Welcome to the first installment of Meri's Monthly Musings! My plan is to share an update once a month with what I've been working on, my plans for the upcoming month, and possible future ideas for this site. I have lots of ideas for future projects! Keeping my fingers crossed that inspiration strikes and motivation keeps me going. :)

September Projects:

• Lots of Moodboards! This is a thing I have been doing regularly all summer. In September I shared family-themed boards for Sol & Etri, Adair & Dray, Blythe & Sol, and Dray & Sol. I also did a character intro one for Feren (one of my secondaries) and a character backstory one for Dray. You can find the collection of boards on my moodboard page if you're curious about learning more about the characters and stories.
• I started working on a glossary of people, places, and terms for this series. More about that in a second.
• I'm back to editing and sharing Hidden Magic. If you haven't read it yet, now's the chance to experience one of my very first stories. I always said that someday I'd write a sequel or another story about these characters again, so we'll see! For now it's nice revisiting old friends. 
• One thing I have been doing this summer is steadily (albeit slowly) reading through and taking notes of the 3rd draft of book 1 (Colorweaver). My goal once this is done is to do another rewrite. I have the story down now, so changes to the plot and characters will be minimal. The next draft will mostly be getting the story in the voices of the POV characters and weaving together all the plot bumps I'd uncovered in my read-through.

October Plans:

• Work on my series glossary. If you're curious who someone is, where a place name is, or what certain terms mean, this'll have you covered in a nice alphabetical list. (It'll also help me keep track, so win-win!)
• Moodboards for secondary characters. I finished the theme of relationships between my main ones, so next I'll be introducing a few of my secondary and minor characters. 
• Work on plushies/dolls of the main characters. I'm going to be crocheting a set of these so I have example photos for my shop and Etsy. It'll be neat to have them sitting on my desk where I work on writing and art. :)
• A month of short drabbles/stories based on Inktober prompts. I'll be sharing these on my tumblr blog each day (or however often I end up writing these), but at the end of the month or every so often throughout the month I'll likely gather them together and share them here as a kind of collection. (Unless I decide to share them individually? Really, it depends on how long they get.) I may also do doodles to go along with the stories, too. I'm the most excited about this because it's been a while since I threw any new words at the page and getting into a writing habit will help a bunch come November.

That's it for now. Tune in on November 1st for the next Musings post (and inevitable NaNo flailing) and check back between now and then to see how these October plans play out. I'll certainly be sharing anything I come up with. You can follow me on Facebook or Twitter for updates about new content on this site, as well as for more frequent updates about what I'm up to.

I also added a way to sign up for email alerts if you want to be notified when I share new content to this site, like stories and moodboards and posts like this one. You can sign up for two kinds of email alerts-- one will give you a post like this as a monthly newsletter, the other will send you an email every time I share content to this site.

I wish everyone a wonderful October and a gorgeous fall. I already bought a pumpkin, so I'm ready!
~Meri