Newsletter March 2025 - Spring Sprung
The silence was excruciating as I watched their eyes scan back and forth as they read. No one showed any emotion, and the silence went on forever.
Hey everyone,
If you're like me, you've been getting out and enjoying the warmer days, flowers, and allergies. Still, it's a small price to pay. Last year we added hydrangeas, calla lilies, helleborus, and a necta-plum tree to our little garden, and it's amazing to see all the new growth and colors out there.
This update will be a short one, as I've been slammed with day-job work and prep for our choir concert this evening. I'm writing the newsletter in the morning while it's still dark out and the kids are still asleep, mere hours before it will publish. Usually I write it a few days ahead of time, but a deadline's a deadline.
As we approach concert day, I practice my songs more and more, and my confidence in my singing plummets. I'm usually fine once I'm on stage singing, but man, the days leading up are stressful. This time around, I'm also in charge of setting up cameras to film the show and then edit together videos for sharing, so there's extra load on the old CPU. I do enjoy film editing, so it's a small price to pay.
And speaking of confidence plummeting before showing off my artistry, I finally showed Under the Diamond Moon to folks outside the house. I shared the first two pages to some folks in my writing group and got feedback. They read it live in front of me on a Zoom call. The silence was excruciating as I watched their eyes scan back and forth as they read. No one showed any emotion, and the silence went on forever.
Once they were all done, it turned out they all loved it! Whew. It still needs work, but I wanted early impressions about how well I balanced teasing info about my fictional Earth with introducing the main character. I want folks to know that there's tech and magic and that something bad happened to the world before they get too far in, but I also don't want to info dump. Oh, and also they need to start getting interested in Lan (the MC). Apparently I managed to pull it off. Yay!
In the writing group, I've been sorted into a subgroup of four who are all writing/editing first and second drafts of our thrillers. I'll be sharing my entire first chapter, and I look forward to more feedback from fresh eyes. Since I know the story so well, it's hard for me to tell if I'm giving too much or not enough.
If you want to know some of the background research I'm doing, check out this article I uncovered while looking into the archaeology of caves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X24004966
Whoops, I hear the sound of the child's alarm, so that means it's time to publish this newsletter and start the day. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and if you're in my choir, break a vocal chord tonight!
Best,
Todd
