Thing the First:Rough Passages WILL be releasing as a collection this year. Hopefully at the end of October because I'd like to have copies for WindyCon (which I will once again be attending as a helper at the Games Plus table with a little display of my own books.)First new book release in over two years means promoting said book on social media & elsewhere. It means begging for review readers. I means shouting this book's praises to the rafters and the sky. It means asking brave, loyal, amazing fans, to go that step beyond reading it yourselves to sharing  it with more friends, co-workers, acquaintances, total strangers, and mortal enemies. It will mean talking to people. And that's hard. I am not a Peppy Person. I don't rally troops. Cheerful, pushy perkiness gives me hives.  I'll ask nicely and often for support and sing my book's praises with honest, passionate enthusiasm--but I know myself well enough to admit I'll get crabby after banging my head against the apathy wall once too often.Why mention that downer? Full disclosure. I do not paint smiley faces around slashes in my heart to make the pain look prettier.  I might cut off at the knees anyone who suggests I should minimize my troubles and "look at the bright side" instead. It isn't a healthy coping strategy. Don't say I didn't warn you. Mute or disassociate as needed.So I beg you, bear with me as I stumble through the trials of a New Release Phase in my own uncomfortable way, coping with sarcasm, bitter humor, and occasional flailing.Thing the Second (a cheerier thing, I promise)I've been keeping this one under my hat for almost a year.  I'm helping a friend publish some books she wrote for her grandchildren.  It's taken 10 months of false starts and setbacks, but I finally feel confident enough about the project's success to share a little bit about it.  <cue confetti & balloon drop>The books range from simple 8-10 page picture books on topics like counting and animals to a couple of  delightful tales written at about the first-grade reading level.  They're heartwarming and adorable, and --importantly--  beautifully written.The sticky part was that the books were hand-written in journals or constructed with photocopies & stickers.  Cleaning digitizing the content alone  is no small challenge.  I gave formatting at try . (Mistake. Big mistake. HUGE.)  A artist friend with graphic design experience offered to help but got sidesiped by technology issues and job demands.Serendipity stuck at Dragon Con. I met a wonderful book designer, we hit it off, and now she's digitizing and polishing up Grandma Mitzie's awesome words and illustrations to the shine needed for print publication. They're going to be real books soon, available to the whole world for parents to buy & read and for kids to hold and enjoy.Thing the ThirdI aim to finish Heartwood by the end of October. Why set myself a dreaded deadline? Well, for one thing, I always set myself deadlines. I just ignore them when they fly by. For another thing --biggish news!I have an outline for a new novel I plan to write during NaoNoWriMo this year.  Sort of. I don't do word counts, so I can't really NaNo. But I also don't usually do outlining, so why not double-down on the wackiness? I'm tripling it, really, since I'm working with a writing partner on this project--a partner who gets final say on the story's eventual shape. It's not at all my usual "chip at the ideas until strands of story emerge and then weave them together" approach.I figure why not tackle the new fresh thing in a new, fresh way? Yup, I'm stretching artistically.  New challenges. Excitement. Good times.No, I haven't been replaced with a pod person, I swear. I've wanted to do NaNo since its very first year.  Business travel and the demands of the retail cycle in general made it nigh-impossible the first few years, and after that NaNo started to feel like a big commercial enterprise defined by social interaction and burdened with an ever-increasing focus on metrics and reporting.  Metrics and reporting are not fun, socializing is hard work, and I have nothing to prove. Zero appeal.Doing it my own way, writing with a simple end-of-month completion goal in the privacy of my own writing cave--that'll be my kind of fun.Now you're up to speed on everything that's going on in my authoring world.