Your Update Link: Darkest Before the Dawn, Part 10

Happy Monday! Feeling great today — woke up on time and getting everything done on schedule. It’s really satisfying to be on top of things again and resetting realistic expectations. I’m also dipping my toes into the CG Facelist project as well again. I updated the Recent Updates page with news from July 21-through Saturday. Because it’s all Flash Fiction, I didn’t spend a lot of time with links because you can find all the Flash Fiction on the same page. I just linked that at the top. I’m hoping to get back into the habit of updating that more often.

I also continued the Alternate History redesign. I decided the best way forward was to finish planning the reoganization by writing the new copy for the page and merging all relevant stories onto that page. Then, when I start to update the individual stories, I can take my time, work on the graphics, and get it all done faster and more efficiently. You can view progress on the Working AH page I set up to avoid any issues on the current AH page. I’m finished writing the descriptions through 2005, but tomorrow I want to merge Series & Ficlet titles so that it’s all up to date.

In writing news, I spent the weekend working on finishing Mad World’s first draft and dipping into Fool Me Twice’s discovery draft. I have four chapters left to write, putting me on target to finish on Thursday. Chapters 51-82 have been posted on Patreon for $3 and above tiers. The last eight chapters and epilogues should be up by Friday.  Around 600 pages have been made available — honestly not sure how long the last eight chapters will be. This thing is a beast, LOL.

I’m only spending about 20 minutes a day right now on the FMT discovery, but I’m excited to start planning it with the changes I’ve been working on. The first episode of my FMT vlog will be posted tomorrow. I’ll embed it and add text highlights.

The last thing I want to say for today is that tomorrow’s Flash Fiction update will be up in the afternoon. I have a doctor’s appointment at 8:45 AM, and I won’t be back by 10 AM because the office is almost a half hour away and wait time for this place has been known to last almost an hour, lol. So I’ll get the update up when it’s ready.

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Your update link: Whatever It Takes, Part 13

Hey! I posted earlier with the monthly Site & Status update so apologizes for double posting today. As I said in that post, I’ve got a few things planned for the channel this month — all the videos for the first two weeks are filmed, edited, uploaded, AND scheduled. I mean, look at that productivity. Basically, I have two videos up today — the Site & Story status, a video about writing Mad World, and on Tues & Thurs over the next two weeks, deep dives into working on Fool Me Twice and its discovery process.

I know I’ve had some people tell me they don’t have time to watch the videos (which I totally understand!) and would love transcriptions. I’d love to be able to get to that point as well, but since I don’t write scripts, it means I’d have to transcribe after the fact. I’m not saying no — I’m saying not right now. What will I try to do is post here at CG with some text highlights to help give you guys more context. The videos are really great for *me* working through my process, and began as a way for me to keep in communication with you guys, so I’m going to try to find a way to make them more useful to my community.

In other news, I released the first chunk of Mad World to my Patreons this morning. They got about 250 pages, which is chapters 51-65. Tomorrow, they’ll get chapters 66-82, and sometime next week, the rest of the story. I finished chapter 84 yesterday and will be working on 85 today. That puts me at about August 6 to finish up (as I had hoped). That draft is available to the $3 and above tiers.

Today’s other video is Writing Mad World. It’s about 19 minutes, and I’m embedding it below with text highlights below. Let me know if the text highlights help!

• Writing Book 3 has been a struggle in a lot of ways but that I’m overall happy with it and I’m learning from this writing process.
• I need to think about why I write a story (what am I actually trying to say, why am I bothering?)
• What draws me to write the characters I write the most.
• Why Mad World has been a unique experience — the creation of a world that I get to continue. By book 3, I’m not rewriting a story anymore, I’m living in the world that I created.
• Brief rant about why I’ve never liked Ric.
• Writing Liason as a public couple is interesting — we never got to see that on the show.
• Books 1 and 2 were just easier to write because of the story in my head.
• Why fanfiction can be just as challenging as writing original fiction. Characters who feel like the ones you watch while living and reacting in a story that I’ve created.
• Mad World: The wrong starting point. The time jump idea was not a good idea, lol, and it’s messing with me. I get into the weeds a bit on why.
• Learning to respect feelings about why something isn’t working: is it the material or is it the energy I’m bringing to it.
• Wrong starting point really wasn’t giving Liz or Carly the space to confront, deal, AND resolve the trauma. It needed to breathe.
• Adding extra 15 chapters to the beginning.
• If I know things need to be added, do I do it now even it means going out of order or waiting for revisions?
• Why adding 15 chapters in the beginning, with a middle 17 chapters that used to be the beginning means some challenges in the revisions.
• Starting it in the wrong place was a huge mistake and it’s definitely a lesson I’m going to be taking into FMT — I get into that in a video I made for that story.
• Building stamina from writing 1k to 3k to 6-8k a day.
• Schedule in July — time lost.
• Getting into again — how I’m taking the lessons in writing Mad World to apply to the next project. I talk for a hot minute about the whole trilogy process and how starting points have always been an issue.
• Plans to check in more during revisions.

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Your Update Link: Desperate Measures, Part 14

Back into a normal schedule for our flash fiction! Today is a big day for me as I’m filming a bunch of stuff for the YouTube channel to be posted over the next week, so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Plus — you guys are getting the monthly Site & Story status video and post which will go up either at midnight tonight or sometime tomorrow depending on my editing schedule and writing.

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Your Update Link: Darkest Before the Dawn, Part 9

I’m excited to get back into my Flash Fiction routine! I had truly meant to update at 10 AM this morning and I was all ready, but, heh, I made the mistake of texting mom and asking her to call me when she was up beause I had a question and was too lazy to text. She called me at 9:15 AM, and well, if you know my mom, you understand why I didn’t start the timer until 10:30 AM. ANYWAY.

I’m feeling way more like myself — last was night was the best night of sleep I’ve had in over a week, and I can’t wait to spend most of the afternoon writing Mad World. I’m going to miss my August 3 deadline for the first draft, but that’s okay — it doesn’t change my Oct 6 release at all and Patreons are still getting the first 532 pages on August 1 & 2 so we’re all working out. I was working on the final chapters yesterday, realized I needed one more chapter and decided that I could either just add it or now or add it in revisions. Either way – I’d have to spend time with it so better to get it out of the way now.

I’m also working my way through an initial round of brainstorming for the Everlasting Love revisions, and I hope you guys are okay if I make big changes — the main storyline will still be the same in the sense that Liason are childhood sweethearts reunited after misunderstandings and stolen letters with Ric as the bad guy — but other elements are going to change. That’s one of the beauties of a first draft — you can find the pieces that work and chuck what doesn’t.

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Your Update Link: An Everlasting Love – Part 16

The first of my flash fiction series is wrapped up. While I enjoyed writing it, I definitely think it was the weakest of the four I launched — primarily because it’s a historical piece set in a time period that I’m not super familiar with and the story changed a lot as I wrote it.  That’s definitely something I’ll be fleshing out  and correcting when it goes into revisions. I should know next week how long it will take me to rework it and have a tentative publication date.

As for the Flash Fiction schedule, we’re shifting into a six day a week schedule –

Mondays & Thursdays – Darkest Before the Dawn

Tuesdays & Fridays – Desperate Measures

Wednesdays & Saturdays – Whatever It Takes

Basically — we’ll be back on the old schedule with Darkest Before the Dawn slotted into An Everlasting Love’s time and taking Sundays off.  also expect to be able to update at 10 again, starting tomorow.

In other news, I’m still plugging away at Mad World’s final section — what was going to be seven chapters is now eight, and that’s just because I plotted those seven chapters before I wrote the first 15 and I just need a bit more space to finish out some of the stories. Like I said — this is going to a MESS of a first draft so it should be interesting to see how revisions go.

See you guys tomorrow!

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Your Update Link: An Everlasting Love, Part 15

Hey! So I realized pretty quickly this morning that I wasn’t going to be able to get Flash Fiction up by 10, so I put up a Twitter message stating that we’d get to it — I just didn’t know exactly when.  I’m terrible at getting back on track when I get sick for a few days, but I’m just trying to concentate on what needs to get done and managing my own energy. Part of it is my own fault — I’m just not getting back into my sleeping habits which is throwing things off.

I’m continuing to plug away at Mad World’s first draft. A few weeks ago, I added fourteen chapters designed to go in front of the seventeen I had already written — and today, I finished that new beginning (which ended up being fifteen chapters) which brings Mad World to 32 completed chapters of a planned 39. I still have seven chapters left to write at the end of the story which I’m scheduled to finish around August 3. So far — this draft is 532 pages and 192k — which is, ha, INSANE. It’s longer than anything I’ve ever written, and sooo freakin’ messy because I wrote it out of order. Let’s just all be glad I’ve give myself two months to revise it — I’m gonna need it!

I’m hoping to get Flash Fiction back into a normal 10 am schedule soon, but I’ll just be happy if I can do them daily from now on!

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Your Update Link: An Everlasting Love, Part 14

Hey! So we’re finally back after taking most of last week off to get through some unexpected health issues. I’ve missed Flash Fiction, so I’m super excited to have it back. I had promised you guys we were going to wrap up Everlasting Love this week, and I definitely want it done before we get into August. Today, tomorrow, and Wedesday will be the final three parts of the story (I think there’s only three parts left — if I need one or two more days, I’ll take them, but we’re about out of story at least for the flash fiction part of this draft). Then, on Thursday, I’ll rework the schedule. I’ll let you guys know tomorrow or Wednesday which stories for which days.

Once Everlasting Love is done, I’ll be going into revisions on it so this week, please don’t hesitate to make suggestions — I want to flesh out the settings, revisit the relationships, and back story, etc — so let me know if you’re want to see something!

In other news, I’m working on getting back into my routine. One of the worst thing about getting sick is just getting back into real life and what you were doing before– honestly, got up at my normal time today and have been doing half of what I normally do — and I’m already tired, lol. So just easing back into it — working on things that have to be done, like last week, but trying to put structure back into it, if that makes sense.

What I’m super happy about is that last week did not put me behind with Mad World whatsoever. I got sick just as we were going into the final few weeks of Broken Girl in early March, and I was so mad because I’d built up so much momentum and I was on track to finish EARLY. Between being sick and the Covid shutdown in my district, I ended up just barely finishing on time. It was just frustrating to me on a personal level so when I got sick last week — I was determined not to do it again. NOT TODAY SATAN NOT TODAY. 

But! I wrote seven chapters in seven days — staying right on track — the only reason I’m not finishing by or on July 31 is because of adding a chapter and also taking extra time the week before — I was three chapters behind my schedule before I got sick — and that’s literally still the same thing today so that’s great. I had a great writing day yesterday — I wrote 12,806 words! If you’re checking out the graph in the sidebar, you can see that spike, heh. Very excited to move into revisions on this book and make some sense of this mess.

I’ll see you guys tomorrow!

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Good morning 🙂 No fic updates for you but checking in with some minor Facelift news.  One of the things I’m doing as I move stories out of the Short story and Ficlet section is revisiting them, adding some introduction to them (timeline set-up, etc) with an eye to also adding graphics to them.  I want to do this more slowly than all at once because I want to make sure the stories are tagged correctly for length and characters.  Today I just started playing with some of the first attempts — I moved two Short Stories written and set in 2002 over to the Alternate History category, so the link had to be updated.  I also updated it on the Alphabetical List. It’s always fun to go back and look at some of my earliest work.

Back at Jake’s and Left Behind were written when I was 18 and still very early in my Jason/Elizabeth writing career. I can see rereading this older stuff that I didn’t quite have my handle on either of the characters or their relationship — what made them work, so to speak. It’s one of my favorite pieces of my own development — to have this early stuff as evidence of where I started and to look what what I’ve written now.

I used to really hate my older stuff, but this last year — I realized how important it is for me to be proud of it. I’ve been writing this couple for 18 years – 18 years THIS WEEK actually as July 29 marks my 18th anniversary of posting my first chapter of Deserving at The Canvas. I can still remember writing those early chapters in an AOL document, lol, and posting, hoping someone would reply and like it. I’d written GH fanfiction before (LL2 stories that literally no one ever saw, LOL) and I’d written Roswell fanfiction that was relatively popular — but writing for this show has always pulled me back — writing for this couple and Elizabeth specifically. I turned 36 this year which means, as of this week, I’ve been writing fanfiction for this couple for half my life. It makes me proud to look back at these older stories and see where I was and who I am today.

If you’ve never read either of them, take a minute and enjoy the silly, melodramatic writings of a high school graduate who saw these two characters on the screen in July while recovering from foot surgery and HAD to write my own version. Thanks for being with me this long 🙂

In other news — thank you for all the warm wishes and support in my recent Flash Fiction hiatus. I don’t update you guys to get sympathy or to apologize, but mostly to keep myself accountable. By setting deadlines and creating features that are time-sensitive, it encourages me to write. When I don’t deliver, it’s important to me that I keep you guys in the loop. I like the accountability — it works for me, and I hope it’s working for you.

Thanks for the last 18 years. Here’s to hoping we don’t need 18 more years before we get our couple!

ETA: I just wanted to clarify — I’m not changing any of my older stories — Left Behind & Back at Jake’s are still the same as they were when I wrote them in 2002 and reposted in 2014. The only thing that’s different is that I’ve added an introduction to the stories to give you background about writing them and when they’re set. I didn’t even edit for typos or missed word.

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Just dropping a note to let you guys know what’s up.  Even though I was hoping that I would only be feeling that bad one day, it turns out it’s lingering. I’ve been really trying to get Mad World done every day  (and I have — I don’t know how good any of it was, but at least it’s there for revisions). I wasn’t able to get a doctor’s appointment for almost two weeks (I’m going August 4) so I couldn’t even get a prescription to feel better.

This morning (Friday), I am feeling a bit more myself but now find myself stressed by everything that’s not done. I’m not referring to Flash Fiction, but really just real life stuff. I was already kind of procrastinating on househoold chores because I was rushing towards deadline on Mad World, but this week I almost missed my online classes — one of which I’m paying for. There was no way I was going to concentrate on a biology class, so it’s not like ditching Mad World would have helped.

Anyway, long story short — being behind and stressed about things has just made me decide to take a few days, concentrate on things that have to be done (dishes, basic chores, Mad World, biology) before trying to get back into my old routine.

I’ll be back with Flash Fiction on Monday and a new schedule for it. I still want to finish An Everlasting Love, so I might do that all at once so it can be off my plate, then I’ll get back into a routine for them.

For anyone worried, what’s wrong isn’t serious — at least not that I know of, lol. It’s just not resolving itself, and NJ is far enough along in the pandemic response that I feel comfortable going to a doctor. It just honestly drains all of my energy. I’m tired right down to my bone and the simplest things have been a struggle. It’s frustrating because I’ve been working really hard to eat well, get a lot of sleep and take care of myself, but that’s 2020 for you.

I’ll see you guys on Monday with Flash Fiction.

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