Month-in-Review Highlights: June 2025

Panoramic view over Nice, France, from the Colline du Château. June 28, 2025.

Throughout the course of June, worked steadily on the plan for my next novel, bringing it almost to the point at which I can't see it clearly enough to know where I can make improvements. Either I need to bring in a second pair of eyes to give me thoughts or simply dig in and begin the narrative portion. I'm leaning toward the latter, but we'll see how the early weeks of July play out.

Honestly, though, I’m feeling such low morale around my whole fiction-writing effort that the prospect of beginning the narrative stage doesn’t excite me as much as it should or as much as that transition has in previous projects.

I’ve worked so hard at this long-work fiction game for so long without knowing whether I’m getting anywhere with it at all—so hard to tell, without trustworthy (honest, but kind) outside opinions—that I’m faltering a bit in my momentum to push forward and continue.

Could be, though, that I’m fatigued after so many months of hard pushing without a break. Maybe the vacation we have planned for one of the later weeks in July will refresh my spirits.

On other fronts, though, all was well in June. I spent time with local friends and messaged with faraway ones, went to a fun, immersive art exhibit at a new-to-me-museum in Renens, and wound down the month by accompanying my husband to this year’s IRONMAN triathlon in Nice, France, where he yet again qualified for the world championships.

I can’t exaggerate enough the dangerously extreme heat we experienced under the relentless, battering sun in Nice or the number of people trying to compete in the IRONMAN who couldn’t even finish the race given the conditions. Simply spectating without a nip of shade was torture.

All this to say how even more impressive his championship qualification and his age-group placement (sixth!) were than they would have been on a more temperate day.

This time, he decided to take the championship spot offered to him and signed up for the IRONMAN World Championships in Nice (yep, again) in mid-September.

He posts a race report after each race on his website; you can read it here. (There are cool pictures, too!)

And now, somehow, we’re in the second half of the year. I have much more to accomplish, per my goals sheet for 2025, but I’m making good progress. We’ll see what July brings.