This post has little to do with writing, but I will give you a little update on that as well. It has been a while since I have given any sort of life update,  so here it is.

My kids are awesome. I know I am biased, but they are. I am so lucky to have them all. I wish I got to spend more time with them, but work keeps me away. I take advantage of every minute I get…or at least I try to.

Connor finished another great season of soccer. His team made it to the championships, but they lost a nail-biter 2-1. He came away feeling good and with a few things to work on before the fall. He is still doing karate and achieved his high-green belt this spring. If he keeps this up he could be a black belt by high school.

Zachary has found something he can be passionate about: bowling. He looks forward to it every weekend and has been participating in tournaments too. He even won $40 in scholarship money. A couple of weeks ago he participated in a ProAm and got 17th place out of 75 kids. I love watching him thrive and have fun every weekend. Zachary went on three-day field trip to the coast a couple of weeks ago and had a great time. The report we got from his chaperone was that he is a well mannered and well behaved young man. Tracy and I are so proud.

Kaitlyn. Oh my goodness, Kaitlyn. She is over seven months old now, and I’ll admit she has me wrapped around her finger. She is not quite crawling yet, but she is sitting up and rolling around like a champ. She is a big girl (taking after Zachary here) and she is as happy a baby as I could ask for. She is teething now, so we are back to waking up once a night, but there are worse things.

My wife, Tracy, is still my rock and is always there even when I don’t think I deserve her. She continues to sell products from Thirty-One Gifts in addition to her fulltime job, and while it doesn’t go as well as she would like, she is making progress and I am proud of her.

We are trying to get a house next year and that means eliminating debt and adding to savings for the rest of the year. As part of this grand push I have started cleaning offices again, only now I am doing it five nights a week instead of three. The pace has been brutal and everything else has been pushed down on the priority list.

My writing. Oh how it suffers from deprivation. If my writing was a pet I would have to consider giving it up for adoption. I intended to have the sequel to Apocalypse Rising ready for publishing by now, but I have not yet finished the first draft. I plan on doing more editing on my own this time, so if I have it published by the end of summer I will call it a win.

I am doing a re-edit on Apocalypse Rising as well so that I can get a second edition out and submit it to a couple of publishers as well. With the one year anniversary of it’s publication rapidly approaching I thought it best to give it that extra once over.

I started a zombie based short story I had planned on submitting to an anthology, but my time crunched claimed it as a victim. I am thinking I may expand on it and put it out as a novella around Halloween.

My dark science fiction piece that I am serializing here continues on and promises to only get better. Keep your eyes open for some updates coming soon.

When I stated writing this blog post I was thinking about my life and how it felt like I was stuck in the crowd. No matter how hard I work I can never get ahead of where I am and where I have been for the last few years. I was reminded of watching long distance runners. There are always a handful of people out in front, but most people are stuck in the pack in the middle. When one person tries to emerge from the pack the rest of them strive to keep up and ultimately that person is reabsorbed into the mass at the middle. I’m not saying that I have done a lot to try and break free, or that anyone is keeping me back, but it sure feels like that is the position I am in. Perhaps this is the year I work hard to put myself in the position to break loose and free myself from the herd.

Well I imagine that is enough of an update for now. There will be some more in the near future. Thank you for reading.

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