Monthly Newsletter | Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Hey-o, my Sun Puppers! I hope you've had a great and productive April because now May has come upon us. It's a time where April showers give us May flowers! Except, in my region, it seems to be doing the reverse. While it's rained a lot in April (it rained nonstop for three days not too long ago; almost caused flooding), the flowers were all in April. May doesn't have a lot of flowers. Well, unless you count the dandelions and the garden flowers. lol XD

So last month, I participated in a lot of contests -- both as a participant and as a judge. It's been fairly fun, if a bit busy. Two-thirds of them, I'm still waiting for results. I've also been a part of Camp NaNoWriMo and have gotten almost 20k words written in thirty days. Not QUITE what I wanted to achieve (I wanted to beat my 30k word-record last November), but it could've been worse. You can thank my profile articles and judge results for giving me three-fourths of those numbers.

So I have several "items on the docket" for you today.

The first order of business is that I'll be busy with judging a couple of contests for a couple of weeks (with one coming up in June), as well as participating in a couple more. But for the most part, I've been toning down the "contest craze" in order to find the time to do other things -- like WRITING! 

But the reason why I'm even doing these contests is to expose the existence of my works to more people so that I can get more reads and genuine followers. 

In fact, the second announcement is that I've gotten around 100 views since the end of March, giving me a total of 250 followers (with some of them being spam accounts)! Like, WOW! O_O

Thank you guys so much for following me. It truly means a lot. I hope you Sunnies will be able to still stick around once I FINALLY post and publish an actual story. Trust me, you'll love the wait. ;-)

Speaking of which, that's the third announcement: I'm going to be busy working on poetry and short stories. Some of the short stories I won't be posting on here for reasons I'll get into right now -- in the next paragraph, in fact.

I'm going to be co-writing with my family on a fantasy short story which will begin the journey into our original fantasy series. I'm very excited, even more so since I don't have to write alone, which makes writing books so much more fun. ^_^

The fourth announcement is that my mom and I are making plans on a special project, but we're keeping it to ourselves until we get it more established and ready for advertising. And no, it has nothing to do with writing.

The fifth and possibly final order of business is that I would like to give you guys a heads up since it is likely that I will probably not be on Wattpad as much. I'll still come and respond and check my notifications, but I won't be updating a lot on here and will be taking a hiatus since I'll be trying to focus most of my time and energy on writing with my family and finishing up some contests.

I'm sorry to those of you who are patiently waiting for updates on my poetry and writing prompts. I'll try to write at least one or two prompts every one or two weeks, and a poem or lullaby at least once a month. I can't promise I will be able to do this, but I hope that you guys will understand that I'm trying to be a good boy and get original stories done. While poetry and lullabies are great, I'm not going to be getting a lot of money from them and I'm trying to get closer to my goal of working from home as a professional writer.

I would greatly appreciate it if you guys could help keep me accountable by occasionally asking me how I'm doing on our stories so that I will have a boundary preventing me from coming on Wattpad and using it as a distraction and procrastination tool. lol XD

Anyway, that's all that I have for this newsletter. Thank you all so much for reading this and for your undying and loyal support, love, and patience. I hope that you're having a great day and that you're having a blessed and productive week. And I do truly hope that you'll have a productive and pleasant May.

May the Father bless you, your families, your lives, and your stories.

God Bless and Stay Sunny! 

- Caleb Ryan (Sunshine Boy)

<><><><><><><><><><>

Date Published: 05/01/19