I’m not gonna lie. The past seven weeks have been a little rough on me. Even as an introvert who already home-schools her children, this period of time has been more mentally and emotionally taxing on me than I would have ever guessed, and probably more than I even want to admit.

I’ve often thought that I’ll bet this is sort of how Bilbo and the dwarves felt as they wandered through Mirkwood, with no discernible end to the forest in sight and no notion of how much farther they would have to trudge along in the darkness.

But I’m not here to talk about that.

I think it’s high time I returned to some semblance of a normal blogging schedule, now that I have my lovely shiny new blog all up and running… just in time for me to lose all motivation to actually… BLOG! Poor little neglected blog.

Aaaaanyway, so what have I been up to in the past seven weeks?

I’m so glad you asked!

Reading

I have gotten a lot of reading done lately. In fact, over on Goodreads I set myself a reading challenge this year of 30 books, and I’ve already read 23!

Here are the books I’ve finished in March and April. Most of these, I’ll admit, were books I read with the kids for school. But just for me, I read The Map to Everywhere by Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis, Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett, really enjoying following the City Watch characters! I finally got around to reading Firefight by Brandon Sanderson (the second book in the Reckoners series. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Steelheart and plan to review the whole series once I finish Calamity), and The Skin Map by Stephen R. Lawhead (which was a re-read, because I’m finally going to read the entire Bright Empires series, but as it has been… 10 years since I first read the first book, I had to reread it before moving on because I had forgotten everything that happened in the first book!)

I also did some beta reading, which doesn’t count for Goodreads, but still counts as reading! I wish I could tell you about it, but suffice to say, it was highly enjoyable and I will definitely be shouting about it when it becomes available for the general public!

I also spent a few weeks reading my grandma’s book, He Whistles for the Cricket, out loud live on facebook. If you’re looking for something to listen to, you can access the entire video series on my author facebook page, or you can watch it over on Youtube. Unfortunately, since I posted it live, the replay videos aren’t high def, but the audio quality is fine.

Writing

Writing has been… an effort these past couple of months. However, I joined Camp NaNoWriMo with an ambitious goal of getting 20,000 words edited in The Orb and the Airship and so far I’m sitting at 11,876. Probably won’t hit my goal, but I’ve gotten 25k words edited on the entire book so far and Camp has helped give me a bit of my motivation back.

The Orb and the Airship has definitely needed more work than I thought it would. I started looking at it earlier this year and got immediately overwhelmed by how awful it was. I don’t usually struggle with disliking my own work, and I was a little taken aback at how little I was enjoying the story. However, when I did a little bit of digging around, I realized that I started writing this story fully 10 years ago! I had no idea it was that old. I wrote this book before I had edited King’s Warrior or republished it. I wrote it before I had published Second Son. I wrote it before I had won the Rooglewood Press Five Enchanted Roses contest or worked with their editors. I wrote it… well, in terms of how much I’ve grown as a writer in the past decade… a lifetime ago. So, I’m rewriting it from the ground up and using the rough draft more like an outline. Thankfully, there was a large gap between writing book 1 and the rest of the series and so I do not believe that the following books will need quite as drastic of an overhaul. But it does mean that this first pass of editing book 1 of the Turrim Archive is taking quite a bit longer than I had expected it to. And honestly, that’s been a little discouraging.

Watching

We’ve watched a lot of things in the past couple of months. I’m sure you have, as well! My favorite thing we’ve watched has by FAR been The Chosen. It’s a tv series about the life of Jesus, and it is brilliantly done. I’m usually fairly picky and critical of faith-based tv/movies because they often come off as low-budget or corny or just sort of half-hearted, and I want to hold them to a higher standard… but this show has none of that. Everything about it is simply beautiful. The script, the acting, the camera-work, the sets, the props, the dialogue… it’s so very well-done. We’re now watching it through for the second time with the kids, and they are loving it, as well. The show uses what I call “Sanctified Imagination” to fill in the gaps a little bit so that it can follow the format of a television show. For example, in the Bible we know that Peter was married. We don’t really know anything more than that, but this show lets us meet his wife, gives her a name, and an idea of what their relationship might have been like. Things like that. For the most part, it follows the events of Scripture carefully and does a good job handling the things the writers added in a way that only ever makes me want to go read the Gospels and study them!

We’ve also been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon. And we introduced the kids to Episodes I and II (the kids were all very creeped out by Anakin and Padme’s whole relationship, which is as it should be). We can’t watch Episode III until we’ve finished the cartoon, though!

I’ve been watching Tangled: The Series as a treat after finishing my writing each evening, and that show is really quite adorable.

Derek and I were watching through Stargate SG-1 again (an all-time favorite). We finished that and are now halfway through Stargate Atlantis. Such a great show!

The kids and I have also been watching Lost in Oz on Amazon Prime, and it’s really fun. It’s set quite a ways after the original Wizard of Oz, and the “Dorothy” of this show is the original Dorothy’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter (I sort of missed that part) and is named for her grandma. Anyway, it’s cute.

Listening

I’ve been listening to Brittany Jean’s newest album “All the Love” on repeat pretty much all month. It came out April 16th, but I got an early copy (perks of being the sister!)

I can’t choose favorites when it comes to my sister’s music, because I really and truly love it all. But this album… it is very special.

Get Your Copy Here

Life-ing

This is a strange time to be living, and so our activities have been limited to what we can do around the house. However, we’ve managed to find fun things to do together as a family. Derek is reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids in the evenings (the hobbits have just made it to the Prancing Pony, so I’m excited that they are about to meet Strider for the first time!) We’ve gone on a lot of family bike rides (we splurged and bought a bike trailer I could tow behind me that the boys can sit in since Brant can’t keep up on his bike and Grayden’s too little to ride a bike of his own yet).

We built a fire-pit and are looking forward to making s’mores over it.

We’ve gone hiking in the woods (and nobody got lost!) We’ve built blanket forts and played hide-and-go-car with friends when we were all about to lose our marbles and needed to be reminded that other people existed, even if we all had to stay in our own vehicles and only communicate over walkie-talkies! We’ve written letters to friends and video chatted with people and made a jar we’ve filled to the brim with things we’re thankful for (and another one that we’re putting our “wishes” into so that when the quarantine is lifted we don’t forget all the things we wanted to do and the people we wanted to see!)

We’ve read a ton of books.

We’ve worshiped the Lord on our couch and read the Bible daily and prayed. My kids pray daily for our leaders and that the virus would go away and that the quarantine would end.

My children made a countdown timeline they posted on the wall until quarantine was over. We’ve weathered the disappointment of having quarantine extended by a month.

We pulled out our best attitude when we got 10 inches of snow on Easter Sunday and we went out and enjoyed the stuffing out of it, building a Snow Easter Bunny, dying some snow Easter eggs, and playing hide and go snow (which is just hide and go seek… in the snow).

We went out and made snow angels in our swimsuits (yes, we’re about as close to insane as it gets!) We’ve rejoiced in the warmer temperatures and enjoyed every minute that has felt like Spring.

We’ve continued to work on finishing the basement.

We’ve baked cookies and bread and pizza.

We’ve played board games and continued with school. We’ve gotten on each other’s nerves and we’ve cried together and we’ve had a few spontaneous dance parties.

You know… when I type it all out like that… we’ve done rather a lot. And really, it’s been good.

Future Plans

I don’t know what the future holds. I do have a book that I’m hoping to release soon (I’m looking at a tentative release date of June 21st, but it depends on a few factors), so be on the lookout for more information about that hopefully coming soon!

I am continuing to work on editing The Orb and the Airship, and hopefully will have that finished up in the next month or two, and then I’ll be diving right into Mantles of Oak and Iron. My goal was to have the first pass of edits done for all five books by the end of the year, but this first book needed a lot more work than I anticipated, so my timeline has gotten pushed back a few months, so we shall see what happens.

I hope that you are safe and healthy, dear Reader, and that you are able to find the good in these strange and trying times. I hope that what we learn in this does not get forgotten when the trials are past. And I hope that we come through this stronger and with a better appreciation of things we perhaps took for granted before.

I’ve got a few exciting blog tours and cover reveals I’m participating in over the next couple of months, so that will be fun. And I’m definitely going to be blogging more regularly from now on.

Thank you for your patience with me the past couple of months!

Blessings,
Jenelle

Adventures and Episodes: Quarantine Edition