Greetings all!  I can only apologize for being MIA for so long.  I’ve had a bit of winter depression, I think.  My fiancé and I only moved two hours north of Louisville, but it’s very different weather-wise.  It’s been so much colder that we’re used to, and the snow!  Indy’s getting lots of snow this winter.  A couple weeks ago, we had enough for the counties in this area to close the roads for three days.  And we at the Johnson hacienda had a nice power outage for most of a day.  It got mighty chilly.  Brian and I were trying to decide whether to try to get my parents a motel room with heat when the electricity thankfully came back on.

I’m between jobs at the moment.  I worked holiday help at Amazon for a few weeks, which left me too exhausted to do any sort of writing, not even a blog post.  I was grateful to be hired, but warehouse work is a little too tough for this 48 year old pudgy woman.  Brian is still working there, which has given me a chance to get some writing done while I do a job search.  I’m not in a hurry.  Amazon and the holidays wore me out.

So I had lots of time to write, and couldn’t manage to write a word.  Until a few days ago, anyway.  To get our butts moving, I challenged my mom, who is writing on her own project, to a 500 words a day challenge.  Doesn’t matter how much we write as long as it’s at least 500 words.  Three days ago I wrote 900, yesterday 2,915, and today, 3,106.  I finished chapter 12 and wrote all of 13 and 14.  Yay me!  That’s by far the most I’ve written since the move.  I hope that I’m mentally getting back in the swing of things.

I wasn’t completely prose-free during that time.  I did write a couple of short stories and reworked some old stories.  But it feels good to be working on the book again.  I’m about 40k words in, and I think it will finish around 70-80k, so I’m about half way through.  And I hope to get more active again here on the blog.  I love blogging, but this winter has really seemed to get me down.

I’m posting chapter 12 of my paranormal romance, Wyrd House, and you can find it here: Wyrd House

I had planned to post the book here in its entirety, but I’ve since found out that posting the whole thing can make it harder to publish it.  So chapter twelve is the last chapter I will post here, and in a few weeks, I intend to cut it down to a three chapter sneak peek.  For those of you who have been reading it, never fear!  Email me at Julianneqjohnson@gmail.com and I will be happy to send you the chapters as they are written.  I love having beta readers, I just can’t do it the way that I planned to.

No more writing news to speak of.  Ghost in the Park querying is still on hiatus.  I still haven’t been paid by Xiaduo Media for the short story they purchased in July, and they said they’d pay by publication or in six months, whichever came first.  I guess it will be February at this rate.

I hope you all are doing well, and I’ll try to get a grammar post or something up soon!

I want spring and I want it now!