Hello, fans! I just wanted to give you an update of what's been happening behind the scenes and where my work seems to be heading.

The March publications listed on the release schedule are still on target. All that remains are some "packaging" issues. I see no reason that both series shouldn't make their appointed releases.

I have so many ideas and stories in my mind. It's a difficult thing juggling two serials, two novel series, and a number of other ideas that are not-so-patiently waiting their turn in my imagination, especially while I am working so hard as the youth program director at White Rock. I've recently had to take a sabbatical and "listen to God." I spent seven days not actively working on anything. I just sort of meditated and let the solutions to some time-related issues come into my head. By the end of the week, I was all set to get back to work on everything.

One of the things I'm having to do is re-evaluate the urgency of my two careers. I've got a lot of ideas about marketing and promoting my writing, but the reality is that I simply don't have the time to do it myself, if I intend to really be available to the youth in my group the way that I feel called to be. I may not really have the time to juggle four or five projects at once the way I've been doing for the past year or so.

One of the decisions I've made is to put the youth group at the top of my priority list. It's the work that ultimately gives my life meaning. Building relationships and growing leaders is what my life is all about. The writing is more of a shadow to that. The relationships and experiences of my life become the characters and the things that happen to them in my fiction. The writing is nothing without some sort of reality to feed into it.

I may spend several months just focusing on youth ministry, until I feel the program is at the level I want it to be and things are more or less running as smoothly as they can be. I'm trying to lift the group up to a certain quality of strength and maturity by the end of my third year as the director, and all is going very well. We just have a few major challenges left before us to get where we need to be, and I want to give those challenges my full attention.

This does not signify the end of my writing career by any means. I will likely slow it down a bit, though you may not even notice. I want to see The Penny Dreadful through to conclusion and at least wrap up the current story arch for The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas before looking at things one project at a time again. I'll also be working on the second Metrognomes novel at the same time. I just won't be be able to really focus on any of it with my all for several months. I won't be writing in the summer at all, which was a hard decision, because the summer will always require me to give my whole being to the youth work that I do. I may also be looking in to getting an agent to handle publication and promotion for my work. I may have to go more "main stream" if I want to continue writing in the long run and still put my youth group first.

I see my writing as a ministry as well. All of my stories have some message, some point that they are trying to make. Even the Nightfire series, when it's completed its run, will have taken maybe forty years on the timeline to tell a story about facing the consequences for things that we do in life that may follow us as far as we go. I will always try to find a way to give a part of myself to this ministry. I'm the epitome of a devout Methodist really. I can do all of these things because I am so methodical in the way that I do them.

So there you have it. Even if I haven't written much, I will try to update this blog a bit more frequently just to let you all know that I'm still alive and working on the stories you've all been asking me for. As I said, you may not notice that I've backed off of writing at all, if things go according to plan.