Hey there!

For better or for worse, the past two weeks have been relatively uneventful! There is something nice about 'getting back to the usual', but it doesn't make for the most interesting update email in the world. The cold is settling in here in Idaho, which means we're truly learning what it's like to milk twice a day in the bitter cold. It's still going to get colder, but we already know one thing: we don't love milking during this season. Sure, our cow's body heat helps keep us warm while we're working, but it doesn't help when we're doing all the other chores.

Most likely, sometime in the future, we'll choose a different time to breed. If she can have her calf in the beginning of spring, it means we'd get to do the milking away from the coldest months (we're planning on milking about 9 months roughly).

Now that the winter's here, our barn cats have been hanging out inside the barn more often, which I don't think they mind too much. Normally they pine over the milk as we work with the cow. When they aren't doing that or hunting mice, they're usually lounging together on the hay stack. Here you can see Wilma (the black cat) and her son Gregory just watching us as we work.

Gertrude (pictured below) used to be a lot more shy, but she's been coming around recently which is a welcome change.

My Progress This Week

I'm thrilled to say that I got the Demon Blooded line edits back from the editor! It's pretty crazy how, even though this is my tenth time doing this, it still feels overwhelming to open up the 'bleeding-from-edits' document and get to work fixing things up. Still, I'm one step closer to getting this second book into your hands. Recently I've been working on the chapter headings for this book. And, after going through some iterations (some more unnecessarily terrifying than others) I finally found one that I'm feeling pretty dang good about. Check it out

I haven't stopped working on book four of the series, but it's moving along a bit slower than I expected. Still, I'm at about 38k words for that draft. For reference, these drafts tend to finish at about 110k with some cuts during editing that bring it down to about 105k in the end.

Chapter six for Demon Blooded is now up on Ream if you are interested in getting early access to the story. Just click here to join the community!

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warm regards,

Dan