I started typing my June post last week and it ended up being all about querying. Let’s face it—I’m a first timer in the trenches. This book and my querying efforts take up nearly all of my thoughts. Sometimes I wonder, is this what my life is now? Checking queries, sending new ones, fielding rejections, wondering if I should rewrite my pages again? When (if!) this book dies in the trenches, I’ll have another one ready to take its place. And then another. And then another.

I’m not giving up, is what I mean. But at what point do I want some brain space back? I tell myself it’ll get less consuming with the next book, since it won’t be so shiny and new. Maybe I’m right.

Maybe not.

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June is Pride Month in the USA. Normally I look forward to this. I try to get involved with small, local pride events (especially because my city’s main pride event is hosted in September) and do things with my writing/reading communities. This year, it was hard to feel prideful. I know I shouldn’t let the current state of things take my pride away from me, but it’s hard to be loudly queer when every morning I wake up afraid of the news. Who will they kill today? Whose deadname will flash on my news apps? Which sort of queer is acceptable to be in public—can I hold my husband’s hand? Can my nonbinary friends exist in peace?

It’s 2026. Ten years since marriage equality passed.

I thought we’d be over this.

I didn’t celebrate pride this year. Next year, I’ll be twice as loud.

What else happened in June? (I promise, the month wasn’t as much of a bummer as the first part of this post made it seem!)

I had a lot of great work updates. Projects closed on time, coworkers were fun, I heard more updates about exciting future opportunities. I’m grateful for my 9-5. It’s exciting enough to keep me engaged during work hours, but chill enough that I still have energy outside of work.

Energy to fix my house, for example.

We started our sitting-dining room swap properly! After a little over a year of living here, we’ve learned the dining room is a smidge too small for the size we tend to host. We have a sitting room on the other side of the kitchen, and after some measuring, decided to make the sitting room our new dining room and turn the old dining room into a downstairs office/library. It started with emptying the sitting room and prepping the walls.

And by “prepping the walls” I mean tearing off all the old trim and putting up some panels. Here’s a teaser (pay no attention to the ceiling that need patching—we tore down some decorative beams):

Any guesses what color the beadboard will be?

The goal is to finish this swap by the end of August. We can really only work on it during the weekends, so progress is slow. But we’ll get there!

Rapid-fire, what else happened in June?

• Got my first manuscript request!
• My dog turned seven. I can’t believe it. He’s still a puppy to me.
• The world cup started! I used to be a big soccer fan (I’d watch La Liga and Premiere), but my attention waned when I no longer had easy access to streaming sports… I can feel the bug coming back, though.
• Started drafting something new properly. Three somethings, actually. As of writing this, I’ve picked the one I’m focusing on. Hint: there’s a lot of bones…

Until next time. Maybe I’ll even manage the post at the beginning of the month. We can dream.