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.
