If you’re wondering why this is popping up on your feed and in your email two and a half months late, we’re just going to pretend that it’s the beginning of October for a few moments. I mean, this post is backdated like it was posted two and a half months ago because it will bother me otherwise. Anywho…

So many plans, so little forward movement.

The third quarter had some big shoes to fill after the first half of the year, but I’m going to be real here. I really don’t have much of anything worthwhile to talk about for the last three months to even warrant this wrap-up post. It’s been a low time. A quarter of upheaval and no progress.

And I mean no progress.

July was the only good month out of the last three, and that’s even a bit of a stretch.

July was the month I was supposed to finish the first draft of my current WiP. It was #WriteToberSunFest, the second installment of a writing challenge made by the @writetoberfest account on Twitter. It seemed fitting that I should finish the draft with them since I had started it with their SpringFest in May. It would have been the quickest I’ve ever written a full novel, start to finish.

Considering I’m talking in negatives, it’s safe for you to assume that I did not, in fact, finish the first draft of this second rewrite novel.

Nor did I finish it in August. Nor did I finish it in September.

I admitted in my second quarter wrap-up that I was starting to struggle on the writing front again. While I had made my goal for June, I’d made the majority of it in three days. The same became true for July. Minus the fact that I didn’t even come close to my goal. No big word count days here. Just a lot of struggle and road blocks.

I only managed to write just under seven thousand words in July. It means I passed the two-thirds mark of sixty thousand words and allowed myself one celebratory bougie cupcake, but I got nowhere beyond that.

No words in August. No words in September. By the end of September I was still sitting at the same word count as I had half-way through July. My spark was gone. Again.

In some partial defense, I had finally landed a second job at the beginning of August and working both the farm and it really got in the way of my at home time at first. Then I downsized my hours a bit, but I still couldn’t find that spark. I couldn’t get past that murky middle point where I’d hit a brick wall of where the story went next. (I’m a plantser, not a plotter.)

On one front, the job was good. I did enjoy what I was doing, but it wasn’t worth the pay for the hours — and miles — I was putting into it. I ended up continuing to search for something better, hoping I would find something before winter came because I didn’t want a traveling job in the winter in the Northeast.

Within the first week of September I found my dream job. Literal dream job. It was exactly the position I wanted in a setting that was even better than I could have hoped for. Naturally, I quit the job not worth my time for the pay and moved onto the dream job. Now I had the farm and my dream job. Life looked so good! I was so excited!

Except for one tiny problem: The dream job almost immediately started showing me red flag after red flag… Two weeks in I nearly walked out and quit, but I convinced myself to give it a little more time because it was an entirely new position and field for me.

And from there, well, that goes beyond the third quarter so you’ll just have to wait on that cliffhanger a bit longer.

Two new jobs in six weeks really did put a damper on a lot of things for me. It threw my semi-routine into chaos and my chronically ill body definitely protested it. It certainly didn’t help me on the writing front to get past my murky middle either. I started having less time to interact with the Writing Community on Twitter, too.

That’s not to say that I lost all contact. I did keep up some appearances. July proffered two more pitch events: #UnhingedPit on Bluesky and Twitter, and #BluePit on Bluesky. Neither of them garnered me any agent likes or as much interaction as the beginning of the year. To be fair, I had very low key participation in both events, especially on the Bluesky front. August had #questpit, which did really well for me! Alas, no agent likes either, but it did better on engagement than my July events. Of course, at that time I was also adjusting to the new job and my Writing Community free time started to fail.

By September I was missing out on events, losing track of everything social media, hardly keeping up with daily tasks, and basically just surviving the jobs. Nothing happened in September for me.

July became the last month I read anything consistently as well. I only managed eleven books this quarter, nine of which were in July. I somehow managed to surpass four hundred and then five hundred Facebook followers before September, but the rest of my social media went nowhere once I started working so much. My only other noteworthy moment of the quarter was joining Caroline J. Trussel’s (@carolinejtrulit) and Mylee J. Miller’s (@myleejmiller) street teams on Twitter for a book launch and a vague era. Unfortunately, both happened while I was battling the double jobs and I admittedly dropped the ball pretty hard on both of them. (Sorry, Caroline and Mylee, but also congrats again!) I’m a bit bummed I did drop the ball. It might have been the only time I get to enjoy vagueness or scream success on social media, but so became the price of needing more income. Perhaps there will be another chance for me one day.

So there’s my summary of the past third quarter written in the future to look like the present past. (That doesn’t even make sense, does it?) I already know how the fourth quarter is shaping up. There’s no sense in me trying to threaten it into shaping back up at this point. I suppose we’ll just have to see how the final weeks of the fourth quarter goes. Wish me luck.