We’ve finished reorganizing our space in the basement and it feels so good to have it set for our future. For the other members of my family, that future is, for the most part, a known quantity. I’ve settled into my space with a clear understanding that what is to come in my immediate future is, for some part, unknown.
I’ve reached a crossroads in what I’m doing. It’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit to confront that, to understand what it means, and to settle myself in for the untangling of what’s in front of me. My children are both in school full time, we are out of the major dizzying spirals of what began in early 2020, and it’s time for me to figure out what I want to do moving forward. I’m chasing possibilities and opportunities and while those things unfurl, I am taking care of what is known. The biggest choice in that was to send out one of my manuscripts, MS:SB, to a few other trusted readers. It feels exciting and nerve wracking to have it out there again and it’s especially different because I don’t know exactly what to expect from this round of feedback. I’m actually very excited about that because I know the story is settled in the main action, the character’s relationships are so much more filled out than they were before and the main character’s darkest night of the soul is so much more intense. I hope to hear back about how it all come together this time around and where more needs to be added to bring the story to the next level. I love MS:SB and because it is one of the manuscripts I care about most, I know I had a harder time ‘killing my darlings’ than I have with other stories. I hope the feedback I get will help me achieve that next level of story writing.
While MS:SB is out there being read and picked apart, I am going to finally finish the chapters in MS:TS with the second sister in the narrator’s seat. I am having such a hard time, not just with the unknown quantity of my future, but with staying in this second sister’s point-of-view (POV). I have to commit to sitting down with her and writing for her. It would be helpful this week to possibly do a journaling exercise where I write from maybe a moment after the story is done. It might help me understand her better. I’ve been meaning to do this, but I think I need to take the pressure off to make it a longer time commitment to do this exercise or to make it a larger thing than it needs to be. That’s the energy I need to have with me moving forward over this next month or so. I need to take the pressure off of myself to do anything more than it needs to be done. If I can make these things easier to get in and out of, with my writing, revising, and other things, I think I will be able to do them more easily.
In case you haven’t been told today, you more than enough.
With you in words, Nikole
Nikole Breault 
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