Posted on by — 2 Comments

Jinxed

I’ve been working hard on the new paranormal project, but I haven’t said much here about it.  I don’t want to jinx myself.  I certainly don’t want to leak the idea until I’m closer to submission.

Call it a feeling, intuition, a hunch.  I really feel like this is a big idea for me.  I have a very clear concept.  It fits my brand *perfectly*.  I was careful in setting this up to push all my personal buttons *and* still fit on the shelf… something I’m not always very good at (it’s only taken me 10 years to get to this point).  *rolls eyes*

There are also key symbols that could be used for marketing purposes, and I have a very solid idea for a trilogy plus more if it does well.  I’ve even found a stock image that I’m using as the background in Scrivener that gave me the central opening image, the color themes, and even mirrors the mythology.  It’s a dark, twisted, lush world that you haven’t seen before.  Or at least, I’ve never read anything like it.  Even the NAME of the series is catchy and unique.  A word I made up myself just for this series.

That’s why mum’s the word.

You see, I’m not always a very fast writer.  I can write fast *sometimes*… as I did with The Billionaire Submissive.  But other books are slower.  They can’t be rushed.  This one… I’m feeling my way through the opening scenes.  Molly’s the only one who’s seen what I have so far, and she gave me the thumbs up.  I’m not saying anyone would copy the idea – that’s not what I mean at all.  But there’s a weird kind of synergy sometimes where writers all over the world can dip into the Well and come up with very similar ideas without ever talking to each other.  The less I talk about it, the less I hope that can happen.  It’ll break my heart if someone beats me to market with a similar idea.

I want to get this first book done by the end of the year.  Once I have the first draft done and I have a feeling for how good it is, I’ll start sharing.  But for now, know that I’m working hard, and I’m in love with the idea.

I’ve cleared 10K for the month so far, just a little ahead of schedule.  My goal’s at least 30K.  Hopefully the PNR will pick up speed as I edge into Act 2.  Molly and I are still working on the collaboration too, a back and forth game that’s keeping us both hopefully engaged.  We’re not writing as fast as we were in July, but I’m really digging what we’ve got so far.

I booked the rest of my vacation for the year.  None in September (since I’m on call).  I’m also the primary night on call person next month (grooooaaaaaans) but I’m taking two days in early October for mental health.  Watch out November and December though.  I’ll be grinding through 112 hours of vacation, including a week off at Thanksgiving and Christmas, each.

I can’t wait!!

Posted on by — 4 Comments

Friday Night Lights

I was never a fan of the television series, but as Princess enters high school this year, I’m suddenly understanding the importance of football.  Even if I don’t have any kids playing the sport.

She’s in marching band and has to be at every home game at 5:15.  Plus every morning early before school, Tuesdays after school, Thursday evenings, and the occasional Sat rehearsal once contest season arrives.  For *band*.

The game doesn’t start until 7.  Maybe as the season goes on, we won’t feel obligated to be there every night, but for the first game, we felt like we all needed to be there.  So we sat through an entire football game, after standing in line at Subway for nearly 40 mins for dinner, to hear the band play 5 mins over halftime.  *rolls eyes*  Then of course she was late leaving the band room, so it was almost 10:30 before we got home.

An entire Friday evening lost to high school football and we don’t know a single player.

On the bright side, the home team won.  And using my iPhone, I was able to write another 1300 words on the PNR, bringing my total so far to 8K.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Two Faces

I wasn’t getting very far plotting out the PNR.  I have a general premise and the world is pretty solid in my mind, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with the plot and I didn’t want to sit around twiddling my thumbs.  The idea is too cool to sit here spinning my wheels.  So I decided to just go ahead and start writing.  Sometimes I need the juices to flow and one thing leads to another and another.

So I was in the first section, feeling my way along.  The heroine is taking shape nicely.  She meets the character I’d planned for her to run into.  They sit down at a table.

And I suddenly realized he isn’t the character I thought he is.  In fact, he’s the hero, so in disguise that not even I recognized him.  I mean, I intended this story to break a few typical genre molds.  This hero is not a big mean alpha shifter.  He’s not even Dominant.  Yet he’s an extremely powerful, interesting man.

I just didn’t know he could do *this* too.

So my two characters Cooper and Dasan suddenly combined into Dasan Cooper and now I know he wears two different faces.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

August Totals

27,300 new words for the month on four projects:  finishing The Billionaire Submissive (including the synopsis), a follow-up to TBS still untitled, a little on the new PNR, and the Plantation story with Molly.  Not a huge word count, but not bad considering I polished TBS for submission and then also completed first-round edits on Lord Regret’s Price.

For September, I’d like to shoot for a minimum of 30K words.  The Evil Day Job is going to be tough this month, but I need to keep momentum.  I’d like to get the PNR under consideration by the end of the year.  If I’m really pushing goals, I’d like to get Mama C submitted by the end of the year too.

Here’s hoping for a productive month!

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Catching Up

I had a lot of things to clear off my desk this month, and for the most part, I think I succeeded.  First round edits on Lord Regret’s Price are back to Tera, plus I have a new submission in the pipeline.  I got back into the Plantation story, and now Molly’s waiting on me to write the next scene again.  I’ve started the PNR.  I’m sooo excited about it I’m not going to say much about it yet.  I don’t want to jinx anything.

School activities are picking up.  Since Princess is a freshman this year, band activity has been insane.  Practice every single morning before school, one late afternoon after school, and late Thursday nights.  Sept and Oct are crazy with trips and performances, all of which she wants us to go to if possible, of course.  (Plus they play at every single home football game.)  Now Middle got accepted on the yearbook team, and Littlest is going to try out for honors choir.  They’re both going to play volleyball.  CRAZY times ahead.

Plus Coyote Con is in the works!  I meant to have things turned around sooner so we could do some advertising, but it just didn’t happen this year.  I got busy writing and didn’t come up for air.  However, the first email went out tonight and you can register if you didn’t get the email but are interested in joining a panel.  The rough schedule is ready and I’m letting people sign up now, so don’t delay!

September is my birthday month too – I’ll be ten years old as a writer.  I guess I should plan some cool giveaways to celebrate, huh?  More to come.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Revising a Fast Draft

In reference to Usable Fast Draft one important thing I learned after Raelyn Barclay’s astute beta read:  I used “that” nearly 1K times.

*headdesk*

They were completely invisible to me.  But once I started looking for that, it was everywhere.  Sometimes I could delete the word entirely.  Other times, I reworded the sentence better.  Other times, I of course just left it because it improved readability.  I don’t know if Raelyn believed me or not, but “that” is usually one of those throwaway words that I have to add in edits sometimes at my editor’s recommendation.  I tend to leave certain freebie words out, like off of.  That bugs me.  I just say off.  Sometimes I leave that out too.

But not in The Billionaire Submissive, evidently!

So no matter how great and clean you think that fast draft is after the first-pass edits, it’s definitely worth a second set of eyes to help you see through all the wonderful trees and find those insidious creepers silently obscuring the view.

A weekend of revisions and The Billionaire Submissive is off my desk to Tera.  Just in time for edits on Lord Regret’s Price to land!  I’m also back to work on the Plantation with Molly as well as more worldbuilding and plotting my new PNR.  It’s going to be a busy end of the year!

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Too Scary for Glasses

This weekend, I finally had the opportunity to go see The Conjuring with Princess.  It’s the first time we’ve done a “mother-daughter date” — though she adamantly said it wasn’t a date — just the two of us and we had SO much fun!  I laughed until I almost hurt myself watching this movie with her.

I’ve already said many times that I adore watching horror movies on Netflix.  Cheesy ones, supernatural ones, serial killers, whatever.  I love horror movies.  I don’t get to watch them very often unless I’m alone, because That Man can’t stand them (he about messed his pants when the creepy voice said “Get out” in The Amityville Horror).  If it’s even loosely based on something real – like demons – he can’t do it at all.  But then Princess came along, and as she’s gotten older, that’s “our” thing to do together.  She’s been dying to see The Conjuring on the big screen, and I’m relieved we actually made it before it left the theater.

She’s almost fifteen–going on twenty one, if you know what I mean–and was so sure this movie wouldn’t scare her.  I mean, the same child refused to even use the bathroom in our finished basement for years because she had a dream about zombies attacking through the basement after watching an episode of Walking Dead with me.  Two years ago she was convinced she had a “stalker” aka Edward the Vampire type ghost that made the chair move in her room and made breathing noises on her iPod recordings (of course those noises could NOT have been her or the dog she slept with every night *rolls eyes).

Anyway, we’re sitting down for the movie and I made her put her glasses on.  She hates to wear them unless she has to for school and I hardly ever see her wear them at home.  We weren’t ten minutes into the movie and she took them off and tried to get me to put them in my purse.  I refused.  “You HAVE to be able to see!”

She compromised.  Every time one of the scary ghosts popped up, she buried her face on my shoulder (she’s almost a foot taller than me now) and had me watch it for her.  “What’s happening?”

“Look and see for yourself!”

“I can’t!  I’m scared of the witch’s face!”

So if you go by “too scary for glasses”, The Conjuring was a huge success.  In all honesty, I think it’s probably the scariest movie I’ve seen.  It didn’t need a bunch of gore or TSTL teenagers boinking in the car while the crazy killer approaches.  All it really needed was a believable background story and a creepy doll.  I loved the whole set up.  And man, I loved Lorraine’s outfits (this one in particular).  Not the normal “seventies” clothes I think of.

Now I really want to write some horror.  *coughs*  *looks at our Plantation files with Molly*  *gets to work*

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Scrivener Update

I’ve blogged before about my struggle on switching over to Scrivener.  I’ve always loved the idea of what I could do, but I was having a seemingly hard time embracing the reality.  Every project I started in Scrivener stalled and I wasn’t sure if it was the project…or Scrivener itself.

I finally drafted Lord Regret’s Price wholly in Scrivener.  It was a very slow project, taking me months longer than I wanted to finish.  But I don’t think it was wholly Scrivener’s fault.  I didn’t skip around with the plot but wrote mostly linearly all the way through.  I had the whole thing fairly well plotted out, using folders Act 1, Act 2, etc. to split things out and high-level scene notes for where I wanted to go.  I even used color-coded index cards to mark expected POV shifts.  It was great for holding all the research and worldbuilding notes in one place.

Drafting was very slow, though I think it was mostly a mental thing I just had to work through.  I would have had the same issue in Word.

I also drafted The Billionaire Submissive wholly in Scrivener – and it went lightning fast.  This time I didn’t have a plot at all and I did skip around a little.  I didn’t use any color coding, synopsis notes, or character/research notes.  But Scrivener makes skipping around VERY easy.  I could see my files at a glance and shift them around into a new order if I wanted.  Renaming them to agree with a new order (I named them 001, 002, etc.) was also very easy.  In this kind of writing, Scrivener definitely shines.

What I still haven’t been able to really get the hang of, though, is EDITING in Scrivener.  I can reread the previous scene easily, but I don’t get the overall “feel” of the piece as easily as when it’s a single Word file.  I think I probably need to use a different view if I’m trying to edit inside Scrivener, rather than a file by file view via the outline.  I’ll play with that next time.

For now, I use the compile feature to build the .doc file, and then I use Word to actually do the read through and edits.  Of course that means if I’m not completely done, I have to flip over to Scrivener, locate the individual file, and make the change there.  So editing is definitely much easier to do in one pass rather than daily.  Again, I’m sure there’s a view inside Scrivener that will create a seamless single “file” that would make this a lot easier.  I just need to play around with it.

In my free time.

Snort.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Usable Fast Draft

Or how I wrote a 76K book that doesn’t need a ton of revision in 33 days.  In fact, I fully expect to submit this book by the end of this month, maybe sooner.

These notes are for me as much as anyone else – I love posts about writers’ various processes.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is that no book works exactly the same as any other.  Even though I’ve been at this writing gig for ten years this September, I’m constantly surprised.  My writing process changes from book to book depending on what I need and how I’m growing.

Please note, too, that I had a dismal few months of writing this year and so I was totally due for a breakout writing period.  I’m sure that helped create the perfect storm that hit me in July and let me write The Billionaire Submissive so quickly.

I broke all my personal rules for writing/plotting this story.

  • I still don’t have a picture of either the hero or heroine (usually I create a character cast) though I hunted down a picture of Lilly’s red stilettos at the very beginning (and pray to God they end up on the cover).
  • I never jotted a single note about their background.  I do not have a profile or even a few words ANYWHERE about them.  Boom, they showed up as they are.  Hello, so nice to meet you Lilly and Donovan!
  • I wrote the blurb first (so I had a very strong premise).
  • I did no advance plotting.  I started writing scene 001 with no outline, no plan, nothing.
  • I didn’t even jot down ideas for future scenes until I paused around scene 017 (the end of the first night where Lilly and Donovan were fully together on page from that point forward).
  • I skipped ahead and wrote the ending scenes of the book at that point (030-032).
  • I created scene layouts for what I wanted to happen in between – just a few lines – starting at scene 020-024.  Basically the last 1/3-1/2 of the book.  Those 4 scenes morphed into 18 scenes!
  • I never had a playlist for this book.  I finally added one song around scene 020e/020f but it totally led me in the wrong direction and I had to rewrite the scene 3 times before I finally got it right.  Those are the only two scenes I struggled with/had to rewrite before I was happy with them.
  • I didn’t write any of this Dark and Early, but rather Dark and Late, staying up until midnight or even 2 AM several times.  (I have to get up at 6 AM for work, but the story wouldn’t let me rest.)

Typical Fast Draft rules I broke

  • I reread daily, almost constantly in every free minute I had, if I wasn’t writing new words.  I used Scrivener’s compile and dropped the file into Dropbox each night.  Then during the day if I was stuck waiting to pick up Princess from band camp or driving around in the car or watching some boring TV show with That Man before he went to bed, I was reading my book, start to finish, over and over and over.  I’ve read it 3 times at least since I finished it too.  It just keeps sucking me in.  I’d say all in all I’ve probably read the whole thing 10 times already.
  • I made revisions as I went.  When I read, I made mental notes of things I wanted to fix and that was my chore for later that evening before I could go to bed.
  • As I reread at night on the computer, I would do line edits too, so each time I reread, the story was markedly stronger and cleaner every single day.
  • I rewrote the trouble scene over and over until I was happy with it (I didn’t skip it).  I didn’t let it stall me though – I’d already skipped ahead and written the end by that point, so I knew I could get there.  I just had to work through that problem scene.

Overall, I think these were a few of the key components that fed the perfect storm and helped me finish so quickly.

  • I had a strong premise from the very beginning that tickled my fancy, intrigued me, and made me smile/giggle every time I thought about it.
  • Writing hard and fast kept me in the zone constantly.
  • Rereading and editing as I went made the story constantly better, which helped keep me in the zone and kept the words coming fast and furious.
  • I wanted to know what was going to happen as much as the reader hopefully will.  No plot meant everything was a surprise and delight as it unfolded, although I already had the ending written fairly quickly.  (That pesky middle had lots of surprises.)
  • Because it’s a separate book from my other series, I was free of expectation.  I had zero expectation for this book.  It’s new, fresh.  I didn’t have to reread anything to remember some quirk about a character I mentioned 2 or 3 books ago.  I didn’t have to worry about disappointing anyone (other than my family who’d be shocked at the language and content in this book!) because the world, story, and characters are completely brand new.

I wish I could deliberately set up every book like this, but alas, I know that will never happen.  Some books need to marinate in my brain for long periods of time.  Some parts will fly and others crawl.  I think it’s important, too, to get it out of our heads that A). fast-draft books must be crap because they were written so quickly aka carelessly or B). that slow books are better and more intellectual or C). if I struggle to write the scene/book then it must be bad or wrong somehow.

I’ve written crap slowly.  I’ve written crap quickly.  It’s still crap.  I’ve plotted and written a 40 page outline with 3 spreadsheets and then threw the whole thing out, so a slow/intellectual approach isn’t necessary “best” either.  And I’ve been assured by my most trusted readers that even though I personally struggled with many scenes in Lord Regret’s Price and it seemed like it took forever for me to write it, that it doesn’t read like it was a painful slog.  (It’s been accepted but I haven’t seen my editor’s revisions yet.  Hopefully Tera agrees it wasn’t a slog or she wouldn’t have accepted it!)

It’s all about where I am in the journey at that moment.  Lord Regret was teaching me some things I wasn’t prepared for.  That road was dark at times, slow and lonely, but I still had to make that trek.  I can see it now in how easily Lilly and Donovan pulled off their story.  I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t been in that dark place with Sig.  I couldn’t have written Sig’s story if I hadn’t already been whipped by Lady Blackmyre in Her Grace’s Stable.

And now that Lilly has beaten some sense into me, I think I’m fully prepared to face Mama C and Mal too.

But I’m not done with Lilly yet either.  Just last night she was whispering a very naughty idea to me for what the next book in her world should be.