Normally I like to take weekends off and give myself the chance to catch up on paperwork, clean the house, and sometimes just, you know, relax, but I’d really like to get Shifter Woods: Claw out so I’m working on the edits this weekend. So far things seem pretty clean—I have a tendency to repeat words and luckily T is good at catching those, and she hasn’t pointed out any gaping plot holes or logic gaps so that’s always reassuring, especially since I’d changed a lot of things about Angela’s background and motivations during the writing and I can never be sure that I caught everything. That’s why editors and beta readers are godsends.

I’m also getting more comfortable with Vellum—I still wish there was a way to stop certain pages from being including during a compile like with Scrivener so that I could keep all the platform editions in one file, and I really wish there was a way to center the Table of Contents, but the formatting is really nice and I like being able to have fancy scene break icons and big initials at the beginning of a chapter.

In other news I’m continuing Operation: Finish All The Craft Projects 2023 by going through my office closet, pulling out all of the half-finished craft projects I’ve stuck in there over the years, and actually finishing them. As of today I’ve finished two baby quilts, three quilt tops, a wall hanging, two dresses, two jackets, and quilted covers for the stand mixer and food processor, which is pretty damned good considering that I’ve been doing all that in the evenings and weekends.

At right is my latest finished project, my Skulls and Roses swing dress. Now, I love swing dresses. They look great on me and I have three of them from Torrid, so when I found this awesome fabric I knew I wanted to make a swing dress out of it. I found one of those “designed to be adjustable” patterns that give you more than enough seam allowance so that you can baste the dress together and fit it to yourself before actually sewing everything, and I must have cut the actual pieces out three or four years ago.

So I started putting it together today. To my surprise the dress fit almost perfectly except around the waist, so I let that out a bit and tried it back on. Et voila, I had an awesome new dress that Ramón pronounced, “So you.” I have two more batches of fabric (black swirls on black and a cream, lavender, and light blue with handwriting on it) that I want to turn into dresses sometime in April or May.