I’ve often had trouble doing fun things. That’s also pretty important. It escapes from the day job and feeds my creativity.

My challenge has been taking the time to think about what I would find fun, rather than zooming off to the Smithsonian because it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to have fun. We called that “mandatory fun” in the military.

Mandatory fun happened when we were required to attend an event on Saturday, our day off, so we could have fun.

So I’ve been thinking about what I want to do and not being a pantser for it (i.e. deciding the day of). I roamed about the Virginia is For Lovers site and stumbled on a carriage ride. With horses!

It was a 45-minute tour in Fredericksburg, VA in blistering heat. The horse is named Raven and was an Amish plow horse. Oddball piece of information I learned: The Amish carriage horses get so burned out they can’t be used for carriages after the Amish sell them.

It was a little scary standing this close to the horse. It doesn’t show up as well in the picture, but she was huge!

I did get mandatory horse petting in.

You can see how huge the horse is from this angle.

View of the back of the horse from the carriage. He's very wide!

Writing Updates:

Weekend With Superheroes: This is done! Whoop! Whoop! I just have to make a cycling pass over the ending, and probably run all four editing checkers before I send it off to the continuity editor.

One of the things I’ve discovered on the refresh is that even the copy editor had a hard time spotting missing articles. Running a combination of Grammarly and ProWritingAid catches a lot of these.

Pantser Rebellion: New book! This one is coming out of the work I’m doing with the inventory review for the Smashwords merger. Admin is tough for me to get to and can get overwhelming fast. So this consists of lessons learned on admin for fiction writers. It’s a shockingly big topic.

GALCOM 5: I’m returning for a fifth entry into the series. Part of the process is to refresh all the existing books and short stories to make sure the continuity’s straight. I’m finding I changed some things along the way…yeah.

I’m making a glossary of names of places on the ship and adding corrections to a list in a macro. A basic example is the macro searches for the ship’s name (and where I’ve misspelled it), then replaces it with italics.

I also just did my first podcast. More on that when I get it.