Hello again. This was quite an eventful month! I’ve been frantically trying to do everything possible to protect my credit in the wake of the Equifax hack, while also begging my senators not to jack up my health insurance and kill millions of Americans … again. And, as you see above, our construction adventures continue. When dealing with 70 year-old streets and 100 year-old plumbing, there are always surprises. For instance, did you know it was possible to shake a water main to death? Our water was shut off a few times as a result, but no big deal. The work is almost done, and it’s gonna be great when it’s finished.

Writing Updates:
Remy had some helpful notes regarding my outline for Book 3. There’s still parts that we’re both iffy on, but we agree pretty well on what should happen at the beginning.

So guess what? I’ve started drafting! :) It’s been slow to start—my inner editor pops up way too frequently—but I think it’ll be less of a problem once I settle into more of a word-churning groove.

Also, when drafting, I invariably put down my first ideas (usually not my best ideas), and then think of better ideas a few days later. It’s a bit of a dilemma: do I go back and rewrite, or keep plowing forward? While you always want to be making forward progress, I think there are times when you can or even should go back. If you have a good idea and the energy/will to implement it, why not?

Thus, slow going. But progress is being made.

Current Goals:
– Learning Italian. I’m a fan of the Fluent Forever approach, and am trying to follow that for the most part, which involves learning pronunciation and tons of vocabulary before looking at grammar. But I’m just not super-motivated to learn random words in this case. I find myself much more motivated to learn things I might need while traveling. Per favore? Grazie. Accettate carte di credito? and so on. Thankfully, there’s plenty that looks familiar from Latin and Spanish!

– Learning Latin. I prefer my Latin study way more, to be honest. The dead language, of course! What can I say? I keep coming across  little surprises that keep it interesting. Plus, I can’t help but love that my book’s practice sentences aren’t so much The store is around the corner but rather more like He will pay the price for his lack of honor! It’s metal.

– Updating website. I made good progress this month, but still have some testing to do. One big thing I’ve realized is that the home page should have pretty much everything on it that I want people to see. Based on Google Analytics reports of my current site, people do not like clicking hyperlinks or drilling down deep webpage hierarchies anymore.

– Plan/schedule trip to Rome in 2018. My hope is to book travel and accommodations next month. Gotta research where we’d like to stay!

Later Goals:
– Ramp up selling/promotion
[[Not sure what else yet! Should start thinking about it.]]