July 12, 2015

I was getting impatient, haha. Chapter 13 of All We Are has been posted today because well, damn it, I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted you guys to see the twist and I’ve had to keep it in for months after I decided to do the opening scene.

Additionally, I fixed the comment template here at CG. I’ve hated it for eons, but couldn’t quite make it do what I wanted. I’ve now adjusted it and will be taking it to the Damaged site later today once I finish editing those files.

Oh, and I added a missing title to the Sort By Title feature. And then I counted. There are 112 links on that page, which means there are roughly 105-108 stories on this site now. It’s not quite 112 since I’ve separated some stories that are part of a series and linked the series as well. And that doesn’t count the Fiction Graveyard. I have spent the better part of my 20s writing for GH. It’s sad 😛

And I added a new story status for the summer which gives you my status on in progress stories and previews what I’m working on elsewhere.

So enjoy your surprise update! We’re kicking off a great week here at CG. I’ll be back on Wednesday with Chapter 22 of The Best Thing, and then on Friday, you get a Jason and Elizabeth reunion in Damaged. (Oh, shoot did I give you a spoiler? Maybe.)

July 8, 2015

Two things really. The Damaged site has been relaunched, though I’ve only readded six of eleven episodes. The last five will be added by Friday so that you’ll have an opportunity to either reread, catch up, or check the story out for the first time. The site also has some reader feedback features so you can better shape the future of the story 🙂

Second, The Best Thing will be back next week. This is definite. I have the chapters finished, they’re beta’d, they’re ready. I’m holding off another week because it’s been almost four months since I’ve posted it, and The Best Thing is long–very long at this point. It’s twenty-two chapters, more than two hundred pages and 80,000 words. So! This week would be a good time refresh yourself on the story.

You can either use the website, you can check it out on Fanfiction.net or at Archive of Our Own, or you can sit with your ereader and enjoy it in the comfort away from the internet with the in-progress ebook. I try to provide as many options as I can for reading my stories. I really reccommend refreshing yourself with some of the earlier details. We’re hitting the ground running next Wednesday and we’re not looking back. I may be bumping it up to two chapters a week once I finish posting All We Are on August 10 🙂

July 6, 2015

Updated with All We Are Chapter Twelve.

So I’m not going to lie. About this time last week, I could see July 15 approaching fast. I had publicly announced The Best Thing would return at that point, but I hadn’t quite finished another chapter. I really didn’t want to push it back.

And then something magical happened. I wrote four chapters in four days, which gives me an entire month of posts. And I made a decision to cut a section of the story that might have worked, but I think it might have dragged the story out as well. And it was causing my writing to drag as well. If it’s not working, cut it. I think it’ll shave one or two chapters off the total count. I’m excited for you to read some of those chapters I finished over this last weekend.

Damaged is still on schedule to return on July 18, so next week will be a return to constant posts from me. You have All We Are on Mondays, TBT on Wednesdays, and Damaged on Fridays. All We Are will be wrapping up by the end of the summer, I’m working on Chapter Fourteen now, and only have four more after that’s finished. If I can manage to finish it all by some time week, I’ll get the ebook formatted and put it up the way I normally do–with a giveaway.

The site was running slow for a while but I made some changes in hopes of maximizing performance. I did some upgrades and my host, Dreamhost, was actually super quick in making the biggest change — a database had to move servers or something. If you’re ever looking for a webhost, Dreamhost is amazing. Their basic plans are super cheap, and even my plan around $15 a month. Give them a looksee if you’re in the market. I’ve been with them since 2006 and can’t imagine going anywhere else.

Oh, and another thing! I was working on a scene for Chapter 14, All We Are, and I wanted to confirm a detail. So I turned to my trust Liason DVDS to help me out. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned CurlyQGrl’s DVDs. I’ve been buying GH DVDs from her since 1999, with my set of Lucky and Liz on VHS, ha. They were amazing, but lost in a housefire. While I was in London, I invested in replacing that set as well as obtaining my own Liason DVDs, some Scrubs edits, and a 2004 Elizabeth Returns DVD which has her interim storylines between the end of LiRic and the beginning of LL2.3 (which is my own personal code for her storyline with Greg’s Lucky.)

Her collection is vast and immense and goes back into GH history waaay into the 1980s. You should check her out.

July 1, 2015

Hey! Just a note for Damaged readers. When I posted the final episode for Season One a few weeks ago, I mentioned I would be taking the site offline in order to redesign it for the next season, add more content, and reformat the previous episodes to better fit the format. Damaged is offline as of today, but will return on Monday, July 13, 2015 so everyone can get accustomed to the new layout. Damaged, Season Two: Prodigal Son will be posted Friday, July 17.

However, with the help of Cora, I’ve taken the initial group of episodes, edited them, and reformatted them into eleven episodes that compromise the new season. You can wait to read them in their new format when the site reopens or check out the ebook I’ve created for that purpose.

I know the site may have been slow over the last week, maybe even longer. I get a decent amount of regular visitors every day and with the site being powered by WordPress, I’m using a lot of processes on my server. It was an issue about six months ago and I moved servers. Apparently, we’ve outgrown our old settings and I’ve had to upgrade again.  I’ll know in about a week of it’s been a good use of the money. Hopefully 🙂

June 29, 2015

Hey! I know a ton of you guys read the updates  when they’re emailed to you, which is why I include the title of the story with the update (All We Are, Chapter Whatever). Well, it was early this morning and my internet is being extremely bitchy, so I posted the wrong title for some reason. The chapter that was delivered is clearly All We Are, Chapter Eleven.

Sorry for any confusion!

June 27, 2015

I was so bored with the blue! I’m still not completely sold on the header image, but I wanted to get this up. Let me know if the greens and yellows are problematic for anyone and I’ll darken them.  This layout is based on the winner of the poll a few weeks ago.

In addition to the new summer layout, I also finished the Sort By Title feature, updated the Featured story with If I Don’t Try With You, and cleaned up some of the columns. No one seems interested in the music/artist section in the columns, so I’m letting it go. I’ll clean up the music page at some point.

The social media links have been moved to the About page.  I have to go through some of the stories and edit the soundtracks to get rid of the Grooveshark links. That site shut down a little while ago, sadly. I’ll continue linking to Spotify, which you can listen to for free if you sign up for an account.

I picked If I Don’t Try With You as the featured story because I personally love it and if I say so myself, it’s one of the best pieces I’ve written since I came to writing last year.  It’s part of the Hand Me Down universe, but it stands alone since it picks up directly from Michael’s shooting in 2008. Please check it out if you haven’t yet.

I also decided to do a separate page for just listing basic updates, so if occasionally you miss something in the chatter, you can bookmark the Recent Updates page. I’ll update everything there in a basic list format without any frills. All the facts, none of the nonsense 🙂

I’ll be back on Monday with a new chapter of All We Are 🙂

June 23, 2015

Well thanks to those who responded to my survey call 🙂 My responses doubled and I have some great feedback so far. I still don’t have a ton, but I saw the same type of suggestion/complaint a few times in a few places, so I jumped on it because I think it’s something I can offer a solution to in the short-term while I work on incorporating it into the new layout in a better way.

Under the Sort menu (where you can sort stories by the year they’re set, the characters, or the couples featured, and even find specific holiday-themes!), you can now sort By Title, which is an alphabetical list of the stories on this site. It’s not yet complete–I still have to add Ficlets and Short Stories, but all longer stories are now listed.

So if you’re looking for Damaged, you can find it under D rather than remembering I list it under the site as an Alternate Reality story or if you want Daughters, but can’t remember it’s an Alternate Universe, you can also find it there under D. Hopefully that helps the site be a more friendly.

It’s a manual list at the moment, so it’s a bit time-consuming but I haven’t ruled out maybe adding story descriptions to it at some point. We’ll see.

I hope that helps!

I also have heard your calls about making updates easier to find. I tend to get very chatty as I update so sometimes they’re lost.  I’m working on something that will be easier, but for the moment, there’s a a section in the colum on the right-side of the page where I have Updated Novels and Recently/Completed New. This will be the majority of the new additions but it’s not as organic as it could be. I have an idea for that I may launch later in the week.

So please check out the Sort By Title page and please keep responding to the survey! I want you guys to be able to find a story to read within a minute of clicking on the home page, so anything I can do to make that possible, I’m willing to look into!

June 22, 2015

Just popping in to note that All We Are Chapter Ten has been added, a bit later than I had hoped but a dentist appointment is a crappy way to start the day.

If you haven’t filled out the survey yet, please please take a moment to do so. It takes less than five minutes and I will be eternally grateful.  I want to rearrange the side columns to feature the stuff you guys use more and eliminate some of the clutter, but I only have 7 responses and I know there’s more of you out there. Take a second and show some love 😛  I can’t finish the new layout until I know what content is going where.

I finished two chapters of All We Are just on Saturday, and I am FINALLY in the best part of the story, which makes me so happy. I’m going to take my laptop and hole up at either a library or Starbucks tomorrow to get a few more out. I work better at home when no one is here, and my parents are home again. I’ve got to get my own place, you guys. Seriously.

Anyway. I’m also digging back into The Best Thing which finally started cooperating yesterday and it looks like I wasn’t ambitious with the July 15 date. If I can get a decent amount of chapters of TBT done before July 15, I’ll bump All We Are up to two chapters a week.

Damaged will be back July 17. I’ve decided to go with Fridays for the posting, so that’s your official return date. Around July 1, the site itself will be offline for about a week so I can finally finish off the changes planned (including cleaning up the previous episdes!).

And finally, I’m torn between three concepts for the project I take on after All We Are wraps up.  Bittersweet (a rewrite of 2002), Mad World (a rewrite of the old version) and Burn in Heaven (the sequel to A Few Words). I’m going to play with all three of them a bit more, but hopefully something will gel.

June 18, 2015

Hey! So I mentioned that after I completed the current story arc for Damaged that I would be putting the story on a planned hiatus for a month while I wrote the next group of episodes. That has now happened. There will be a few changes over the next month — I’ll be taking all the episodes currently on the site, merging the shorter ones into one long one per day, and then putting them all under one umbrella season. So, all in all, there will be eleven episodes. So, in my head, I’m saying Season One is completed. Season Two is underway.

So head over to Damaged and get reading if you haven’t yet, and please let me know what you might want to see going forward. I’ve got the next season mostly plotted, but I’m always open to more ideas.

That being said, with Damaged on hiatus, I’m turning my attention back to this site. I’ve created a survey to try and focus in on what parts of the site you guys enjoy the most and find useful so I can either cut back or emphasize accordingly. I’m also looking for any suggestions for making the site easier to navigate, etc. So if you have maybe five minutes to take a survey (it’s anonymous!) I would love it!

Click here to take the survey!

I’ll be back on Monday with All We Are, Chapter 10.

June 15, 2015

Hey, sorry I didn’t post this earlier today. I forgot to schedule it this morning, and then I was stuck at work all day. We’re finally back to posting at least one of the in progress stories, so yay!

So there was some concern that because I put Chapter 9 up last week with a password for the Patreon supporters, that I might make this story only available to them. I think that’s my fault. I mentioned I would be posting All We Are again starting Monday without realizing I was posting on a Monday (ha). I meant this Monday. All We Are updates are moving to Mondays. Chapter 9 is live, and Chapter 10 will be up next week.

I will never make a story exclusive to the supporters. Not because they don’t deserve it (you do and you’re awesome) but it almost feels like a punishment for those who aren’t supporting. You guys are amazing and that’s just not going to happen. Any bonus content will usually usually early previews or deleted scenes. For example I threw out an entire chapter and a half of All We Are last week. I’ll be posting that for Patreon supporters in a few weeks. I hope that clears it up!

All We Are – Chapter Nine