I have written hundreds of thousands of words in the last year, and while I can’t possibly say I have enjoyed all of that work, it is a return to something I have missed for a long, long time. I’m grateful life has given me the opportunity to spend time on something that I love. Even so, the combination of that output and a particularly stressful series of events at my day job had me on the ropes, and I needed to step away. So, for the first time in a long time I shunned the keyboard and the screen and spent as much time as I could outdoors.
The one benefit to my writing was that my break gave me the chance to spend real quality time with the setting for The Beasts They Become. The picture above is just a taste of the land that surrounds the book’s central location, and I hope quietly living in it for a while will inject a real sense of place in the manuscript. I’m about to dive back in so we will find out soon.