I started 2020 on a bit of a sabbatical. James and I flew to India, back to a place we’d been before, in order to rewrite the book draft we’d completed on our last stay. Indoor Boh is a much-reworked crime caper with getaway by bike and boat but, at this point, it is still not completely ready for pitching to publishers. We’re having a hard time finding beta readers, so talk to me if you are interested!
Erotica writing hasn’t deserted me. It’s a combination of the writing prompt in the calls for submissions and the idea of writing a sex scene…which is honestly my favorite part. “Hold On Harder” was published this year in Best Bondage Erotica Vol 1, and I submitted stories to two anthologies coming out in 2021.
The other, larger and more confusing, project I’ve been working on this year is called The Pound. It’s a novel that isn’t really a romance, though it will have a poly HEA. It’s about what happens when you realize that it’s time to pass a torch, when the passion of your work fades and leaves you mired in the pure capitalism of it all. It’s hard, it’s personal, and it’s deep. Turns out, that’s not such a great formula for simply firing up the old Baby Puter and typing out enough scenes to call it a book. This one might have to gestate a while.
At the opposite end of the difficulty continuum, I’ve continued (with James) to edit the Waterway Guide. This year, we edited or completely re-wrote the Narraganset, Maine, and parts of the Chesapeake Bay and Massachusetts. Our pandemic year differed from many others in that we could distance ourselves safely by anchoring our boat and staying on it as much as possible.
We did go ashore for shopping and…whew…foraging for firewood, but we also traveled from Warwick, RI, through the Narragansett and the Long Island Sound, down the Atlantic coast and up the Delaware Bay, then through the C&D Canal and as far south in the Chesapeake as Solomons. We turned around when the jellyfish got too bad for comfortable swimming and did a reverse trip that took us into Maine before James was offered a job in Boston and we settled in for some serious pandemic prodjing.
As you might have surmised, another chunk of this year’s writing was done on our sailing blog, sovereignnations.net. If you have an interest in sailing or boat projects, that’s a fine place to keep up with my goings-on.