Tag: personal updates

Fifth Wednesday September 2026: Personal Updates

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Hey, hey, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here, and we just barely got a fifth Wednesday this month. You know what that means: Personal Updates. Today, our writers share personal updates from the past few months. I’ll kick off this post with some of my personal updates.

Kyra’s Updates

Well, this is an awkward time for an update. Nuke-Con 2026 is a couple of days from now. Not only will I be at the board game convention, I’ll be a guest of honor. What? I’ve never been a guest at a convention before. I’m stoked. We’ll see what happens in a couple of days. October’s Game Design Brain Dump is already written and ready to post, so I may have to share some highlights in November’s Game Design Brain Dump. Nuke-Con 2026 should include a ton of playtesting. The Spielmasons (a local board game design group) and I have a dedicated table this year. We’re even putting on an event where convention attendees can take supplies (provided by The Gamecrafter) to design their own games. The Spielmasons and I will be playtesting your designs on Sunday. Woo hoo! If you’re in the Omaha area and you’d like to have me and The Spielmasons playtest a game you designed, stop on by.

I’m still in discussion with a publisher for Spill the Beans. My point of contact has been busy these past couple of months with a KickStarter campaign, which I covered in one of our Geekly News posts, and GenCon. Convention season is dying down. Ironically, Nuke-Con is one of the latest board game conventions of the season, so I should be able to meet with the publisher soon. Fingers crossed.

I haven’t heard back from any of the publishers where I submitted Whirligig Pets. I’m treating this process similar to submitting to literary agents. I’ll craft a follow-up email for Whirligig Pets in the coming days, wait another week or two, and then submit to another board game publisher before Halloween if I don’t hear from this wave of publishers. Board game publishers get busy. Case in point, the publisher with interest in Spill the Beans. I’d like to reengage with the publishers where I sent Whirligig Pets before closing out those submissions as “never responded.”

“Never responded” is a good segue for my writing update. October also marks the three month mark for this round of Crooked as a Dogwood submissions. Most literary agents choose silence. In the next few weeks, I’ll update my submissions to “never responded” and submit to another wave of literary agents. But I’m going to change up a few things. Notably, I’ll rebrand Crooked as a Dogwood as upmarket fiction. Upmarket fiction is a fusion between literary fiction and commercial fiction. If you ask four different publishers what upmarket fiction is, you’ll get four different answers. In short, upmarket fiction is book club fiction.

I always viewed Crooked as a Dogwood making at least one book club fiction, so it may qualify as upmarket fiction. Most writers don’t know that their books are upmarket fiction. I may be one of them. Oops! Upmarket fiction is one of the most sought after genres by literary agents. Before this next wave of literary agent submissions, I’ll give my synopsis a quick pass and spruce up my query letter. It’s always a good idea to revisit these items.

Ber Season has officially begun. With the exception of Nuke-Con most of my focus will be on writing this year’s novel and editing my previous novels. I’m well over 15,000 words, which is a good total for me by the end of September. I’ll ramp up production in the coming weeks and months and easily complete a novel-length work by the end of November. Novel Writing Month. Woo hoo!

Those are all the updates I have for this Fifth Wednesday. It’s a little light because I write Game Design and Writing Brain Dumps once a month. If you want to hear more about my exploits, check out those posts. Let’s see what Season has been doing.

Season’s Updates

As of this post, I’ll have been at my gardening job for a full year. Yay! I’m still loving it and learning a lot. I’ve been trying to cater the flower beds in my work environment to natural pest control. A.K.A. keep the spiders safe. We have a lot of cat-faced spiders and yellow garden spiders. They’re amazing little helpers. 🙂

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned my car before. I have a black 1999 VW New Beetle named Horus. I’ve had Horus for two years now, and he’s been in and out of the shop at least twenty times since I bought him with more tows than I care to admit. He’s my first car, and I didn’t know anything about what to check for in a used car. I got his A/C fixed earlier this month after his most recent attack on my wallet. I’m hoping Horus will behave himself so I can save up for two big things I want to achieve within the next handful of years.

My sister and I are planning on moving in together next spring (hopefully). Recently, I got a pay raise at work and have gotten a lot of overtime, so I’ve been squirreling away an extra hundred bucks a paycheck on top of my usual twenty percent. I also want to buy a dark red Honda Accord within the next five years. I don’t know why, but it has to be red. I will not be swayed. And yes, I already have a name picked out. Let me know if you’d like me to share it, Geekly Gang.

Hey, hey! Kyra Kyle here again. Those are our writers’ personal updates from these past few months. What’ve you been up to, Geekly Gang? Let us know in the comments. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.

Whatcha Doing, Geekly? Personal Updates

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Happy Wednesday, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here. Today, our writers share personal updates from the last few months. I’ll kick off the post by sharing what I’ve been up to over the past several months.

Kyra’s Update

I’ve been submitting my board games to various publishers. This includes a lot of work like making sure the rulebook works, blind playtest, crafting a sell sheet, and a how to play video. Here’s a link to JK Geeky’s YouTube channel, where you can find how to play videos for Whirligig Pets and Spill the Beans. The latter game I pitched at Omaha Gaming Convention, and a publisher has agreed to have me pitch the game after GenCon, which will occur this weekend. So, I should have a meeting soon. Fingers crossed that everything goes well.

I also returned to my writing group. “Ber” season soon approaches. Ber season is the months ending in “BER.” I’m a little early this year, but I wanted to get a head start on this year’s fiction and maybe get another pass on the Rustbucket Riots novel. I’m still pitching Crooked as a Dogwood to agents. I just reached a total of 50 literary agents with a few of them asking for the entire manuscript. I wanted to submit to at least 50 literary agents before considering small publishers. I may try another 25 to 50 before I transition to submitting to publishers directly.

That’s all I have for this month’s personal update. Ultimately, I’m still playing the waiting game. Let’s see what Season and Skye have been doing.

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Skye’s Update

Hello, Geekly Gang! It’s great to be back, and wow do I have a story for you. I know I haven’t posted any updates in a while, but only because I’ve had a lot of personal developments taking place. On Jun 22, I had bottom surgery! Since that was the last surgery I planned to receive as part of my medical transition, this now means that my medical transition is fully complete. Woo-hoo! That also means I’ve been spending a lot of my time lying in bed and focusing on recovery too. It’s been relaxing hanging around the house, but I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like having her actions restricted. It’s not all bad, except for that first week of recovery (that sucked), especially now that I’m starting to regain some semblance of the status quo. Don’t worry, I’ve also had plenty of time to catch up on various media in that time as well.

With all that said, I look forward to my official return to the Geekly Gang next week with my latest installment of what I’ve been playing. I’ll get started typing out my picks early; I wouldn’t want to miss it! I also have plenty of options. You bet I made the most out of my recovery time. I hope y’all are having a fantastic week and never stop geeking. 😉

Season’s Update

Hey, Geekly Gang! I’ve been busy the past several months. I got employed as a gardener in late September of last year, and I love it. I’ve learned a lot about the ins and outs of how the company I work for likes to do things, and I haven’t burned out at this job. I plan on working there for a while. I’ve also been playing catch-up on taking care of my medical appointments. I’ve got a clean bill of health, and so does one of my cats. Next week, my other cat is going to the vet for his yearly checkup. Yay!

On a more personal note, I struggle with anxiety. I’m also kind of an introvert. I want to go to events and board game conventions, but when I do, I sometimes shut down if the crowd is too big and/or if the noise level is too high. I enjoy myself when I find a corner to hunker down in, but it takes me a while to relax. I’m currently seeking a psychiatrist who can help me figure this out. I will also continue to go to events because, dang it, they’re fun. Don’t let anything hold you back from doing what you want to do, Geekly Gang.

Hey, hey! Kyra Kyle here again. Those are our writers’ updates for the past several months. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.

Personal Updates April 2026

Personal Update Wednesday: April 29, 2026

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Happy Wednesday, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here. Today marks April’s fifth Wednesday, so that means our writers will share personal updates over the past three months or so since our last update. Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll hear from Season and Skye this month, but you’ll get an update from me. Here’s what I’ve been doing these past three months.

Kyra’s Personal Update

If you’ve been following my Game Design Brain Dump series lately, you’ll know all about the Great Plains Game Festival (GPGF) and how I submitted three games for its inaugural Playtest to Win Event. My designs weren’t checked out as much as I would’ve liked, but I got some good feedback. Spill the Beans and Whirligig Pets received mostly praise, so those two games are pretty much ready to submit. And I have begun submitting Spill the Beans. That’s one part of my New Year’s Resolution down. I have a submittable board game, and I’m submitting it to various companies.

Whirligig Pets needs a promo video, but that may occur as soon as today. I have a script and a ring light. Let’s do this thing. I’ll share whenever I begin submitting Whirligig Pets and whatever happens with any responses. Fingers crossed that I’ll hear something back from my first wave of Spill the Beans submissions. While I’m sure these companies receive multiple queries daily (I went with some larger board game publishers first), I was hoping I would have heard something back from someone by now. I may wait a week or two and follow up.

I also submitted No Kings to GPGF’s Playtest to Win Event. That one needs more work. I’ll try various things to see if I can jazz up the gameplay. I’ve mentioned in a past Brain Dump that popular art’s sweet spot between familiar and strange could lie in the following Venn Diagram.

Evidently, No Kings leans toward the “Potentially Boring” side of this Venn Diagram. I have some ideas to shake up the design, and multiple people signed up for No Kings’ notifications. No Kings had more followers than the other two games. Most people who responded sounded as if they would give the game another chance. But before I send the game back into the wild, I’ll send it through the meat grinder a time or two.

Moving from the games I’m designing to games I’m playing, I’ve dove into the Marvel Multiverse RPG or MMRPG or the d616 System. That’s a lot of nicknames for one game. Anyway, I will be running a one-shot MMRPG scenario at the Nuke-Con Aftershock Event next month (May 16, 2026) at the Bellevue (Nebraska) Public Library. If that goes well, you could see me at a Free RPG Day Event at the end of June. Regardless, I’ve busied myself by converting some of the TSR Marvel RPG of the 1980s into the d616 System. Roll Charts! Woo hoo! My future holds countless hours of rolling up characters with ridiculous origins and powers.

And since I’m old enough to have played the 1980’s TSR Marvel RPG, I regret to inform you that I’ve had lower back pain for the past several days. I haven’t been able to leave the bed too often. While that helps me read four resource books for the MMRPG and catch up on some other reading, I haven’t been able to sit for prolonged periods. I’m on the mend. I’ll get back to writing and game design real soon.

I’ve been submitting here and there to literary journals, but for the most part, that’s all I have for these past couple of months. Let’s check in with Skye.

Skye’s Personal Update

Long story short: I got a new job.

This has taken up the majority of my time over the past few months. I wasn’t getting enough hours at my movie theater job, which was having a negative effect on my income and prompted me to seek out new employment. Ultimately, I landed a job at Carvana. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect to get an interview for this position (let alone get hired), but I’m very glad that I did. I like going on adventures with Carvana.

So far, things have been going well; the only difficult part has been sorting out my hours between my new job and my theater job. Yes, I ended up keeping the theater job. The good news is that I’m getting the hours I need; the bad news is that my free time is completely unpredictable now. I’ll still try to post and update whenever I can, and I still love being a part of the Geekly Community.

We geeks gotta stick together, right?

Hey, hey! Kyra Kyle here again. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.

Fifth Wednesday: New Year’s Resolutions

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Happy New Year’s…Eve, Geekly Gang! The holiday happens to fall on the fifth Wednesday of December, and whenever a month has five Wednesdays, our writers share personal updates. So, today sounds like a great day for New Year’s Resolutions. Feel free to share your New Year’s Resolutions in the comments. I’ll get us started.

Kyra’s Resolutions

I may have spoiled some of my resolutions with a previous writing brain dump, so you may find some repeats here. I’ll try to keep this short.

1) Write something every week. First, this needs to be something outside Geekly. Yes. I write something every week–or at least most weeks–for the site, so this is personal writing like a short story or chapter in a novel. But this could be as little as a single word. I’m not putting a word count on this resolution. My idea is that one word usually leads to a sentence, which will lead to much more.

2) Work on a game every week. This could be playtesting, developing an existing design, or even designing a new game. Again, the simple act of working on a game every week should lead to more than a single design or development session.

3) The above images remind me that I need to be more consistent with posting brain dumps–at least one of each per month.

4) Read one book a month in a genre that I write or a genre I’m interested in writing. It’s always a good idea to stay current with what sells. And reading helps with one’s writing. Don’t worry about reading another person’s writing impacting your writing. You have your own unique perspective.

5) Read one writing craft book or publishing business book next year. 2025’s book was Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and I barely got that one under the wire. Reading about the act of writing is crucial if one wants to write. And I could stand to learn more about the writing/publishing business.

6) Read at least one book next year in a genre I don’t intend to write. This past year, I read I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a romantacy novel, but I’m glad I read this title. Kimberly Lemming did a great job balancing comedy, steamy romance, and social commentary. Kudos! And romantacy sells. I needed to read at least one book from the genre. I may read another one or two in 2026. Romance and fantasy are two of the best-selling genres. Put them together, and you get a powerful combination.

7) Play at least six board games with themes or mechanisms I don’t usually gravitate toward. This is the board game design equivalent of the previous resolution. Nuff said.

8) Get something published. This resolution is largely out of my control, but I’m not so sure. If I don’t share a publication in a literary journal or board game through a publisher in the next twelve months, I may post a short story or poem on JK Geekly by the end of 2026. Let me know if you’d be interested in this style of content. I’ll even offer this invitation to our other Geekly writers. I can’t wait to see what they have in store.

9) I have plenty of other personal goals, like staying active and volunteering more with Extra Life, but I’ll still primarily focus on writing and board game design with these resolutions. Case in point, I’ll be at ScroogeCon in Lincoln, NE, January 10, 2026, with Extra Life. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi. I helped raise thousands of dollars for the Children’s Hospital in 2025 and hope to raise even more this upcoming year.

Looks like I’m flying solo this week. Season and Skye aren’t sharing any New Year’s Resolutions in this post. I guess that means they won’t fail at any resolutions by next Friday. They don’t have to sweat Quitter’s Day (January 9, 2026). Smart.

What are your New Year’s Resolutions, Geekly Gang? Let us know in the comments. Thank you for reading this past year, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a fantabulastical New Year’s Celebration.

Fifth Wednesday Personal Update: July 2025

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Happy fifth Wednesday, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here. Since it’s the fifth Wednesday of July, that means our writers will be sharing personal updates. I’ll get things started.

Kyra’s Writing

My writing and game design will sound similar this month. The two center around the same concept. I wrote a first draft of a novel based on one of my board games, Rustbucket Riots, and I’m in the throes of reverse outlining.

Reverse outlining is an important stage of writing/editing that I learned after multiple novels. During the reverse editing stage, I take note of what happens in each chapter/scene, looking at the novel from a macro level, rather than a micro level (like line editing). Reverse outlining allows me to see who the point of view (POV) character is for each chapter (if there’s more than one POV character for the novel). If a character has only one POV chapter, I may need to give them more chapters or consider omitting the chapter or using a different POV character. Jotting down what happens in each chapter makes it easier to see which chapters are pulling their weight (from a narrative perspective), which ones could do more, and which ones may not be needed.

In previous novels, I made the mistake of line editing after writing the first draft. That doesn’t work–at least, not for me. The sunk cost fallacy (the tendency to continue an endeavor because of the time and effort spent on the project) is strong when a writer does this. Slapping together a crappy first draft and then taking a macro look at each chapter makes it easier to “kill one’s darlings.” If I haven’t spent hours editing a chapter, that chapter hasn’t reached the status of one of my darlings. It’s easier to make cuts.

Depending on when you’re reading this, I may be slashing through thousands of words in one keystroke. Can you hear the ink cry?

On a different note, I’m still querying agents. Fingers crossed.

Kyra’s Game Design

I received a ton of great feedback for Rustbucket Riots and Whirligig Pets. Both games are well on their way to being publishable.

I’m continuing to refine my other designs, and I’ll be at Comic Con Nebraska this weekend. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi. I’ll be in the game room, demoing various designs that will include Rustbucket Riots and Whirligig Pets. I’ll even have JK Geekly badge ribbons.

Tangent: I joined a board game publication and pitching course, so hopefully, my board game pitches will improve in the coming months. Lol

That’s all I have for these past three months. Let’s check in with Skye.

Skye’s Update

Believe it or not, I do have a life. I know, I was surprised too. Not much has happened since the last time I did one of these, but there were a couple of things I wanted to mention.

First, I have a new job at my local movie theater. Y’all know how much I love movies, so this kind of job is right up my alley. There’s a more community-oriented culture at Marcus Theaters with several opportunities to learn and connect with the team, which I love. Of course, there’s also free movie tickets. This means that I can start covering recently released films on my personal blog, TGIMovies, in a more financially responsible way.

Second, I took this summer off from college. So far, I’ve been having a good time relaxing and dedicating my time toward things I love, such as my hobbies, my relationships, and this community. I’ve learned a lot about myself, spent time with those I care about, and started working towards my future. At this point in my life, I’m the most excited I’ve ever been about what’s to come. I’m glad I got to share it with y’all!

Thanks for reading about my experiences and for inviting me to this website. Though I don’t say it often, I’m greatly honored to be a part of this community, to experience geeky content with like-minded people, and to have a platform to offer my thoughts. I’ll see y’all next week with another “Whatcha.” Take care!

Kyra Kyle here again. Season doesn’t have an update for the past three months. She graduated from college with a Bachelor’s and continues to look for work in her field. Fingers crossed that she’ll find something soon. And feel free to share what you’ve been working on over the past three months. We’re all part of the Geekly Gang. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.