I really miss having an actual fridge.
And, to add to that: we’ve had repairs done on the dishwasher and the washing machine, but those were within reason; we’ve had a leak from the upstairs bathroom repaired – and the hard part for that one was finding what was leaking. But: bathroom not leaking anymore.
So I’ve been a bit absent as things are breaking down, and I really, really hope that 2023 does not have any more appliance deaths.
But: we are all healthy at the moment; we had our usual Christmas day with family & found family; we had a lovely, quiet New Year’s Eve with a few friends.
I hope you all had holidays with less things breaking down :).
Melanie 
tsnor 
Susan Cook 
br60103 
Kathy Scappace 
Christina Grykuliak 
Mary Allen 
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As an apartment dweller, the only appliances I own are my washer and drier. The rest came with the apartment. They are all tittering on the edge of AD (appliance death) but as long as the temps stay low and the microwave holds out, I’ll be fine. Glad you made it through…