Update Link: This is Me Trying – Prologue

Hey! I overslept this morning, and sometimes I wake up with migraines when that happens, so I’m moving Flash Fiction to tomorrow. I try to give you guys something to make up for missing scheduled updates, so I thought you guys might enjoy the prologue of a story I’ve been playing with a bit. I had an idea for a rewrite of Dec 2004/Jan 2005, and I’ve been plotting it in my spare moments. I had a really vivid idea for the prologue, so I wanted to get it on paper while I had it. It reads like the prologue — but it can also be a short story.

You can find it linked above — it’s a PDF download from the Free Digital Shop on Patreon. I’ve been moving all downloads over to the Patreon. You should be able to download this one without an account. I’d love to know what you think!

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Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 40

Hope everyone is having a good week 🙂  I’m feeling a bit more productive this week — must be my brain getting ready for classes again, lol. Can’t believe I start work next week. Summer went slow and fast all at the same time.

See you guys on Friday!

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Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 39

Sorry for the extra delay! I wanted to wait until I had at least three hours without a power outage, and we hit that at 6 PM, so I decided to start writing at 7.

It’s Monday, and we’re moving into the final weeks of my summer break, so it’s time for a round up. More information included under the Read More Tag.

Continue reading →

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Hey! Dropping a quick note to let you guys know Flash Fiction IS coming today, but we’re having really weird power issues in my area right now. It’s been since 7:30 AM — every 20-30 minutes, the power just blinks out, and it went out about five minutes into starting Flash Fiction today, so I’m just going to wait until I get something from the electric company. I’m lucky — I use Google Docs and Scrivener which both auto save, so I can just keep working, but Flash Fiction is supposed to be timed, and it takes about 2 minutes to reload the computer, another 2 minutes for the internet to come back — so it ends up eating time.

There’s no Phillies game today, so I can pretty much pick whatever time I want to write, so here are the next two windows for Flash Fiction:

• If my power is on and reliable by noon, I’ll start at 1 PM and post at 2 PM.
• If it’s not reliable until 3PM – 4 PM, I’ll start at 5 PM and post at 6 PM.

If I haven’t posted by 2 PM or 6 PM (EST), then I won’t be updating at all today. Hopefully it gets cleared up and fixed asap.

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Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 38 | In Case You Missed It: NaNoWriMo Poll

Today is the last day for the NaNoWriMo poll! It ends tonight at midnight!

You know, most of the time I don’t feel like I’m actually 39, lol, but physically there are some days when I wake up and I’m like, nah, this body has definitely been on the planet for 39 years and two months. On Wednesday, we went to pub quiz and won (there was a question about the de Medici family in Florence, so it definitely felt like Lauren was there), and I drank a bit more than I usually do. I don’t typically drink anymore because I always associated it with being out with my friends and drinking alone feels sad, lol. AND THEN while I was at the bar, the Phillies pitched a no hitter, Castellanos got his 200th career home run and a rookie got his first home run in his FIRST at bat — so I went home and rewatched the entire game from start to finish — and by then it was 1:30 am so I stayed up to see if Taylor Swift was going announce 1989 TV at her final show in LA — all in all, I didn’t go to sleep until well after 2 am.

No regrets.

Anyway. Yesterday, I edited about 35% of Signs of Life for the final posting version. Chapters 1-15 are done! This final edit goes really fast because it’s just typos and checking for internal consistency. I mostly only had the typos and a few minor line adjustments. I think there’s one scene that needs a light rewrite and then two scenes that need to be switched in the order, but other than that, it’s pretty good.

Today, the goal is to get back on track with FMT. I hate that I lost a week, but clearly I needed the break, and I was a bit scattered with the one year anniversary — more than I thought I would be. Grief is a weird, sneaky bitch.

See you guys on Monday!

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Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 37 | In Case You Missed It: NaNoWriMo Poll

Hope you guys are having a good week! I’m in the final countdown to the end of my summer break, and I got a sneak peek of what my school year looks like. My school district (and so do many others) uses the Remind app — and because I used to work in this district four years ago, I have the same email again. Which means Remind logged me into my classes, lol. It’s the first year of French, so I have only one French I class and one Honors French I class — the other four are a Freshman Seminar which I’m hoping isn’t just study halls, but I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks.  Next year, I should have more French I and some French II classes.

I still haven’t started writing again — I guess I’m not surprised when I think about having written like 59k over just two weeks. I pushed really hard, and the chapters were easy to write, but literally as soon as I got to the end of Act 1, I just hit a wall — hard, and I’m sort of struggling to come back out of it. I wasn’t expecting that, but we’ll just have to work it out.

I’m hoping to get back to wring some today — but I’m not sure what I’ll finish. Today is the one year anniversary of losing my best friend to cancer, and it’s already a bit of a hard day. But my friends and I are getting together to do something we haven’t done in seven years — not since the first of us moved out of state. We’re going to our old Wednesday night pub in Philly and playing pub quiz with our old host. Fado’s (the pub) and Tom had a recurring weekly role in Lauren and mine’s lives since 2011. This is the first time I’m going without Lauren. She and I went alone for almost a year before we started gathering a reliable, steady group every week. But we got older and started careers where it made it harder and harder to travel to Philly for a 9PM pub quiz start — and then Mike moved to Florida, so we just fell out of the habit like you do as you grow up.

It’ll be weird to be there tonight without the other half of the Redheads Do It Better (our team name when it was just the two of us).  We went to pub quizzes in every country we ever visited together and won a lot of money thanks to her insane music knowledge and my ability to remember the most useless of all trivia. Though one time we had a fight briefly over who was the original artist for Say Something back in 2014 — she swore it was Justin Bieber, and I was READY to die on the hill that it was Passenger. She finally agreed and we won. For college students who didn’t have a lot of money to go around, regularly winning $60 was pretty awesome. (And all ties were broken by chugging beer — your girl is UNDEFEATED. I actually beat a Marine once. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bar full of assholes cheering USA for the guy and the girl kicks hiss ass. HIGHLIGHT OF MY LIFE)

Anyway, I’ll see you on Friday. Take care of yourselves 🙂 Here’s a picture of Lauren and I enjoying some Girl Scout shots purchased with our winnings after one of our solo wins in 2011. Pretty sure this is the night the humidity in the bar fried my Blackberry keyboard (which…is a thing that can happen apparently) and I’m sunburned because I’m a ginger who explodes in the sun.

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Link: November NaNoWriMo Project

Hey! Sorry for completely skipping yesterday’s update. I woke up feeling a big sluggish and just — I don’t know. Mentally scattered. I spent most of the day watching movies, and not doing much else. I just couldn’t get myself to concentrate well. I had tried to take a few days off after Friday morning, because FMT editing was starting to get me close to burn out, but I probably didn’t do enough to take a break, lol, because I started to put together the NaNoWriMo poll project which meant I’d write other projects instead. I needed an actual writing break which I took yesterday.

(Unless — are we counting that I finished rereading the Signs of Life beta draft to mark up one more time?)

Anyway, if all goes to plan over the next 4 months, then I’ll be reading to start a new writing project in November. I decided to pick up from last year — bringing back three of the seven projects I featured then. All three of these are completely plotted out and considered turnkey ready — I can open a file and start writing on November 1.  I had one chapter for each of these last year — so I added a second chapter.

And because it was a poll project, I decided to make it one of the “free tier” perks for this month. Check out the post above — there are three projects each with 2 chapters, then a poll to pick which one you want most. It’s free to read and vote, you might have to create a Patreon account if you haven’t already.

See you guys tomorrow!

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Updated: Watch Me Burn – Part 36

Hope everyone had a great week! I finished Act 1 of Fool Me Twice, which went from around 17k to 67k in the last two weeks, so woot for that! Acts 2 & 3 reuse a lot of older material, so I’m hoping edits will start going faster. See you on Friday!

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Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 35 | August Patreon Perks

Happy August! Over on Twitter (which I will call it until the day I die, bite me Elon), we’re celebrating our favorite month. August 2023 marks Becky’s 26th year on GH AND the 24th anniversary of Liason’s first scene in Jake’s. I put together a calendar of events, one for each day, so definitely check out the hashtag #Becky26 if you’re interested in participating or just enjoying.

Thanks for all the comments on the recent updates for Watch Me Burn. It’s a bit wild how the timing turned out — to be writing these scenes mourning Emily as I come up on a similar anniversary myself. I unfortunately have more experience than I ever wanted in losing an essential person in your life suddenly, without warning. Lauren’s battle with cancer was short — they found it too late to do anything. It was, I think, 12 days from diagnosis until she passed, and most of her friends didn’t learn until a little more than 24 hours before she passed. The conversation Jason and Elizabeth had in the last part about whether Emily knew how much they loved her echoes conversations that I had last year, and thoughts.

I posted the August Patreon Perk post which has plans for the free tier, and also talks about the projects I’m working on this month, so definitely check it out if you’re a member. For those who aren’t, here is the project list:

• Fool Me Twice, Book 1 – Ebook: I finished the edit for this a week ago, but then got distracted. I just need to put together the formatting. That will be up for Patreons for a month, then released publicly.
• Fool Me Twice, Book 2 – Beta Draft: Finishing up Act 1 on Thursday, which nearly on schedule. I’ll be finishing Act 2 towards the end of the month. The Adored, Obsessed, and Stalker tier are getting updates on that. Check your tier for when to expect them.
• Signs of Life – Posting Draft: As soon as I’m done setting this post up, I’m grabbing the iPad to complete my final markup. I’m hoping to finish the edit by August 11 for the August 28 posting date.
• Malice: I’m working on discovery for this project so I can add to the slate of choices for NaNoWriMo. I’m finishing up Act 3 in my Plot Sketch.
• Kismet: I was originally going to work on this for the summer, but I want to do more research and think about my plans for it. I love what I’ve written for it, and I’m still excited about this time period. I just want to be sure I know what I’m doing with it.

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Update: Watch Me Burn – Part 34

Happy Monday! And happy last day of July! Three weeks left of summer vacation, hard to believe. Not much to say today (because I’m writing this at 8:48 and I wanna go blow dry my hair before I start to write). Whatever we need to catch up on, I’ll do it on Wednesday.

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