Midnight Rain

Midnight Rain: "He'll NEVER forget you..."

I See You

I See You: "Someone's watching..."

Last Girl Dancing

Last Girl Dancing: "Don't talk to strangers..."

Night Echoes

Night Echoes: "Your past is waiting..."

Because of a bit of a financial bump, I’m pushing hard to get all the backlist up in the next couple of months. To my amazement (because I thought exactly the opposite), I think the suspense novels are going to take the longest. I’m having to go through them and edit to bring the late-draft manuscript versions I have up to the published versions.

The scans don’t have to be rewritten. They just have to be edited, and my guys (and in two cases, my co-authors) are working on that.

So my release schedule is going to change completely, and will probably start with either the Arhel trilogy or the Devil’s Point trilogy.

But there will be books soon.

>>>–4EVR—>

The title means a lot.

I got it to Trisha Telep in time, heard back that I’d made the deadline—and we are NOT going to talk about the morning-to-next-morning hours I worked for several days getting that revision done. What was supposed to have been a 6500-word story that might creep up to 7000 words became a 12,000 word PROJECT.

But I love the story. And when The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance comes out, it’ll be in there.

Meanwhile, with that done, I’m holding firm to my commitment to the Write A Book With Me project.

To that end…

TALYSMANA is live again. I finished chapter 26, posted chapter 26, and am prepped to do 10 minutes or 300 words a day on this from now until I wrap the first draft of the project.

What this means for Write A Book With Me folks is that we’re jumping BACK to the TalysMana blog, because that’s my WABWM project. You’ll note that Write A Book With Me now has its own tab at the top of the weblog, too.

Post your wordcounts and progress to the most recent post tagged Write A Book With Me. I can’t promise to post every day. I’ll do my best.

The story in first draft runs 7641 words.

I always add some words in second draft, because my first drafts run lean.

I like my ending, I like the twist I got, and I definitely did not see the last bit going the way it did.

I’m going to collect my short paranormals into a Kindle edition, I think, after this story comes out. Probably throw in a couple of original short shorts, and maybe some other things.

So. Anyway. That was my words.

How did yours go?

Interesting. So tomorrow, I’ll pursue the conversation further, and find out why she responded as she did.

293 words.

How did your writing go?

I did 3588 words on Lesson Four of HTRYN today, and was pretty happy to get the 287 I managed on Dreaming the Dead.

I’m not exactly enthralled by what I got. But I’m dead tired, and I got something. I’ll leave it at that.

Hope your fiction was more fun.

Her life, derailed when she was fifteen, has taken an odd turn suddenly, and she discovers that she has something to live for—that her life has become valuable to her again.

569 words.

How are you doing?

The news on my brother-in-law, by the way, is there is no news. He’s in a holding pattern now, where the hospital with the doctor who WANTS to do his surgery suggested he go to a bigger medical center, and the bigger medical center said he’s not a county resident and he’s self pay, so no chance.

At this point, he’s controlling the seizures pretty well. In theory, he may be able to get the surgery in January.

My Writing

Last week went OVER seventy hours working on Hot To Revise Your Novel, including working all morning today.

Next week, I think, will be more sane. A lot of what I’ve been doing is one-time stuff associated with setting up the How To Revise Your Novel course software, the course forums, adding a NaNoWriMo forum to HTTS, testing things, creating workgroups….

A lot, of course, is writing the course and interacting with my two beta students, so even once everything is set up, I’m still going to be logging some serious hours. And once the Early Birds hit How To Revise Your Novel at the end of November or the first part of December, that’s going to require some additional time, too.

But, to get to the point, I wiped out around 3 AM last night without ever getting to my fiction.

I’m not going to write tonight. Today is my Official Weekend, Dammit^TM.

But I’ll be back tomorrow night. With fiction.

How did you do yesterday? How are you doing today?

The world stopped. I leaned on the guitar I was trying out and just watched this guy, and listened. His hands were liquid, boneless, the notes perfect, the whole piece played out into the stillness like the magical gateway to another universe.

When the last notes shivered into silence and I realized there weren’t going to be any more, I asked him the name of the piece (I’d never heard it before).

I’ve remembered his version of it forever. I’ve never heard a better rendition than his, and I’ve listened to a lot of them.

Tonight, that guy and his guitar and Moonlight Sonata found his way to a street corner in New York City, where he enchanted Aleksa, before he passed on a message she needed to hear.

I’ve been hanging on to that moment the majority of my life.

It was something sacred then. It came out something sacred tonight.

413 words.

You?

I’ve heard knees creak, heard the sound bone makes on bone when weighed down by muscle, skin, sinew, and fluid. It’s a distinctive sound—nothing else compares.

So that detail slipped in as I was writing, and then the question followed:

What if the sound Aleksa hears from his knees isn’t that sound?

Tiny detail, tiny question…but the man escorting her to the train station came alive for me when I suddenly got the answer, and understood what it meant.

I stopped at 300 words exactly.

How did you do?

I deleted the last two paragraphs, re-wrote them to change the neighborhood through which she was driving, and suddenly the identity of the person on the phone with her became suspicious, the instructions she was being given became frightening…

…And as I realized she was in real trouble, and getting in deeper by the second, she came up with a cool-headed way to save her own neck from a danger that hadn’t even existed last night. The solution flashed on me as I was writing—as quickly as the problem had tempted me to write it, and it’s just beautiful.

So tomorrow night I have something cool to start out with, and something scary to continue—and all because the neighborhood she’d previously ended up in was simply too nice.

I got 520 words not including the two paragraphs I deleted and re-wrote. Good writing night.

Coming up with any cool twists on your story?