So, I won NaNoWriMo (or as I like to think of it, successfully completed the challenge, since everyone who validates 50,000 words or more "wins") for the 6th year in a row :-D The result is the rough draft of The Source-Fixer (working title, or possibly the permanent title if I can't think of anything better) and three accompanying short stories giving the backstory on the main characters. Like a lot of my books, this was based on yet another old unfinished story fragment I was stuck on. I decided to go a different direction with the characters, which I'll write about another time, and, as so often happens when I take a fresh look at the characters, this is what got me un-stuck. I also printed out my very first novel ever, Prince of the Trozdozh (another meh working title, I suck at thinking of titles) and its sequel (untitled, the one with Travarac and Kilahra). I think there's hope for them, I started reading the sequel while I was printing it out and couldn't stop. So the pile of manuscripts awaiting revision grows even bigger. Also in November, Beneath the Canyons had a fantastic release. Thank you, everyone, for your support! Book 2, Bad Hunting, is now under revision. On the A-Z reading challenge, I'm still on D (Darkmage, by M.L. Spencer). It's very long, and I'm also dividing my reading time with The Plains of Kallanash by Pauline M. Ross, a lovely author I've gotten to know on Goodreads and Google+. Besides Christmas, the main focus in December will be on continuing with the revision and editing of Bad Hunting, aiming for a release hopefully in the first part of January. Between NaNoWriMo and Thanksgiving, I didn't get as far with this as I wanted to in November, so it doesn't look like I'll be able to get it out this month. I'm writing a lot of new material for the book, filling out some things that needed to be filled out, and so far I've added over 5,000 words. I've also started revising the fanfiction I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2013. Now that the big, heavy first revision on Daughter of the Wildings is done, I have time for a side-project, and some of my fanfic readers have been asking about it. So it's time to get it finished and posted. Which leads into the big dilemma I'm having right now. I've got lots of stories I want to write, and lots of things awaiting revision (including but not limited to books 2-6 of Daughter of the Wildings). The more time I spend writing new stuff the less time I have to spend on revising, but, as always happens during a NaNo event, I'm reminded again of the importance of writing every day, to improve my craft and stay in practice. So it's a matter of trying to figure out how to allocate my time and, more importantly, mental and physical energy. Right now I'm thinking maybe 30 minutes a day of planning (if the project is still in the planning stage) or a daily writing target of 1000 words (which takes me about 30 minutes to do) will fit into my schedule and energy limitations, with the remaining 2-3 hours of writing time spent on revisions. Also on the to-do list is to finish the paperback edition of Beneath the Canyons and do some work on the website. My list of books is getting too long to display them all individually in the sidebar (not that I'm complaining!), so I'm looking at some other ways of letting website visitors know about my books. Weebly (my site hosting service) has a nifty slideshow widget, so I'm thinking I'll put my first six books into that and have the Daughter of the Wildings books separately as the current and upcoming releases. (I started my first website in Jan. 2001, and I've been a happy website-fiddler ever since). For the A-Z reading challenge, I think I need to start choosing shorter books. Will not finish by the end of the year. Finally, there's another special blog hop event coming up Dec. 19-22, the Winter Warm-Up romance blog hop. This should be enough to keep me out of trouble for another month.
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I just realized I hadn't done any NaNoWriMo progress updates this month. I got a late start, busy with the release of Beneath the Canyons at the beginning of the month, and other things came up, which made it hard to catch up and stay caught up. But now, with one day left (I make myself take Sundays off from writing) I've got 1700 words to go, so I'll finish tomorrow *knock on wood* I finished the actual story at around 40,000 words, so the last 10,000 words is an extended epilogue, which will probably be trimmed in the final version or maybe not, and back stories on each of the main characters, which may or may not find their way into the final version; if they don't, I'll release them as separate short stories. You do what you gotta do to get those 50,000 words honestly. My proudest moment of doing whatever it takes to get the word count was for Camp NaNo last year. I was writing book 3 of Daughter of the Wildings and, short of my goal and running out of story, in desperation I threw in a conversation about Silas's chest hair - and made it relevant to the plot! And that *will* be in the final version. In other news, Beneath the Canyons had a great launch - thank you for your support! The revision of Bad Hunting (book 2) has been slowed down a bit by NaNo, but it's still continuing, and I'm looking at a release date in January. I'm undecided as to whether to keep the series exclusive to Amazon for a while, to take advantage of the Kindle Unlimited program and other perks, or release them to all platforms once the 90-day exclusive period on Beneath the Canyons is over. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and I'm trying to figure out what will get my books in front of the greatest number of readers. To everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving this week, Happy Thanksgiving! And to those who didn't, happy day of your choice! Among many other things, I'm thankful for you, my readers. You're wonderful, and your support means a lot to me. Thank you! So I'm about a week late with the monthly wrap-up and overview. My excuse is I've been busy :D Lots of good productivity going on! First off, in case you haven't noticed, Beneath the Canyons, Book 1 of Daughter of the Wildings, is now available. Through tomorrow, Sunday November 9, you can get it for only 99 cents! After that, the price goes up to $3.99. Or, while it's exclusive at Amazon for the next few months, if you have Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited, you can borrow it for free! If you don't have a Kindle and don't want to wait till I release it on the other ebook platforms, you can download the free Kindle reading app for Windows, iOS, and Android. Also, the paperback edition will be coming soon. So, that's how I spent October. I've started revisions on Bad Hunting, Book 2, and hope to get about a two-month turnaround time on it, looking at a release date in late December or early January. The revisions, editing, proofreading, and formatting on Canyons took a little less than two months, so that seems like a reasonable target. Book 2 does need a lot of work, right now it reads more like a summary than a fully fleshed-out novel and I anticipate adding 15,000-20,000 words to it by the time it's done. But the plot is fundamentally sound, and it's a shorter book than Canyons. November also means National Novel Writing Month, and I'm using it to get a new novel written after having spent a year working mainly on revisions. This new project is The Source-fixer (working title, I'm so bad at titles :P) and you can read more about it on the Still to Come page. This is an old, abandoned idea that I picked up again. It's better developed than it was the first time I tried to write it, and I've made some significant changes to the main characters that I think will help drive the story. On the A-Z reading challenge, I'm on D right now. For some reason, I keep choosing really long books so it's taking a while. So that's where I am. I'll update my NaNoWriMo progress from time to time; right now, after starting late, I'm at about 10,000 words with another thousand or so to add tonight. And, onward! September was all about finishing the first major revision of Daughter of the Wildings and working on the second revision of book 1, Beneath the Canyons. So far it's going well; I'm using a modified version of Holly Lisle's Seven-Day Crash Revision to fix what needs to be fixed and get it fixed fast. I should finish this revision on Tuesday (the 7th), then it's on to the last few editing rounds to fine-tune the writing and fix up mistakes. After that it's time to format and release the book! I'm hoping to be able to release a new book in the series about every two months. If my current pace holds, that should be doable. The official release date for Beneath the Canyons is November 10, though, barring any unforeseen problems, it could be as soon as the end of October. I've made the decision to put Beneath the Canyons exclusively on Amazon for the first 90 days.* I like to have my books available at all the major ebook outlets, but the truth is that my sales at the other stores just aren't enough to make up for the benefits and exposure I lose by not putting books in the 90-day exclusive Select program at Amazon. Once that 90-day stint is up, Canyons will go up at all the other stores, with the rest of the books to follow. (If book 2 is out before Canyons comes out of the Select program, it'll just go up on Amazon but not in Select, until Canyons's 90 days in Select are up. Then I'll put them both up at the other stores.) For up-to-date release information and special offers, be sure to sign up for my email alerts. In other September news, I finished the Clean Out Your eReader Summer Vacation challenge with 21 books, more than twice my original goal! Somehow, though, the number of books on my Kindle seems to have grown, not shrunk. So I've set myself a new, fun challenge - to read a book (that I already own on my Kindle) starting with every letter from A to Z (ok, X and Z might be kind of hard). Let's say, hm, by the end of the year. I'll do occasional Reading Round-up posts with the books from this challenge. I didn't make a lot of progress planning my next novel, but last night (late) my muse came out to play and I got a lot of good work done on developing some new story ideas. Check the Still to Come page for information on my upcoming projects! With National Novel Writing Month coming up in November, I'd like to have one of these ideas ready to write. And, onward. *Don't have a Kindle? Never fear! You can download the free Kindle reading app for PC, Mac, Android, and iPad/iPod/iPhone; read in the Amazon Cloud Reader, or, since my Kindle ebooks are sold without digital rights management (DRM), you can download free Calibre ebook management software to convert them into epub format for your Nook, Kobo, Sony, or iDevice. Mostly book reviews and author spotlights on the blog lately; now it's time to check in with what I'm up to. In August, I more than doubled my reading goal for Clean Out Your eReader Summer Vacation, with 20 books on the list and a few more to add before it's all over. Still catching up on the reviews; they'll be up later in the week. I also finished reading Midnight Tides, book 5 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson. I also had a goal to write 500 words a day, for a monthly total of 11,500 (allowing for several days of not writing) and finish the Tales of Azara collection. I also hoped to plan my next project (working title: The Source-fixer) and start writing that. On the days when I wrote I averaged well over 500 words and I did finish Tales of Azara (or at least the stories I had planned; I'm not calling the whole collection finished because I might come up with a couple more ideas), but I ran out of stuff to write before I got to 11,500 words. I also hoped to finish the revision of Daughter of the Wildings, but it's going to end up taking another week or so. The main event in August was taking our younger son to Northern Arizona University, where he's starting college. We were gone for a few days, and they were busy days, and the whole thing -- traveling, the youngest leaving home, adjusting to not having the same involvement in his life as before and to my changing role -- took a greater physical, mental, and emotional toll on me than I expected it would. So I just haven't been getting much done. I'm a little more than halfway through Book 6 and expect my pace to start to pick up again. So I didn't quite hit all my goals, but considering that I overestimated my ability to deal with other things going on in my life and underestimated the demands all that other stuff would make, I guess I did ok. And now, here are my September goals: 1. Finish my COYER book reviews on or before the event ends on the 5th. 2. Plan The Source-fixer and start writing 500 words/day when it's ready 3. Finish the revision of For the Wildings (DoW book 6) by Sept 13 (being generous here; hopefully it won't take me that long!) 4. Start the final revisions and editing on Beneath the Canyons (DoW book 1), aiming for publication later in October. Also in September, the 19th-22nd, I'll be participating in the Fall Into Romance blog hop. Be sure to check it out for some falling-in-love moments from my books, giveaways, and links to other romantic posts! I'm still slogging my way through the revisions on For the Wildings, book 6 of Daughter of the Wildings, and adjusting to the major lifestyle change of having no more kids at home, so in the interests of un-stressing a little bit, I decided to take Christy Birmingham's Spam Poetry challenge. Only I'm not that great with poetry, so I took my spam and turned it into haiku. Enjoy! (Image: Honjo Shigenaga parrying an exploding shell By Utagawa Kuniyoshi [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
And now, back to For the Wildings. (Seriously, no one can procrastinate like writers.)
Mishka Jenkins at A Writer's Life for Me does a monthly roundup/overview (check out the post for July/August), which I decided is a great idea to keep myself on track and keep my readers (Hi!) informed of what I'm doing and what's coming up. In July, if you missed it on the post before this, The Warrior and the Holy Man got a great new cover by Mominur Rahman. Currently, The Warrior and the Holy Man is available exclusively at Amazon, $2.99 for the ebook or, if you have a Kindle Unlimited membership (U.S. only) or Amazon Prime, you can read it for free! I will also be scheduling some free days. (Hint: there's one coming up soon!) Don't have a Kindle? Never fear! You can download the free Kindle reading app for PC, Mac, Android, and iPad/iPod/iPhone; read in the Amazon Cloud Reader, or, since all my ebooks are DRM-free, you can download free Calibre ebook management software to convert my Kindle books into epub format for your Nook, Kobo, Sony, or iDevice. I also participated in Camp NaNoWriMo, and met my goal of 12,000 words! Not a very big goal, but on top of doing heavy revisions on Daughter of the Wildings, it was enough to keep me busy. I'm working on Tales of Azara, a collection of short stories, character sketches, and vignettes to go along with Chosen of Azara. Even though I met my Camp goal, the project still isn't finished, so I'm going to continue working on it in August. I also finished the revision of To the Gap, book 4 of Daughter of the Wildings, and sent it out to the test readers. Response to the series from the test readers has been pretty positive so far :) And finally, I've read thirteen books so far for the Clean Out Your eReader Summer Vacation challenge, which beats my original goal of ten books read, and there's still a month to go! Watch my main COYER post for my reading list and links to reviews. So, on to August. Job one is to finish this first major revision of Daughter of the Wildings. I'm nearly through with City of Mages, book 5, and then should be able to finish up For the Wildings by the end of the month, keeping to my three scenes a day quota. I've allowed a few extra days to finish, since we're hitting the road for a few days later this month to take our younger son to Northern Arizona University for his freshman year there. I'll take my writing with me, but probably won't be able to get in a full day's work on any of those days. Still, the goal for finishing this revision is August 30. Another goal is to write 500 words a day of new fiction, for a total of 11,500 words (minus Sundays and a few days for travel). I want to finish Tales of Azara, and in the meantime start planning... whatever the next project is going to be. Probably another novel/novella set in Estelend (the world of Chosen of Azara) so I can start on that next. Once this heavy-duty revision of Daughter of the Wildings is done, I may be able to increase my daily word count goal. I'm also aiming to read at least five more books on the COYER challenge, for a total of twenty. And finally, it's been a long time since I've posted a novel for free on the site. Starting today, you can read The Lost Book of Anggird! I'll post a chapter three times a week, and leave the first several chapters up for a couple of weeks to give anyone who's interested time to start, and then continue with up to 6 chapters available at a time (plus the first chapter, which is always free on the site). I seem to have found myself caught up into the Writing Process Blog Hop again, having been tagged last week by the lovely and talented Teshelle Combs, whom I've featured here a couple of times. My writing process hasn't changed much in the time since I did this before, but I figure it's time for a progress update. The first major revisions on books 1-3 of Daughter of the Wildings are done and out to the test readers, and I just started on book 4. It's taking a lot more rewriting than I thought it would. Not that the plots have changed so much, but some major issues with the magic are different, and also some character issues. Plus a lot of what I wrote was me just trying to figure out what happens next! I like to plan my stories in advance, but a lot of Daughter of the Wildings resisted any kind of advance outlining. So I'm cutting lots of stuff, and adding lots of stuff, and changing lots of stuff. Saturday I spent working out the money system a little more. The amount of money Silas and Lainie have is an important plot point at this point; they just got a big payout for services rendered to wealthy rancher Brin Coltor (one of my favorite supporting characters in the series), and it had to be enough to make taking on the job he hired them for worth the risk. On the other hand, there's something Silas wants to do that's going to cost even more than they have. Balancing the money in and money out to keep it all in proportion took some sitting down and calculating. I think I've finally got it figured out. So there's that, and since it's been a long time since I wrote anything new, I've decided to participate in July Camp NaNoWriMo (because I'm just not busy enough :P). My goal is 500 words a day for a total of 12,000 words for the month (not much, but should be doable on the heavy revising schedule I'm on), and my project is Tales of Azara, a set of short stories to go along with Chosen of Azara. Some readers have mentioned to me that they'd like more background on the characters in the novel and more stories from that world, so that's what this is for. And I'm doing COYER Summer Vacation! So when I'm not writing and revising, I'll be reading and reviewing. Should be enough to keep me out of trouble! This week's other stop on the Writing Process Blog Hop is Madhuri Blaylock; go check her out! I don't usually blog about other blog posts, especially not posts directed more at writers than at readers, but this is too good to pass up. Right now, Amazon, which really opened up the possibilities for independent authors with its invention of the Kindle (the first really usable e-reader) and Kindle Direct Publishing (Smashwords also gets credit for starting the independent author revolution, but it was Amazon that brought it mainstream) is involved in difficult negotiations with one of the Big 5 publishers (Hachette). The news media (which in large part is owned by the same giant international comglomerates that own the Big 5 publishers) has been in an anti-Amazon frenzy, spouting out ridiculous claims about how Amazon means the end of literature and ideas and civilization and life the universe and EVERYTHING!!! Passive Guy is an IP (intellectual property) and contracts lawyer with a special interest in independent writing and publishing and in the disruptive technology and business practices that make this revolution possible. His blog is a must-read for independent authors. Here is part of his response to the frenzy: As independent authors arise, empowered by Amazon’s democratic commons of ideas, PG says we’re looking at a renaissance of American literature, an upheaval that is shoving the suits out and putting authors back in charge of the art they create. You can read the whole thing, along with quotes from the article that inspired this response, here: http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/2014/how-the-amazon-hachette-fight-could-shape-the-future-of-ideas/ For readers, the independent author revolution means more books, less expensive books, a wider variety of books - not just what the sales departments at the publishing companies decide they can market, access to previously out-of-print books whose authors have gotten their rights back (often at great time, expense, and stress), continuation of series that were cancelled by publishers, easier and more convenient access to books in a variety of formats, and closer interaction with authors. Big publishing does not see readers as their customers; their customers are the book distributors and the big chain bookstores. The independent author revolution is good for readers, good for authors, good for everyone except those with a vested interest in preserving the old, bloated, exclusionary, wasteful way of doing things.
With Sarya's Song out now, I'm finally able to turn my attention full-time to revising Daughter of the Wildings. Which makes me really happy: finally I get to start turning the first drafts I wrote into the books I want them to be! I started out by analyzing the whole series, diagnosing problems with plot, worldbuilding, character development and stuff like that. This is a picture of my binder with the printout of Daughter of the Wildings when I first started that process. So that took about three months, splitting my writing time with Sarya's Song. Then I just worked on Sarya's Song for about the next month and a half, getting it ready for release. Once Sarya's Song was out, I made the revision cards for Daughter of the Wildings. I make an index card for each scene as I want it to appear in the revised version of the novel, with a summary of the scene and its purpose in the story. On the back I list the major issues that need to be addressed in the revision of that scene. Then I color-code each card, to show an estimate of how much work each scene is going to need - up to 25% (green), 25%-50% (yellow), 50-75% (orange), and 75% to complete rewrite or new scene (pink). This stage was a lot faster than the analysis stage, and only took a couple of weeks. This is a picture of my lovely stack of DoW revision cards. You'll notice that many pads of Post-Its gave themselves to the cause, especially yellow and orange. Once that was done, I got to start the fun part - actually marking up the manuscript. And here is where I really realized how much my initial ideas about the characters and the story changed from when I started Book 1 to when I finished Book 6. Usually, my estimates for how much work each scene needs are pretty accurate, but so far this revision has called for a lot more work than I thought it would. "Green" and "yellow" scenes, that I thought would need changes to less than half of the scene, have ended up completely obliterated with red ink. Here's the first page of Book 1 of Daughter of the Wildings, with lovely red scribbles, scrawls, arrows, lots of words crossed out, and some blue ink where I changed something and then changed my mind about the change. And this page is pretty clean compared to a lot of the pages I've done since then. The numbers down the sides are references to my notes; I have hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of individual revision notes for this series. The great thing about revising this way, analysis - plan - markup, is you discover all the issues with your manuscript and figure out what to do about them before you ever start in with the red pen, so that you don't get halfway through and then *forehead slap* realize that subplot isn't working or this character's development is way off. I'm still making changes to my plan as I go, but it's easy to go into my notes and update them. I still refer to my notes as I do the markup; the summaries on the cards give me an idea of the major changes that have to be made. I do those, then go back and check on the more detailed changes that I put in my notes. Half the time, those changes don't apply any more because I already re-wrote that whole section while making the big changes. And so it goes. After a little more than a week of working on the markup and type-in, I'm about 1/3 through Book 1. This stage is going to take at least a couple of months; hopefully, it'll start going faster after Book 1 because I won't need to make as many major changes to bring the later books into consistency. (Real life issues, including a bad flare-up of my fatigue, also slowed things down over the last week or so.) In the meantime, I'm going to start scaring up some test readers, and I'm putting the lettering on the covers. Here's the prototype for the cover for Book 1 with the lettering. I kind of hate having to put lettering all over the gorgeous art, but if I have to, I think this is kind of cool. I'm open to feedback, though. Cool, or not? Also, I haven't had the reveal for the cover art for Book 6 yet, so watch for that in a week or so! (Note: I revise using the method taught in Holly Lisle's How To Revise Your Novel online course. That's my affiliate link, and I'm an affiliate for that course and recommend it every chance I get because if you want to publish your writing, whether self or traditional, it's the best $250 you can spend on your writing.) |
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