Loni Townsend's Blog

I am super behind on everything, and I owe a lot of people a lot of visits. *sigh* I’m sorry if I didn’t stop by your blog last month. I plan on making it up this week.

Today is the first Wednesday of the month, and after troubleshooting slowness issues with my blog and trying to purge addons I don’t need, I find myself looking at the most recent WordPress editor with a sense of foreboding. When WordPress updated their editor oh so long ago, I opted to install the “classic editor” plugin. Well, I decided it’d been long enough and bit the bullet to try to come into the modern times. I don’t like it, but que sera, sera. At least it has a code editor view, so I’m not completely floundering, but it’s not my favorite.

Writing wise, I’m as far behind on that as I am visits. I am just past the midpoint in my book, and I’m in a section of chapters where I’m not sure about the flow. It’s also a bunch of fight scenes, which I suck at. I want to just sit and write, but there’s school stuff to prep for, a dog to train, a job to work, and all the other things.

I’m going to skip the question of the month. It’s been over a decade since I focused on publishing, and I’m not really sure what the worst of the worst is out there anymore.

How was your summer? Do you feel you accomplished much? Sorry if I missed your post last month!

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Happy Insecure Writer’s Support Group day! It’s July and the puppy is huge. Pictures don’t do him justice. He’s 4 months old now, and he’s probably close to 40lbs, if not more. The kids and I have been doing training, but the barking and jumping are things we have yet to break him of.
Oso chilling on the couch, watching the guinea pigsIt’s impossible to show how huge this dog is.

Despite the constant distraction that is the dog, I have managed to make decent progress on my rewrite. I’m 2K short of where I want to be with this book, but 83K is nothing to scoff at. I’m at a spot where the timeline is unclear to me, and that makes me uncertain which order these chapters will end up in when I’m done, but every day, I’m tightening my events just a little more to keep this book focused and moving forward.

So far, critters on Critique Circle have been entertained by my progression, which tells me I’m on the right track. I’ve completely redone the timeline, and I’ve upped the humor factor to better align with book 2. The fact this book was more drama than humor worried me when I started, since I lean pretty heavily into silliness in book 2. But thankfully, Derek’s shift in character (from attempted suave to hot mess) has brought out the LOLs and giggle-snorts in the comments.

I’m hopeful I can actually finish this book this year.

IWSG Question of the Month – Is there a genre you haven’t tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

Nope. I write what I want, when I want to.

How has your year been going? Do you enjoy a bit of humor in what you read? Got any tips to stop a dog from barking?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Wow. It’s been a month, and I owe a lot of you visits. I’ve been treading water with all the things I need to do, all while keeping one eye and half my attention on the dog because he won’t stop chewing and digging and wreaking havoc. Even as I type this, I am shoving him away from my carpet where he’s ripped up the edging. It doesn’t matter that he has a squeaky monkey right there next to him that he’s allowed to chew, he wants what he can’t have. Plus, if I get him to stop doing the naughty stuff, he wants my attention and will whine, bark, and claw at me and refuse to let me type (as he is doing now). But I’m the only one up between 5-7AM, so I’m the one on puppy duty.

My husband says the dog likes me better than him. I say I am a novelty and he only gets to see me in the mornings and evenings, which makes me more interesting. We have puppy class on Saturday, then it’ll be five weeks of basic training to hopefully curb the madness of puppy teeth and claws. But being constantly on my guard has left floundering with the writing aspects in my life, making it impossible to sit at the computer and focus for more than a few minutes at a time. I have left my computer four times during just this blog post. My critique group can attest to how often I’m standing and removing something that shouldn’t be in my dog’s mouth while we video connect.

I hope training helps because I have 20K to write in June to be on target and it feels like I’m running on fumes. (And now the dog is chewing on my clog…)

IWSG Question of the Month – What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?

My childhood was made up of Xanth, Landover, and Goosebumps (puns, magic, and a tad bit of horror). Maybe that’s why my sense of humor is so off-kilter at times.

Got any puppy tricks? What books impacted you? Anybody got a spare brain?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Happy Insecure Writer’s Support Day, Everyone! I completely forgot about last month’s post. I blame all the March action. The trip to Costa Rica was a whirlwind, wonderful adventure with my daughter, then there were school projects and events, and well, April came and went. April also brought new additions to the Town’s End.

Meet Oso Inu. We adopted him from the Human Society April 26th, a two-month-old mixed-breed squirming bundle of chewing energy. Oso was the name the Humane Society gave him, which in Japanese is a greeting like “Hey!” or “Yo!” (In Korean, my mother-in-law says, it means “come here.”) And he got the name Inu, because I name all my dogs Inu (which means Dog in Japanese). Therefore Oso Inu translates to “Hey Dog!” which suits him. He’s small enough still that he can’t reach the guinea pigs, and young enough to learn they aren’t chew toys. He’s rated as a medium dog, so somewhere up to 44lbs, they’re estimating. And he’ll have my husband for company during the day.

But what does that have to be with being an insecure writer? Well, it begs the question, will I be able to focus with all this cuteness? (Actually, he sleeps a lot still, so he’s perfectly fine with crashing on the bed next to me while I type.) In truth, focus isn’t the issue. I’m changing my plan, and that has me worried.

At the beginning of the year, I reassessed all the scenes and events of book 1, sound-boarded off my sis-in-law, and set up a spreadsheet with the scenes that’d get me to The End. Now that I’ve written the first quarter of the book, I revisited the plan because things deviated. And looking at what I had in mind… I didn’t like it. It was too messy, too all-over-the-place, too unfocused. (I guess focus really is the issue, huh?) So I made major changes to the plan, cut and rearranged, and while I have a tightly coupled timeline now, I wonder if it’ll play out correctly because of the movements. Won’t know until I finish, though.

IWSG Question of the Month – Some common fears writers share are rejection, failure, success, and lack of talent or ability. What are your greatest fears as a writer? How do you manage them?

Honestly, the biggest fear I have as a writer is that I won’t finish my series before I die. For one, I’ve started over on book 1. For another, I don’t even know what the plot of book 5 is other than “the good guys fight and defeat the big bad in the final showdown.” And when I don’t have an idea of what I’m doing, I tend to take a while. But my grandparents both lived into their 90s, so maybe I’ve got a good 50 years to finish this.

Any new additions to your life? How do you handle major plan changes? What are your fears?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Wow. This year is just zooming by. It’s already March and the first Wednesday of the month: Insecure Writer’s Support Group day!

I wrote almost 12K (11,951) in February! That’s not quite the 3200 a week I set, but it is almost 3K, which is uplifting. However…

March is always a busy month for me because of birthdays and spring break. This year, it’s particularly grand because my daughter and I are going on a trip to Costa Rica. It’s organized by both her middle school Spanish teacher and her current Spanish teacher, and since it’s her first big trip out of the country, I’m tagging along. My husband suggested I try shoving my son into my carry-on, but the boy is almost as tall as me, so he’s gonna have to wait until he takes Spanish in a year or two and then we’ll see if there’s a trip in the future for him.

While I’m on the trip, I won’t have my laptop, nor will I have time to write. That’s to be expected, of course, and it won’t affect my enjoyment. But I’ll have to pick up the slack in other weeks if I want to finish the book this year.

IWSG Question of the Month – If for one day you could be anyone or *thing* in the world, what would it be?
While I am already a squirrel, I think I’d be the more compact version of myself. The version that always lands on her feet and could scamper up trees without feeling her age. I think it’d be fun to sit up in the branches and eat peanuts for a day.

How was your February? Do you enjoy travel? What would you be, if you could be anything?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

The first month of 2025 is already gone, and we’re once again at the first Wednesday of the month with Insecure Writer’s Support Group. I had to laugh because I looked up the question of the month and it seems like it was written especially for me.

IWSG Question of the Month – Is there a story or book you’ve written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

If you’ve interacted with me at all in the past few months, you know I’m rewriting book 1. You also know I’m not making as much progress as I want. I’ve been plugging along, streamlining events, showing more, telling less. I’m currently 25K in, which sounds great. Except this book is 170K long. Yes, I’ve cut a lot in my planned rewrite, but I write longer, deeper scenes now so I’m expecting it to come out around the same length. It’s already 4K longer compared to the same point in the plot in the old version.

So I did the math. I have 150K to go, and I want to finish this year. That’s 455 words per day. Doable, except there are several days I don’t get to write. Between juggling my job, my kids, their homework, my exercise, cooking dinner, reading with my son, not ignoring my husband, and trying to get enough sleep to be a functional person… I’m left with a 1 hour lunch with which I can choose 1 of 4 activities: writing, critiquing, responding to messages, or working on art while consuming an audiobook. Writing doesn’t always win. On the weekends, I spend a full day taking care of necessary tasks like laundry, house cleaning, grocery shopping, and catching up on all the things I put off during the week due to no time. Sometimes I do have one day left to do some writing, but that isn’t every week.

Therefore, 455 words per day isn’t achievable for me. (That’s my unfortunate realization.)

However, I’m not one of those who subscribes to the “must write every day to be considered a real writer” mentality. Words a week is a better target: 3200, rounding up. That’s still leaps above my recent progress, which *looks at yWriter* was 4700 words in the past 2 months. *sigh* At my current rate, it’d take me 6 years to finish. After taking 10 years on book 2, that’s too long.

I want to finish this book this year. And according to the numbers, I need to up my output to achieve that. And I will, after I show you all the pictures I’ve been working on lately. These are environments from my world, each their own province:

I find I don’t have a passion for environments like I do my characters. But it was a fun experiment visually diving into other areas of my world.

Have you ever done the math to figure out how much is needed to finish one of your works within a year? Do you like environment art? Do you have trouble juggling everything like I do?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

I failed to visit anyone’s blog last month. I know, I know. I am a crummy blog friend, and I will be sure to visit this week. The past couple of months have been overwhelming in my personal life, and I ended up slacking in my online presence. But the holidays are over so it is now just general busyness that I blame for slacking off.

With the holiday providing me a full week off of work, I thought I’d be able to power through several chapters of my book 1. But with the holidays came bad news for close friends, so three of my seven days were spent with them. I also slipped in eye appointments and dental appointments and a trip to the local sporting goods store that has an indoor Ferris wheel. All-in-all, I didn’t get much time to work on my writing. It didn’t help that I got stuck on one of my chapters. The chapter was fine, but it dragged. So I rewrote it, starting later. That worked better, but it still bugged me. Then I rewrote it again, starting later again. I’m now eyeballing it, but I think it’s to a place I’m okay with. Spending three weeks on one chapter isn’t great for getting this book done, though.

Rewriting book 1 is my only goal for this year. And because I always get obsessed with my characters, I drew portraits for my book 1 POVs:

Kaio (green-haired guy) got the biggest revamp. I never had a good grasp on how I wanted him to look, so I finally sat down, figured out his colors, and decided on face shape and eyes.

Anyway, I’m skipping the question of the month this month since I can’t think of anyone except family and fictional characters that I admired as a kid.

How were your holidays? Do they make you feel overwhelmed too? Do you have any goals for this year?

Forgot to add…
About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

November sped by. It passed way too quickly for me, and I can’t believe it’s already December.

I had hoped to rewrite book 1 this year. I thought, since it’s already a finished book, it should be fairly easy. Alas, that isn’t how it’s turning out. If it’d been a matter of words, I probably could’ve done it. However, this book was my first, my baby, and it was written with a healthy dose of youthful enthusiasm and Red Bull fueling my squirrel brain. After redoing the first few chapters and struggling to see the vision of where I was going, I decided to look at resources to improve this version, read books like Story Genius, brush up on my structure, and figure out the goals of each scene. Over the holiday weekend, I sat down and spent several days hashing out my sticky-note spreadsheet. I think I have my plan.

While the root of the story remains unchanged, I am changing a lot of things. I’m cutting events, renaming characters, and even removing a major aspect of my magic system, which means I’ll have to change a couple of things in book 2 and a scene that precedes book 3.5, but I think it’ll be better for book 1. That leads me to think about the question of the month.

IWSG Question of the Month – Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

I prefer stories that have a sense of conclusion of one story or another. While I have epilogues in my own writing that promise more to come, I strive for satisfactory endings. It’s why I refuse to break up my book into smaller books. Plus, with how long it takes me to finish a book, it’d be a terrible decision to leave it hanging off a cliff.

However, book 3 in my 5 book series ends with my main guy in a bad state, and it won’t get resolved until book 4. Because of that, I won’t publish book 3 until I’ve written book 4. And I won’t publish book 2 until I’ve rewritten book 1. Hopefully that will be within the next year.

I’ve also finished a series of montages for my books! The background colors match up with the book covers, and the gray silhouettes represent the setting. The characters pictured are POVs, except for book 5. I don’t know what book 5 entails, other than it’s the whole family against the bad guys in the last epic battle. So book 5’s montage has Derek’s family, power-walking toward the conflict. And it also is during the book’s steampunk era (which starts in book 3.5, 150 years after book 3), so I had fun exploring fashion.

That is my vision for right now, and you can see Derek’s transformation over the series. I’m going to focus on my environments next. I want to represent my different locations. I think, once I get better at environments, I might get better at backgrounds and I can transition to painting scenes from my book. And someday, maybe, I can make a create a graphic novel. But first, I need to finish the series.

Have you ever rewritten a book and changed a lot? Do you like cliffhangers? What do you think of montages?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Happy IWSG day, everyone! October passed quicker than I thought it would, and I can’t believe we’re into holiday season. It’s getting chilly outside, and I’ve had to dig out my gigantic fleece squirrel hoodie once more.

Despite how dramatic the title to this post sounds, things aren’t as dire as they seem in the writing world. True, I’ve made no written progress toward book 1, but after a productive critique group night, one of my cohorts suggested to another member the book Story Genius, and I’ve decided to give it a look. I started in on the audiobook, and after a third of the way in, I decided, I should probably study a printed version and take notes. So I put in a request with the local library. Two weeks later, the library says the book is in transit. *sigh* That means I haven’t taken my notes on how to improve Derek’s journey in book 1 world. But, my sis-in-law helped me hammer out some plot things for Cameron, so that’s a win.

I’ve also figured out how to represent my sticky-note brain in a spreadsheet format, which I consider a HUGE deal. I’ve used soooooo many different whiteboarding apps, just searching for one that will work for my form of messy organization. Some shrink the text to unreadable levels to keep a consistent size for the notes. Some grow the notes and won’t let you keep a consistent size. Some are a pain to push to the background or bring forward, and others don’t have marker tools. After about a dozen sticky notes, I tend to abandon whatever program I’m trying out.

The nicest one so far has been Canva, but for some reason, it’s blocked at work, meaning I can’t even access it on my personal laptop on my lunch when using work WiFi, and my phone has terrible reception in the building so I can’t even use that as a hotspot. Therefore, Canva is out.

But so far, the spreadsheet system is working for me:

I need to be able to see the offset, alternating colors to align my thoughts properly. I also don’t like writing things out by hand (M.J. Fifield has some admirable sticky-note walls that I envy), and I like to have my info accessible both at work and at home. So far, though, the spreadsheet seems to work for me, so I’m rolling with it.

IWSG Question of the Month: What creative activity do you engage in when you’re not writing?

Well, if you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you probably know my answer to this one. If I’m not writing, I’m usually drawing. I actually just redid my map of the weekend, because I wanted to even up my provinces, adjust the location of the palaces, and make it digital friendly. The original was drawn in a sketchbook. This one was done on my laptop in Rebelle 7, which is a pretty cool application that mimics traditional media quite well.

I have another series of art I’ve been working on, but I want to finish the last piece before I post it all here. At my current rate, you should be able to see them next month.

How do you organize your thoughts? Do you use sticky notes? Do you like art?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.

Happy Insecure Writer’s Support Group Day! I’ve admittedly suffered more writing insecurities this past month than previous months. My book 1 rewriting has trickled to a stop, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get the rest of chapter 6 written before Friday to submit it to my group. I keep getting torn between my book 2 edits, rewriting book 1, and figuring out a way to streamline the plot of book 1 in a way my brain will accept.

Focus is something I’ve been lacking lately, and I feel like I’m dropping all the balls. I even forgot about my post this morning.

Before I forget anything else, I want to give a shout-out to Melissa Maygrove. She’s releasing the fourth book of her Forging America historical romance series, Battered Pride, on the 6th!

Passion knows no prejudice.

Eva McCabe may have been raised in the genteel tea rooms of North Carolina, but she isn’t one to surrender. Even after finding her husband’s scalped and mutilated body in the field of their Oregon Territory land grant, she refuses to leave. But tenacity won’t be enough. If she can’t meet the grant’s conditions of cultivation, she’ll forfeit her independence and all 640 acres.

Hatchoq is a man of mixed blood and clashing heritage. His father’s people tolerate him, and his mother’s people want him dead. When he kills a rogue member of his clan to save a white, he’s doomed to wander brutal lands alone.

Hatchoq camps on Eva’s land and secretly lends the struggling widow some aid. Once his presence is discovered, Eva is torn between bitterness and need. Reluctantly, they work side by side, farming her land and navigating a burning attraction neither one wants. Love grows as stubborn walls of hurt and anger crumble, but can it survive? If Hatchoq stays, he must deny his Mojave identity or risk both their lives.

If you love historical romance, you’ll love this book. Check it out!

EDITED: I forgot the Question of the Month!
Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.
Well, my favorite ghost story isn’t actually a scary one! I grew up watching the movie Heart and Souls with my parents, and it remains one of my favorite movies involving ghosts. Of course there is always the movie I watched on my first date with my husband: The Grudge. Yeah, not quite so sweet.

Have you ever had so much to do, you forgot to do other stuff? How do you tackle multiple big projects? Have you pre-ordered Melissa’s new book yet?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.