Category Archives: Site News

November 30, 2015

Well, here we are at the end of November, and I’m not sure where the days are going. It feels like just yesterday that I decided (very nearly on a whim) to see if I couldn’t finish some of the fanfiction I had abandoned six years earlier. I was only just beginning a year long sojourn in London for a masters program that wasn’t nearly as rewarding as the year spent living in one of the most amazing cities in the world.

So much of what I write now was plotted and planned as I walked the streets of London that year, listening to the soundtracks and writing dialogue in my head.  In fact, the very chapter I’m writing in The Best Thing this week — I can really remember exactly where I was when I came up with the scene — across from Euston Station, at the corner of Euston Street and Upper Woburn Place.

Anyway, the point of this is — I know the updates have been sparse since August, particularly if you’re not following Damaged, and I apologize for that. That’s not a situation that will be changing this month as I’ll only be posting Fiction Graveyard updates.

However, starting in January, the plan is to have at least one fresh update of something accompanying the Fiction Graveyard updates. In January, the final chapters of The Best Thing. Then Bittersweet starting in February, then Damaged, Season 3 in March, and so on. I mentioned that I was going to write Bittersweet during NaNoWriMo. I had hoped to finish at least half the story by the end of month, but I ran into some problems. I had to stop and start over, so I only finished eight chapters. Still, eight chapters is roughly a third of the way through, so not so bad.  I’ll be finishing up The Best Thing, then hoping to get to the rest of Bittersweet and in January.

So why am I bothering you all with a post? Updates to the Fiction Graveyard will restart next Monday, with Tangle and Poisonous Dreams #1. If you haven’t been following Damaged, Season 1 and 2 are now completed and posted at the website. Damaged Season 1 is 11 episodes long, Season 2 is 14 episodes long. Each episode is anywhere from 15-23 pages long, so if you’ve not been reading my version of General Hospital beginning with AJ’s murder and Jason’s return from the dead, you’re missing out on 600 pages of new material. 😛 It ought to hold you over until January.

Happy holidays! Every week, I’ll be highlighting one or two of the Christmas stories already posted here. So this week, I bring up an old favorite. Always An Angel, a particularly sappy story I wrote in 2003.

November 17, 2015

Hey! Valla informed me that the chapter link for Aurora Dawning was broken. In case anyone else noticed it, I just wanted to let you know it was fixed now.

Also, this Friday, I’m posting the season finale of Damaged 😉 So stay tuned and subscribe to that story to get updates!

October 21, 2015

So on the heels of a few really good weeks of writing, I’m previewing our schedule for the next six months. At the moment, my priority is to finish writing The Best Thing and Damaged, Season Two by the end of October. I’m on good track to do that — I have about four episodes left to write for Damaged and five chapters for TBT. I’ve split the work and scheduled it in order to have ample time to work on it.

Damaged will feature fifteen episodes in all, nine of which have been posted already. I will continue posting Season Two until Thanksgiving weekend — Friday, November 27. At time, that will go on a hiatus until Season Three is posted in March 2016.

In order to give myself and Cora a bit of a vacation for the holidays and let her finish her schoolwork, no brand-new work will be posted during December. However, I’ll be posting Fiction Graveyard stories instead. Depending on how many I can get edited, I’ll do two updates a week.

The Best Thing will return for a final run of episodes in January 2016. Bittersweet, which I will be writing during NaNoWriMo in November, then editing and revising in December and January, will be posted in February.

So starting in January, you’ll be getting about a run of five months of original content, posted probably twice a week. What I’ll be posting in the summer depends on how well I stick to my schedule.

So to recap –here’s the breakdown:

October & November – Damaged, Season Two
December – Fiction Graveyard, Ebooks, Site projects
January – The Best Thing
February – Bittersweet
March – Damaged, Season Three

I’ll be back this weekend with an update — a new featured story, an update to The Best Thing in progress ebook, etc, as well Damaged, Episode 2.10 on Friday!

October 16, 2015

I am beside myself with the amount of happiness I feel right now. If you’ve been following Crimson Glass since we first moved to this address and converted to WordPress, you know I’ve been painstakingly try to gather all the stories I’ve ever written since 2002. Between rewrites, computer crashes, and board bannings, I lost many of them. Thanks to some readers and the Internet Wayback Machine, I managed to find around fifteen or so of them. I’ve been putting old versions and abandoned stories in the Fiction Graveyard as well, though that’s been on hiatus due to editing issues.

Today, I connected with Joanna, one of the old crew at The Canvas. I had been missing four particular stories — ones with chapters and written in 2002 and 2003. Joanna saved two of them: No One Else Sees Me and The Ends of the Earth. I haven’t even read them since 2003 as both were lost in a computer crash that summer.

I’m going to go through them and edit them, and hopefully re-add them to the site at some point in the next few weeks. I can’t even…I am so happy right now. Thank you, Joanna!

Also, Damaged has been updated. It’s a good day and I can’t seem to stop smiling 🙂

October 9, 2015

Hey! Good news. I’m declaring my hiatus over. Mostly. I’m updating Damaged against, starting tonight. And The Best Thing will return momentarily. I hit a snag with my last chapter and have to restructure pieces of it. However, once I start the final four chapters, I have a feeling they’re just going to pour out because they’re so closely interlinked, I won’t be able to stop.

Hopefully, The Best Thing will back and completed by the end of November. For now, enjoy Damaged!

 

September 27, 2015

I had one chapter of The Best Thing I was saving in case of a emergency. We’re there, ha. It’s been about a month since I’ve been confident in what I’m writing. I’ve got some scenes written, but nothing substantial or ready for a beta read.

But I didn’t want to leave you guys hanging for too long without something new. So here’s where we are.

Since I’ve realized I write in cycles, I have to structure my posting around that so that I can take off the time I need to recharge without running out of things to post.

I’m nearly finished The Best Thing. I have five more chapters to write. I’m about halfway through Damaged, Season Two. At the conclusion of both of those, I’ll probably need some time off in order to write Bittersweet. NaNoWriMo is coming up in November. That’s National Novel Writing Month. The objective is to write 50,000 words. That’s about half of what I plan for Bittersweet, so that will give me an amazing headstart to return in January with a new story.

Damaged Season Three is on hold for a bit while I sort out a few things. If things go well in November, I should be able to bring that back at the same time as Bittersweet.

So the game plan is to finish writing The Best Thing and Damaged by the end of the month and then posting them in November and December. I’ll keep you guys posted 😛

Enjoy The Best Thing, Chapter 29.

September 17, 2015

So I thought I’d throw this together as a peace offering since this hiatus is lasting longer than I intended. This is some questions I’ve been asked over the years and some others I’m making up. Ha. If you have anything you want to ask, feel free to reply and ask!

You can click the read more button for the interview. I also added the links (finally!) for All We Are, the ebook. All three formats are there.

Continue reading →

September 3, 2015

So you might have noticed I didn’t post The Best Thing this week and those of you who read Damaged know that last week’s episode was supremely delayed and that I haven’t put up any teasers for this coming week.

I don’t want to bore you with any of the details except to say I have had a bit of a setback. I was planning to go back to school this year and get my teaching license, but funding fell through at the last minute. (And like seriously, the very last minute. I was due to start classes Tuesday and Friday was kind of the death knell for the whole project.)

It’s actually turning into a major setback and I have to rethink my whole timeline for getting my certificate. There’s also been some turmoil in my family. An in-law lost lost a member of the family, and I’ve been picking up extra baby-sitting shifts for my youngest niece, while baby-sitting an extra ton while my sister starts her classes on schedule (oh, the irony).

Anyway. This is all to say that the last week and a half have basically been a bust for writing. I’ve gotten next to nothing done, and what is done I mostly hate and feel like trashing. This weekend is going to be a bust for any writing — I’m baby-sitting again, shopping for dresses for the wedding, and Labor Day bbq. I’m starting work on Tuesday as scheduled — ugh. It’s just a whole lot of nonsense. I’m tired of it, but you know, life saps creativity from time to time.

I’ll post some scenes from Bittersweet that I’ve trashed — I’ve written several opening scenes and only just found the one I liked, but I won’t be able to use the others. So I’ll post them at some point this weekend as a peace offering.

I’ll post any further updates on my writing on Facebook/Twitter so as not to annoy you guys further here.

August 26, 2015

So first things first: Chapter 28 of The Best Thing has been posted. It’s the first chapter in Part Four of the story, and it’s taking us closer to the end. I’m looking forward to putting this one in the done column.

Second, I’ve been toying with taking a small hiatus when classes begin next week. I think I’ve mentioned how insane my schedule is going to be when I’m in school, then I go back to work the week after, I’m going bridesmaid dress shopping because I’m maid of honor, I have nieces and a nephew to help with because my sister is also starting classes (we’re going to get our teaching license and need some education classes before we can student teach) — and sometimes I might want to just stare at the ceiling.

So I want to give myself a chance to get into that routine and find space for writing without worrying I’ll run out of chapters of The Best Thing or miss a deadline.

So The Best Thing is on hiatus for about two weeks. Damaged will only be one week, because I can finish next week’s episode before I start classes and then we’ll just be gone on September 10.

Damaged is on schedule to be posted this Thursday at 8 PM EST. I posted some preview dialogue snippets over at Damaged and updated the cast list with some guest appearances, so check it out.

Thanks guys!

August 22, 2015

So it’s been about six or seven weeks since the last update. I wanted to give you guys some concept of how we’re going to go forward into the fall since I’ll be juggling five classes and a part-time work schedule (and baby-sitting nieces and nephews!)

Site Features

1. I want to add a new sort feature that will give better ideas on length. If you want a full-length novel (more than 50,000 words), you’ll be able to find that. If you want something shorter, you can go to novellas, which will range from 15,000 to 50,000 words. Everything else will be in that short story, ficlet range where it already exists.

I had contemplated reoganizing the site and moving stories around to reflect this change. For example, a story like Spinning On An Axis which has always been located in the Alternate History section would move to the novellas area, because it’s about 32,000 words long. But instead, I’ll just tag it with the word “novella” the way I would tag it with a character or couple featured, so if you wanted something that was mid-sized, you could get it.

Adding this feature may seem like a waste of time, but sometimes the chapter length doesn’t give you an accurate idea of how long something is. For example, Spinning is 15 chapters long. Shadows is only three parts, but it’s 20,000 words. You’ll have a better idea of what you’re getting yourself into.

2. On the subject of adding more usefulness to the sort features, I want to start working on adding summaries to the Sort By Title page. I think that this is probably the most visited page in that section, and while I do list where the story is located, it still doesn’t give you enough information to decide whether you want to read it. This is going to be kind of time-consuming, so I’ll be working on it on and off in a separate file. There are around 100 stories listed on the site at the moment.

3. I need to be better with ebook releases. I still haven’t added All We Are, even though the ebook for that is finished. It needs to be converted into two other formats. But I’ve been meaning to set aside one day a month to do ebooks so I can do a new release every month. I hope to fix that going forward, but we’ll see.

Those are the major site changes I’m planning. They go along with the normal stuff — I’m working on a fall layout, but it’s taking longer than I expected since I’m rewriting the WordPress theme code to better reflect everything I’ve learned.

Story Status

The Best Thing – So I’ve finished writing through Chapter 30. I’ve planned and storyboarded through Chapter 35, which with the addition of an epilogue, will complete the story. I’ve tentatively scheduled myself to finish the last five chapters this weekend and part of next week, but definitely by September 1. I’ll continue posting once week to give me a finish date (projected) of October 10.

Damaged – I have done a ton of work on this story this last week and have planned the major storylines through the end of Season 2 and Season 3, with some tentative work on Season 4. At the moment, there’s no plans to go beyond Season 4. I may do a wrap up Season 5 depending on how things unfold as I continue writing.

If everything continues to go to plan, Season 2 will finish on October 8. I’m not positive about when Season 3 will premiere. I took a month off between seasons last time, but it wasn’t enough time, to be honest. I’m thinking a premiere date of December 1 would be the best bet, but it might move up depending on how things move along.

For example, I’ll be finishing The Best Thing by September 1, so while I’ll be working on the next story, I might take the opportunity to write two episodes of Damaged a week. If I can finish writing the season sooner than October 8, I’d feel more comfortable bringing it back in early November.

I can’t make any promises since I don’t know how heavy my schedule will be.

Bittersweet – Because I’ve been concentrating on completing The Best Thing by September 1 and Damaged Season 2 by September 15, I’ve pushed Bittersweet to the back burner a bit. It’s the still the next story I’m working on, but I’m glad I decided not to start posting it this week. I’ms still looking at a mid-September, early October launch. I should know by the time I finish writing The Best Thing.

Other Stories

Up Next: Burn in Heaven, Mad World, and Feels Like Home are all on the roster to be written next. I know I’ve been saying this for a year, haha, but as I remarked before, I’ve been burnt out on writing Liason 2004-08 just due to the elements that have to be dealt with. I have no problem writing Sam and Courtney, I’m just tired of writing the baggage, and all three of these stories incorporate it to a certain extent. So I’ll be taing a break to work on Bittersweet, then coming back to these three projects.

These Small Hours – This story is still on my radar, make no mistakes about it. I’m eager to get back into it, but the outline is coming out right because it’s more ensemble than I had anticipated in the initial outlines. It was originally going to be straight Johnny and Nadine with Jason and Elizabeth as supporting characters, but I underestimated how much I would have to deal with Sonny and Kate, and when you deal with them, you have to deal with Jason and Elizabeth more.

So I’m trying to shift it so that it’s written more like The Best Thing, only in reverse with Jason and Elizabeth as the semi-main characters but it being Johnny and Nadine’s story. TBT has Jason and Elizabeth as the main characters with Sonny/Carly and Nikolas/Emily, with some Steven thrown in for good measure. Like Sonny and Carly, the Liason subplot will be fully fleshed out, but won’t steal the focus. That’s if I can make the outline behave.

Counting Stars – I’ve been tempted to sit down and just write this story because it’ll be less than a full novella. It’s kind of like All We Are with an even more narrow focus and less twists and turns. I could probably write it in about a week if I had no other distracts, and doing that and posting it would give me more space to work on more intensive story.

Any other stories not mentioned remain on the drawing board. 🙂