It was... interesting. I had a good laugh and you can read more about it in a bit.

On the bright side, I am back to writing the Warrior Series. December is usually my planning month and since I front loaded all of that planning to the first few weeks while I waited for my computer to arrive, I can get back to the important stuff. I fell behind after I lost all of my material, at least on the writing side of things, but it gave me time to work on other admin tasks like prepping for a street team. You can find more about that at the end of this email. Now that those are finished, I'm ready to get back into those word counts.

FREE romance short: My short romance Right in Front of You is free in the Amazon store today.

I'm looking to do an AMA for you guys! You can ask questions about anything using this form. Thank you to Kellie and Carolyn for your questions! I think I have a good idea for what I want to do with these questions but I need a few more from my dear readers! You can ask about any of my books, my writing process, or pretty much anything else.

December 22, The Banished Warrior will be released. You can add the book on Goodreads and get an email when it hits the Zon! If you can't wait that long to get it, you can join my Patreon before Sunday and get the book before release day! Patrons get advanced copies of every book I publish.

Podcast:

Confessions of a Writing Addict - I talk about end of the year reflections, wins, failures, and goals moving forward. The whole episode is basically my writer confession.

Give it a listen, subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on, and leave a rating! You can also reply to this email with your thoughts, suggestions, or writing confessions for a chance to be featured!

Fantasy Dictation - Hilarity Ensues:

As you may have heard from my last updates, my computer died in the middle of November. Well, I discovered that the 10 year old computer was failing during backups and did not alert me of such failings... resulting in me losing every backup (read: every book) I had written or edited since May 2020. That's 16 books.

Well, I was able to do some workarounds and pull from email or re-type out of my Kindle app to recover the Warrior Series (other books will be re-typed soon). This was my priority since I'm in the middle of releasing these books and I was technically supposed to be done writing book 8 next week. I started book 7 this week (not to worry, I'm still aiming for a late January release but probably not sooner).

My writing app has a built in dictation tool that can handle about one paragraph at a time, depending on how fast I speak and how clear it is... Well, what I failed to prepare for was the insane difficulty of going back and trying to figure out what it thought my fantasy, made up names really were. I started collecting the phrases that dictation could not handle because I couldn't help but laugh when going back and changing them.

• Aiolos (I almost)
• Rhish (Rich, A fresh)
• Nekail (Mikal, Nicole)
• Ouba (Oprah, Oba, Obama, Opal)
• Baeddan (To be done, Payton, Bed and, Biden)
• Kahyr (Cashier, Cahir (funny because that's what I based her name on), Here, K here, to hear, can you hear)
• "Kahyr sighed" (Kick your side)

And my personal favorite "the bridge of Baeddan's nose" became "a Bridget Baden snows". I guess I should work on my pronunciation skills.

Outro:

• Reading List 1 | Reading List 2
• Passion Planner: Get 10% off all Passion Planner items using code LAURAW10. They also have free downloads if you can't afford one right now.

With the holiday happening next week, I'm going to take a Friday off and spend the time fixing up the new house! My goal is to get you guys some behind-the-scenes looks at my office as I get it into working order. I'll be back on January 1 with some cool things for you!

Street Team:

In the meantime, I'm looking to build a street team in the new year - a group of volunteers who would be willing to share some graphics on their social media, participate in some fun conversations, and spread the word about my books... but of course, we need an awesome name before we get going. You can fill out this form to vote on a name AND if you're interested in joining the street team early, you can join the private Facebook group!