It seems a little hard to believe that not only are we finished with the first half of 2022, but as I write this, we’re already a third of the way through July!

Before I look at the first six months, I want to point everyone to the James Webb Space Telescope site here The image includes the star HD147980, and a number of other stars, recognizable by the diffraction spikes. Every other object in the image is a galaxy! It’s a sobering reminder of the scale of the universe, and how miniscule we humans are by comparison.

Turning back to the more mundane, the year began well, both from a writing and publishing perspective. As I’ve mentioned previously I published four collections, and separately submitted several stories. Unfortunately, progress on the next Jacob and Miriam novel has been moving slowly, and I think some of that frustration led to pretty much a writing halt in June. I did finish a couple of short stories, but it was an effort.

July began pretty much the same as June, and over this weekend, I sat down and gave some thought as to why. Blaming it on critical voice is an easy, and not very satisfactory answer. The real question is what caused me to let critical voice seize control like that? I have some ideas about that, and some of it goes back to the decisions I made around writing goals for 2022 back a tthe turn of the year. My next step is to revisit, and maybe revise those goals for the second half.

I’ll keep you posted.