Hey there!

We've reached the end of a homestead year, which means it's time for me to roll up my sleeves and start prepping things for winter. It's surprising how much goes into preparation for the cold months, and for past years I've been overconfident that my nights and weekends would be enough for it all. This led to way too many failures, enough that I realized I need to work on it way more to get it all done.

That, plus two late October birthdays, pretty much necessitates me taking some time off of work. Thus, this week is my 'take PTO to work my behind off and get things ready for winter' week. This year is particularly 'special' because we are in need of a much bitter structure to house our new cow. Ginger has been out in the cold, rain, and wind since we got her on account of there only being a small house for goats. Well, this year, I have grand plans to build an 'extension' onto our existing barn, like so.

As you can see, it's much taller (8 ft. at the low end) and a lot wider (24ft. altogether). Since the location we live mostly gets East and South winds, the shop wall takes care of most of it. This is by far the biggest thing I've ever built for animals, so hopefully it's built strong and very well. Time will tell on that one.

My Progress This Week

I finished editing Demon Blooded, which has been the highlight of my life. Primarily because it means I'm done editing! If you don't know this already about me, here is it again: editing and I are not friends. Though, I have to say it went a lot more smoothly than in past years. Hopefully that's a good omen for the future. The manuscript is off to the editor tomorrow for line edits, so my attention is shifting to the next project.

That next project is book 4 of The Hidden Heritage series! I'm only a few thousand words in so far, but I've been thinking a lot about this book. We've seen the story from David's POV in book one, Krista's POV in book two, 'unknown person's POV in book three (no spoilers here) so it's now finally time to hear from our friend Jared. Yup, you guessed it, book four is Fairy Blooded. And boy does he have some things to process and work through. If you've read Dragon Blooded, you know what I mean. Poor guy.

Recently I learned about a tool called Google Notebook LM. Disclosure here, I know some of you aren't keen on AI, and that's cool. I'm currently AI positive (I'll never use it to generate my work or words, but there are other uses for it.) I finished my epic fantasy book The Etcher's Plight over a year ago, and I've been nervous to get back into the complexity of it. How do I document the themes? The characters? The plots? Well, Google Notebook LM did a lot of that for me. It 'read' through my book and dropped a lot of those summaries and information into 'sparknotes' for myself, and boy did that help. I feel a lot less overwhelmed by getting back into that story, and I'm even excited to start writing book two (at some point still uknown).

Chapter three for Demon Blooded is now up on Ream if you are interested in getting early access to the story. Just click here to join the community!

Updates from The Casual Author Podcast

It looks like, for the most part, this isn't the right place to share updates about my podcast, so to remove some clutter for you, I'll be moving updates about that to another email list. It's not set up quite yet, but if you are interested in continuing to follow my podcast journey, just send me a quick email and I'll make sure to get you added to that when it's up and running.

Also, I've found that my schedule of putting up episodes on Wednesday has been a bit challenging (due to scheduling conflicts when I'd be editing the episode and whatnot) so I'm moving to a Monday posting schedule from now on. I'm looking forward to the new changes!

Some New Books to Check Out!

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warm regards,

Dan