Update the First

An Elemental Water

57340 / 57340 words. 100% done! finished!

Yeah, I know I have the progress bars at the side as well, but those ones will be continually updated while the ones at the top of the posts are permanent (more or less). I just thought it would be nice to be able to check back and see my . . . progress. :-)

So the big news is, I've finished the re-writes on An Elemental Water . Whew! What a job! If you followed along with the serialized version (which ended up taking close to two years before it was done so if you hung in there all that time you're totally awesome!) you'll know it ran a tad long, clocking in at 71,581 words before I was done.

One of the problems with Water was that I started at the beginning, which you should never do. And when I say the beginning, I mean the very beginning - with the main character and his twin being born. So the first thing I did was lop off the first 20,000 words, which brought me down to a more respectable 52,336 words.

But some of the stuff I got rid of was necessary, and since An Elemental Water is sort of telling the same story as An Elemental Fire but from a different perspective, I thought it would be kind of cool if it was done in the same format. Which meant including journal entries at the beginning of each chapter to impart the necessary back story. Only before I knew it, the character who was making the journal entries kind of took that part over and told her own story as well. This, along with a few other changes, brought my word count to 57,340. And there the word count will sit until the final rounds of edits is done. :-)

An Elemental Earth

9415 / 50000 words. 19% done!

An Elemental Earth has a new chapter on my main blog every Thursday. Usually I like to get my posts done the night before and schedule them to appear at 8 a.m., but occasionally (like last week) they don't get up until the afternoon.

This is really supposed to be Chloe's story, since she's the Earth Elemental, but Zephryn seems to have taken over. I was whining complaining mentioning to a friend that I know what's going to happen a few scenes from where I've left off, but it's getting there that's the problem. Chloe and Zeph need to be closer, but I don't want to rush them. Maybe I'll skip ahead to what I know will happen and write backwards from there.

The bonus of that will be having several installments written ahead of time. And if the writing starts to speed up on this I'd like to start posting twice a week so I'm not letting two years go by between books again. Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Lucky Dog

50940 / 70000 words. 73% done!

Lucky Dog is the sequel to Magical Misfire and was my NaNo novel from two years ago. Which is probably the last time I looked at it. It continues where Magical Misfire left off, namely, with Jessica up to her neck in hot water again. I swear, she makes the Perils of Pauline look like child's play. I'm going to start by re-reading what I've got and sanding off some of the rough edges. Being a NaNo novel I'm sure it's got a few plot holes that you could drive a snow plow through, so I'll be fixing them before I continue where I left off in the story.

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For those of you who missed it, I wrote a 1600 word story for Valentine's Day. It's an odd little romance but I set myself a goal of having it done for VD and I did it. If you'd like to read it, you can find it HERE. It's a little longer than I'm comfortable with for a blog post, but it's not as long as it could be. I actually left out quite a bit and I'm planning on fleshing it out to be released in a downloadable e-format next Valentine's Day.

Hello and Welcome!

So . . . you may be wondering why the woman who took over a year to decide which of her two blogs to abandon suddenly creates a whole new blog. It's a fair question.

Here's the thing. When I revamped my main blog and created new pages for it, I had a page for Current Projects. At the writing of this post I still have that page. At any rate, I was going to use it for updating my progress on my current writing/editing projects.

Well . . . first of all, I was supposed to update it once a week. That was a major fail, I've only updated it twice in the last month. And then I noticed my updates looked more like blog posts. The problem with that is because it's a page you're just adding to it and it turns into one incredibly long blog post. So I figured I'd have to either stop talking so much, or move my chattiness elsewhere.

Now. I could have just given the blog I abandoned a face-lift and used it, but I decided to start fresh. So here I am. :-)

One of the cool features of blogger is that you can link a page to a web address . . . as in a new blog. So that's what I did here. It's a stand alone blog, but I have a link to it on my regular blog. Cool, eh? Now all I have to do is decide whether I'm going to keep the page I created for Current Projects and just update the progress bars once a week as I'd originally intended, or delete it altogether and just keep the link to this page.

Now the incredible Jamie DeBree has a site where she shares her Writer's Notes and you really should got take a look. What I find so inspiring about them is the amount of writing she gets done in such teeny tiny snippets of time. Don't be expecting such inspiration here. LOL

Here's what you will and will not see on this blog:

I will not be sticking to a schedule, just updating as the spirit moves me.
I will not be sharing the length of time my writing sessions are.
I will be showing progress bars on my current projects.
I will be talking about said projects.
I will be talking honestly about how the writing's going.

And that's pretty much it. I'll probably get the first post up later this week, 'cause right now I have to finish my post for tomorrow for the other blog. ;-)

Oh! And don't be surprised to see colours, gadgets, etc. coming and going while I settle on the fonts and backgrounds for this blog.