A Long Overdue Update

Hello, my bookish Explorers. It has been so long since I gave you an update on life. What have I been up to? Well . . .

I finished grad school (hooray!), earned my degree and my teaching credential (hooray!), then started looking for a job (ug). My son went of to COLLEGE (dies), and my daughter started her junior year of high school (!).

For a while there I didn’t think I was going to get a job, but I finally did! I am a fifth grade ELA/Social Studies teacher for an online school. That means I get to work from home, which is the case for most teachers in the world these days, anyway, though this school was teaching online long before Covid came along. It’s a very different way of teaching, but I’m enjoying it and my students.

My new job has left almost no time for anything else these days. I’ve only been working for three weeks, so in a way, I’m still training and learning, which also means I’m putting in extra hours, just to keep up.

I have not written in what feels like forever, but is really only about five weeks. (weeps)

Two other things have happened that have kept me from writing. Working with Stephanie Morrill and Shannon Dittemore on Go Teen Writers: Write Your Novel book and the To Darkness Fled audio book (!). This last weekend, Gillian sent me files for proof listening. I am SO EXCITED to get the audio book for To Darkness Fled out into the world, but with my new job, I’ll only be able to do 1-2 chapters a day. I still hope to have it released by the end of the month (fingers crossed).

Some have asked me, “Jill, what’s the progress on Hunger look like?” Well, I was about 1/3 of the way through the Hunger rewrite when I got my job, so I hope that in a couple weeks, once the To Darkness Fled audio book is completed, I’ll be able to set aside Saturday mornings to write, write, write. My new job affords me ZERO weekdays off, however, so I’ve decided to shoot for my school’s Spring Break to release Hunger. This is still tentative. But if all goes to play, I will do my cover reveal in mid-January and release Hunger mid-April. That’s much longer than I wanted to wait, but it’s the only thing that makes sense with my new work schedule. And then, my guess is, next summer will be spend working on the From Darkness Won audio book and getting all of my Kickstarter audio CDs ordered, packaged, and mailed out to my backers.

Somehow. Someday. All the things will be finished. (hopes)

THEN, maybe, hopefully, I’ll be able to get out the two fantasy novel drafts I wrote in 2018-2019, dust them off, and see what’s to be done about those lovelies. I really did like both stories a great deal. They just needed more time than Grad School Jill had to give.

So, that is my update. How are all of you? What have you been up to lately?