It’s been a hectic end of December for me. We traveled north to celebrate Christmas with the kids and grand kids, plus see extended family and friends. Busy, busy, busy. As a result, I am way behind on my writing.

But Christmas was wonderful and seeing everyone was just what I needed.

Nothing new has been written for Generation Zee, and while I have a couple ideas for my Substack newsletters, nothing has been written. Yikes! I decided to work on this blog post to Syloquies first, but it’s going to be a short one. And I brought all kinds of notes and paperwork to not only work on the newsletters, but Generation Zee and even my mystery: Secrets in Slacksville. But nothing has gotten done. Boy, did I pack with some rose colored glasses on! LOL!

Anyone who knows me or has worked with me in the past, knows that I go nuts if there are incomplete tasks left to be done at the end of any day. Right now I have this post, which was due 12/24, a Writing Whispers post, also due 12/24, a recipe post for Going Gluten Free – the Good, Bad and sometimes Ugly, due 12/31, and also on 12/31 I wanted to re-read Generation Zee from the beginning because I think I dropped some events and characters that I included earlier and just forgot about – which is the danger when you work on a project for fifteen years. How I thought I would get all of that done during the busiest time of the year. I was definitely wearing some rose colored glasses.

Of course, all these due dates were dates and deadlines I placed on myself. It’s not like I have a boss telling me to get these projects done, but somehow, it feels the same as when I did.

So here’s my end of year wrap up: I got through the messy middle of Generation Zee and am working on the third act. So that is great progress as that middle was very messy to write. And the first two thirds of the book are with my editor, more progress. But I didn’t get the whole book finished, which I really did want to do. So that was a fail (at least in my head). I did create a new Substack newsletter, Going Gluten Free – the Good, Bad and Sometimes Ugly, and have a schedule for posting to it. That has led to me doing more cooking and baking new things, so that is writing progress and personal progress, definitely a win. And while I cancelled my original Writing Whispers, newsletter, I recreated it as a Substack newsletter, which I like much better. And I am not only giving extended writing and personal updates there, but have started serializing another of my novels, Water Earth: Rhia, that I am particularly thrilled about. So all in all, I am going to say that this year has been a plus in my writing world (not saying anything about what else is going on in this world).

So here’s to a wonderful and productive 2026.

It’s been busy since Thanksgiving. Between decorating for Christmas, trying to get lists from the grandkids (and the kids!), shopping and finding a new program to help me organize my stuff I’ve been out straight. Plus some time at Brews and Mews to visit with the cats.

I’ll admit, I haven’t gotten much fiction written. I have managed to write this and some posts to Writing Whispers and Going Gluten Free – the Good, Bad and Sometimes Ugly, but nothing for Generation Zee. I have been thinking of the story: plot, descriptions, coming action, but no actual writing has been done. I’m hoping now that I’ve gotten this new organizational tool (Craft @https://support.craft.do/hc/en-us/sections/15274893377180) I can manage my time better and get things done on time. So far it’s working on the two substack newsletters. I have everything blocked out and on my calendar. Even this blog post was blocked out in Craft, pictures and everything, so I can easily post it to WordPress when I’m ready.

I have also set up my January Planner – can’t believe it will be 2026! This year has passed in a blur – Where did it go?

Here’s to a more productive end of 2025 and beginning of 2026. My plan is to post one more time here, by the end of December, post Christmas. I’m hoping I’ll have progress to report, but I’m not making any promises. I don’t have a lot of Christmas events scheduled, but anything could happen. (I just found out about an open house at a neighbor’s house this weekend, which we will go to – that means I need to bake something to bring.)

Anyway here are a couple cat pictures to finish out the post. You’ll here from me again come December 30 or 31 (see, I’ve put it on my schedule, so I will make sure to do it!).

Oh, and here’s the Carolina sky:

I’ve been working a lot on my two Substack newsletters, getting the posts written and scheduled. So far I have things scheduled through December 10. I hope you have all had a chance to check them out: “Going Gluten Free – the Good, Bad, and Sometimes Ugly” and “Writing Whispers.” Once I got the schedule organized and written in my date book (that’s like being written in stone), I was forced get my butt in the chair and start writing. And I am really enjoying it. I want to get more writing done. There is a challenge on The New Daily Journal (TNDJ) site that I read every day (Harvey actually has a few challenges) that I want to join; he calls it the Stephen King Challenge in which you have to write 1000 words of fiction per day. So far I haven’t gotten to that, but it’s a goal.

Then I was doing some writing housekeeping and realized that I didn’t save all the book descriptions in my Promo Docs file. Now I have to go back to KDP and read what I have and save the descriptions in my file, maybe update some of them. When that’s done, I have to upload my two most recent short stories as books on KDP. I’m not quite sure how I neglected to do that. One of them, “The Legend of the Silver Doe” is on my website, but not Kindle, and my last story, “Fun City” isn’t on either. And I have to upload everything to Draft2Digital (D2D), so everything will be available on all vendors, not just Kindle and my website. So I definitely have some housekeeping to do.

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I started this post a week or so ago and am just finishing it now, on Thanksgiving. Let me tell you what I’m doing today. We were invited to friends’ house but really wanted to go out to a restaurant, as we’d never done that before. And now we have a decent restaurant, Longhorn, in town that opened earlier this month. So we looked at their menu online and it looked good, so we were all set. Then Tuesday night, I decided to check online again and saw that individual stores have the option to be open or not. And I was concerned, so I called the new Longhorn and sure enough, they’re not open today. I’m so glad I checked on Tuesday; can you imagine if we showed up today and saw they were closed? That would be a sad Thanksgiving for us. So instead, we quickly came up with a menu for just the two of us: Ribeye steak, Stuffing, Garlic Green Beans, and Mashed Butternut Squash. Who says it has to be turkey? One other year, we did homemade Chinese Food – because I can’t get that in any local Chinese restaurant due to my gluten intolerance. It was a very tasty meal, though a lot of work. So we wanted to do something a little easier today. The hubs is cooking the steak on the grill and we’ll do all the side dishes together. We’ll be starting all of that very soon.

Sending wishes that you all have a great Thanksgiving Day.

Talk to you next month. And this is a kitten I’ve fallen in love with, because no post is complete without some kind of cat picture.

October/ Early November Update

I’ve been busy writing since my last update, but the funny thing is that I haven’t been writing my novel, I’ve been working on my two Substacks. I’ve written a few articles for both and am getting into a routine to have something scheduled each week. I am alternating weeks, one week is Going Gluten Free the Good, Bad and Sometimes Ugly and the next is Writing Whispers. Next week is Writing Whispers. Make sure to subscribe to either or both of them!

And I’m letting you know in advance something I talk about in Writing Whispers next week. I will be serializing a novel I started writing a few years ago and have not yet finished. So starting in two weeks, I will be posting my novel, Water Earth: Rhia in my Writing Whispers newsletter, one chapter or scene at a time. I’m pretty excited about this and hope that once I finish Generation Zee I will be able to finish Water Earth: Rhia – posting one large scene or chapter per month only, I should have plenty of time to do that.

I’m hoping that getting into a routine of writing an article each week for these newsletters will get me back in the habit of writing regularly, now that the weather is finally cooling off and I have no excuses to not write. My plan is to also increase the number of times I write these updates to Syloquies.com; I’m thinking at this point to possibly twice per month. Of course, they will be short like this one if I’m doing them twice per month.

I have been doing some other things regarding Generation Zee, like naming some of the new characters – they are in a new location filled with new people, some of which will play major roles in the coming action, so they all need names, backgrounds, and some character analysis. Will they be helpful or hurtful? What kind of part will they play? Already in Chapter 20, I’ve introduced six new characters, and have to make those distinctions as I write, a good part based on what the characters themselves tell me as I’m writing.

It also was my birthday this past Sunday, that entailed getting presents (my favorite thing!), phone calls from my kids, going out to dinner with the hubs and friends. And a cake! Flourless Chocolate Cake!

It’s funny, but you don’t think about it, but just writing this post entailed research to see if the title of a book, website, newsletter, or short story should be italicized, underlined or in quotation marks. I knew all of that once upon the time. When I was going to college for my English Degree, I had to know this as I wrote a massive amount of papers in those days. But it’s been a few years now and I’ve forgotten, even though I have been writing consistently all of those years. But still, forgotten. But now I’ve taken notes and hopefully I will remember for future posts.

Anyway my next update/post should be in two weeks, around November 25^th. Talk to you then!

Earlier this month I did a guest post on another author’s Substack newsletter about opening my WooCommerce store. You can read it here on Harvey Stanbrough’s New Daily Journal. His page is mostly geared towards writers at various levels of expertise, both published and unpublished. I have found Harvey’s advice and encouragement very helpful over the years. He was the one that encouraged me to publish my short stories, giving me advice on process and pricing, etc. Otherwise I would still not have published anything so far.

The more I think about it, the more I regret shutting down the Writing Whispers newsletter. Was it a mistake? Did I jump too soon?  I’m just not sure. Though if I get it started again, I’ll definitely try it as a Substack. As a result I’ve been researching how to optimize using Substack. The odd thing, Substack is mostly driven by an app and that is where I have an account as S E Knight. However, I couldn’t also have Sylvia Auclair on the app – to be honest there is probably a way to do it, but this luddite couldn’t figure it out (you should have seen what I just went through trying to have my guest post linked above!) – so I always access it via the internet to post my Gluten Free newsletter as Sylvia Auclair. I just tried to add the app on to my MacBook and it’s not a valid app there, so I guess any posts I do as S E Knight will have to be done on my iPhone or iPad. I found this very strange as they are all Apple products. Just one of those things that make you go, “Hmmm?”

Nothing else of note to post, though I have written a little more on Generation Zee. Not a great deal, just getting my feet wet in their new location. I realized I have to give a pretty good description of the place as the next ten chapters take place there and I don’t want readers to be confused. But description is not my strong suit. So I am working harder at it than I expected – give me dialogue to write any day!

That’s it for now. Not even any fun pictures to post, at least I don’t think so…

Progress!

I’ve made some progress on Generation Zee (Finally! Yay!). I’ve started the final book of the novel. I think it’s going to go fast, but I was stumped on how to start out. But the characters spoke to me and told me what came next. I also have to show that feeling of foreboding – will this new location be their salvation or something else? I’m excited to get going again and have it all revealed.

I have also decided that this will be Generation Zee – Book 1 – Evie, with two more book to follow. One for Danny and one for Rick. I think Danny’s story first, then Rick’s to finish the trilogy. That means I have to contact my bookcover designer for her to add the Book 1 – Evie to the cover. I started getting ideas for Danny’s story and I think that is what inspired me to get back to work or Evie’s story. Can’t have a Book 2 without finishing Book 1!

 

 

On a sad note, I have decided to cancel the newsletter, Writing Whispers, that I have been doing since last November. I wasn’t getting the response from it that I had expected and it was difficult to write that newsletter and then this blog without repeating myself. And I always felt rushed to get it done at the same time I was trying to write the blog post. It was just too much non-essential and unproductive writing. The newsletter might come back at some point, but possibly as a second Substack, because I’m still working on my Eating Gluten Free Newsletter, which is important to me and close to my heart. But that, too, was not getting the attention from me that I wanted to give it. So instead from this point on (for a while) there will be the gluten free newsletter at least once a month, maybe more often when I’m inspired, and these blog posts. Right now I’ve been doing them once a month towards the end of the month, but I’m going to try to do  them more often in the future (all depending on whether I have anything interesting to talk about).

The Store Page

Has anyone taken a look at it? I’m still pretty happy with it. But! But I cannot fix the font on the heading of the page. All the other pages on the site follow the parameters I have set – Arial font in dark purple. But the store page is black and a super bold san serif font that I don’t know. I’ve been over and over the website admin page trying to make the correction. I’ve tried a bunch of things, but nothing has worked. I’ve gone to google, YouTube, Reddit, etc and all of those suggestions haven’t worked either. It’s making me a little crazy, because, in case you didn’t already know this, I’m a bit of a perfectionist in stuff like this. (It’s like sending out an email and as soon as you hit send, you see a typo. Makes me crazy!) And as I’ve mentioned before, technology, while I love it, is not my friend, or at least not my brain’s friend.

End of Summer

I’m kind of happy to have fall around the corner. It has been super hot here in North Carolina, but I guess that goes for pretty much everywhere this summer. Then the spring and summer were busy with travel to visit the kids and grandkids (twice!) and doctor’s appointments for both me and my husband. Nothing too serious going on, just inconvenient and time consuming running back and forth to doctors and testing. As a matter of fact I had to create a family calendar so I can make sure we don’t double book – which happened in July: I had a procedure in the morning (again, nothing serious) and the husband had a pre-op visit for his cataract surgery in the afternoon. It worked out fine, but added a whole level of stress that I didn’t need. So a family calendar for the first time since the kids were little and I had a calendar on the wall where everything got listed and tracked. Though this one is on my iPhone. And of course I’m in charge of it – it’s not something he wants to be in charge of. Which is fair as he is in charge of the car, truck, yard, and exterior house maintenance. I actually don’t have anywhere as much on my plate, but I guess it depends on your skill set, mine is more towards the banking, filling out forms, scheduling appointments, not to mention laundry and general housework, all that minutiae that runs a household, but I would be awful at car maintenance! And yard work! Yuck! Not my thing at all.