Writing

Writing Review: May 2026

May was certainly an…interesting month. While I had specific plans, they’re not at all what happened. At the same time, I can’t say that May was a bust either, especially since I did hit my word count goal for the month: 21,373 words written against a goal of 19,000 words.

But while I did get the outline of Headwaters done, as assigned, every time I started drafting I found myself making excuses. I needed to update a web site. I had a random idea about Legends Lost. I did a scaled-down relaunch of the professional blog. I even reorganized the writing file folders on my computer. Bottom line, even though I kept opening the Scrivener project, I only wrote three scenes.

By mid-month, I’d figured out that my subconscious was probably trying to tell me something.

All right! I finally shouted at my muse. I’ll go ahead and work on A New Horizon since you want me to so badly! But then we’re doing something original. You hear me? We are not only writing fan fiction this year!

Writing Review: April 2026

Writing

April was a planned “rest and reset” month after going full-speed through January, February, and March to finish All That Mattered. At the beginning of the month, it actually took me several days to downshift out of that mode, but by mid-April I had done what I intended. Even with that, though, my word count of 19,602 was more than the monthly goal, so I’m still well on track toward my annual goal.

“The Tobacco People” is published!

Writing

My poem, “The Tobacco People,” appears on Page 77 of the 2026 Reedy Branch Review!

Every spring, RBR publishes work from Pitt Community College students, faculty, staff, alumni, and anyone who supports the mission of the North Carolina community college system. RBR accepts short stories, poetry, flash fiction, excerpts from longer works that can stand alone, creative nonfiction, and visual art that can be represented in a printed document.

RBR 2026 includes the work of a broad and diverse range of writers and artists, including Pitt Community College students, former students, PCC faculty and staff, and other writers who support the mission of community colleges.

Available now for reading or download now at the Reedy Branch Review web site.

Writing Review: March 2026

Writing

My word count for March was less than it was for February, which means there was yet another slowdown. But there are several reasons why I am definitely not worried about things.

Writing and AI: Is It Really About Rights? Or Quality?

Writing

One of the largest debates about large language models (LLMs, imprecisely called “AI”) and authors has to do with rights: who owns what? Who consented to what? Are creators being fairly compensated? Those questions matter, and they’re not going away anytime soon. But the rights argument doesn’t explain the sheer intensity of the opposition to LLMs among authors, especially since there are plausible solutions available via tweaks to content licensing, copyright law, and compensation structures.

The other big argument centers around quality, but even that isn’t quite enough to explain the absolute fury I’ve seen in some quarters. Poor-quality writing has never been in short supply, and it has never posed a threat to high-quality writing, even though it has always existed in greater volume. Before now, though, it was largely treated as an annoyance. Authors ignored or avoided it (including, at times, looking down on those who self-published, but that’s a separate conversation).

As a writer who uses an LLM for developmental editing*, I’ve pondered why there seems to be such vehemence in its opposition. Ethics, rights, and quality aren’t minor issues — they’re very real and very important — but the emotionality of the reactions points to something more.

I suspect I know what that “something more” is: writers and non-writers alike expect writing to be hard. Anything that makes it easier is automatically suspect.

Writing Review: February 2026

Writing

In my last monthly update post, I set a goal of 18 writing days per month for the rest of 2026, and I mentioned that I’m also seeking a sustainable pace.

What does that mean in real-world terms?

February 2026 gave me a good answer.

Writing Review: January 2026

Writing

I’ve been tracking my writing stats since 2024, and in the past two years, January was a light month. Not so this year. As of this writing, my word count is 33,039 for the month — and note that it’s not quite over yet. Unlike December, this time, my writing pace was steady, which means this word count figure is actually a bit of a slowdown.

But I don’t think that slowdown is a bad thing, given that burnout is real. And toward the end of the month, I was feeling it a little anyway. This last week, I’ve intentionally backed off a little…but only a little, and only enough to tune and calibrate a bit. The idea is to write at a sustainable pace for the entire twelve months. That’s why, despite the extremely strong month, I’ve decided not to change my original annual goal of 225,000 words.

Using AI: Is it Caving? Hypocrisy? Or Just a Tool?

Writing

I mentioned in my last post that, during December 2025, I made a change to my writing process that has paid off in spades. It came after a lot of serious thought and consideration, but now that I’ve made the plunge, I can’t believe how much difference working with an AI has made.

There’s a lot of yelling and screaming out there, these days, about whether AI writing is “real writing,” and I should make one aspect of my position on the matter clear: if the writing itself is generated by AI, it’s not the author’s work. This is evidenced by the fact that, if text is solely written by generative AI, it cannot be copyrighted.

Further, I still fully agree that the use of copyrighted work to “train” a LLM is unethical if the author hasn’t given permission — and in my personal case, I have explicitly prohibited the use of my work for such purposes. This holds true even for my fan fiction, as certain aspects of fan fiction are, in fact, copyrightable to the author and not the source material’s creator (and thus, it is possible to plagiarize fan fiction).

So why did I “cave” and begin using AI?

Writing Review: December 2025

Writing

I’m now almost eight weeks into my new life, and for a while I was despairing about being able to pick the writing back up. But then, all of a sudden, it picked back up dramatically — to the point that, in December 2025, I logged my third-highest monthly word count in 2025 at 28,079.

Virtually all of that word count came on or after December 16th. Nearly eleven thousand of it happened between the time I signed off the day job on December 24th and the time I signed back in on December 29th.

That is definitely a comeback — and with a roar! It wasn’t quite enough to make up for the deficit I accumulated in October and November, but it came close. Given the reasons for the deficit, I’m calling the month a win, particularly since I hit another goal: finishing up Never But Maybe before the end of the year.

Writing Review: November 2025

Writing

November 2025 very much did not go as I’d expected, and my writing output shows it, clocking in with a word count under two thousand.

I’m keeping the details and reasons between us, but my husband and I separated early in the month. I’m the one who moved out, and since there was nothing keeping me in Georgia, I came back home to Eastern North Carolina. I spent exactly half the month — fifteen days — living in a hotel before moving into a beautiful 1910s-era house in a small town. It has way more square footage than I need, but it’s well-built and extremely walkable.

The long-distance move and keeping up with the paid job took up nearly all of my time and energy in November. I’m just now beginning to reflect, regroup, and figure out what I want to do next.

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