In October, Joanna, a reader from The Canvas, got in touch with me about having some of my older missing stories. She had No One Else Sees Me (set 2002) and The Ends of the Earth (set 2001). Both were written in 2002, when I was a shiny new writer in the fandom and a mere eighteen years old. I didn’t have a chance to clean either of them up until recently, and today, when my inspiration dried up, I decided to pull them out.

No One Else Sees Me is not a good story, haha, but it’s a fun read and another example of how much I’ve grown since I started writing fanfiction fourteen years ago.  While I used to hide these old stories away, now I recognize how much I learned from writing all of them and I look forward to seeing your reactions to these older stories.

I’ll be back later this week with the other older story, and soon with Bittersweet!

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I have literally eaten, breathed, and slept school work for the last two weeks — when I wasn’t actually working. From sunup to sundown, I studied Macroeconomics, education, trade networks in the early modern period, and the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic, 1916-1924.

I just emailed my last paper. This semester is done. I can’t even process that right now. I’m going to relax today, go to training tomorrow for my summer job, and then work on Friday.

And then next week, once my brain has relaxed and recharged, I’m going to write. So see you guys in June with the first chapters of Bittersweet and a better idea of what the summer is going to bring you at Crimson Glass. Thanks for your support. I can’t wait to get back to creative writing!

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I finally finished editing the ebook for The Best Thing. It’s available in .epub, .mobi, and .pdf.   I apologize for the delay in getting that together. I’d like to offer more ebooks, but they take forever to format, so no promises on the next release.

Also, I posted Part One of Look After You, the sequel to Choose Your Moment. It’s new material to the site, but anyone who has a keen eye will recognize the chapter from the old site. I didn’t repost it before when I moved the site here because I wasn’t going to be posting the rest yet. I’m still not posting the rest, but there’s no reason I can’t put up something you guys had access to before.

Bittersweet has been delayed until June. I know I keep moving that back, and I’m sorry, but it’s just better if I stop promising dates I can’t deliver. Just when I got myself caught up from having the stomach virus, I caught the flu. Now I have to get caught up from that, and go into finals and plan my friend’s bridal shower — I’m not going to be free until around May 10. And then you know, the semester crash in which I sleep for a week.

That being said, I’m going to try to write a short story or two, but I want any creative energy funneled into Bittersweet and Damaged so that once I do start posting again, we don’t have these long breaks.

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I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post that I update little writing statuses on CG’s Facebook page. I’ll mention if I’m working on something, how things are going, etc. It’s a bit more informal than here, so make sure you like the page on Facebook.  You’ll see a bit more activity from me there than you might here between updates, so if you’re ever worried if I’ve, you know, died, haha, the Facebook page is probably the best way to keep up.

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I’m not sure how this happened, but here we are in April. Nothing about this semester at school has worked out quite as I hoped.  When I went back full-time for my undergraduate degree in 2009, I pretty much disapeared from the fandom and fanfiction altogether. I managed to write during the year I was in graduate school because that program wasn’t very demanding and I only worked last year. I’m going to have to fight to keep that from happening again.

Since January, I’ve been sick with a stomach virus and a sinus infection. I’ve juggled two graduate reading seminars with online classes and Macroeconomics (which  I mostly had to teach to myself because the teacher wasn’t really effective). I’ve also worked three days a week, looked after my nieces and nephew, dealt with the general responsibilities of being the only single member of my family who can take care of everyone — and my best friend is getting married in a wedding in June where I’m the maid of honor.

Since the beginning of the year, since finishing The Best Thing, I’ve literally written maybe three full chapters of anything. I’ve edited, refined, reoutlined, but I haven’t really had a minute to write. It’s been…it’s just not been what I had hoped. I can’t even find time to read for fun anymore, much less write fanfiction.  I’m also about to enter the worst month of the semester — as a history student, I don’t just have finals, I have final papers. I have a 12-20 page paper, another 8-10, plus finals in all those classes–yeah, April is a pain. And my beta, Cora, is also a college student, so you can imagine the insanity of two college students trying to find time for this stuff

That being said, I do have nine chapters written of Bittersweet, five of which are with Cora. I’m hopeful to have the first chapter up either this week or next. I’ll be posting them Thursdays to keep room for Damaged (which is on my schedule, but talk about not having time…) I’ll finish the last scene for Chapter 10 in Bittersweet, and send those five to her, which should give me a decent buffer zone to get through the second week of May. Then…school ends. The wedding stuff takes a bit of a breather before the ceremony in June. I’ll be working, but I was able to write last year while that was going on.

I am going to get back on track. I have not disappeared. But as much as I would love to do nothing but sit at home and write fanfiction, no one’s paying me to do that, ha, and I have to do my real life stuff first. This is the worst part of being an adult.

In the mean time, I have more than a hundred stories on this website, with an archive that goes back thirteen years. Please please take the time to read, or even reread. I can’t think of many Liason authors still around from 2002 who are not only still (sort of) active, but also have their full backlist up for consumption and work as hard as I do to make them readable for you. I love you guys, believe me, I think about this site and my stories in all my spare times — but I just….I can’t get my schedule together yet. I will be posting soon. I’m excited for you guys to see what I’ve done with Bittersweet.

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I’m not going to lie — I was pretty sure this day would never come. And admit it, there are some of you who wondered as well 😛

The Best Thing, Chapter 34 has been posted. The final chapter. It’s done. Wow. I wrote an author’s note at the end — if you’ve read the story at all ever, please drop me a brief line to let me know what you think. And if you’ve been waiting for it to be done before you started, ha — well, you’re good to go now. I should have the ebook up by the end of the week.

This is about the time I post the old plot sketches, but um, it turns out the plot sketches are long. The first one is about 25 pages long, and the second one is roughly 31, 32 pages. If you’re interested, I’ll be happy to upload them as .doc files to read in Microsoft Word, but they’re LONG. And DETAILED. There’s some great plot elements I cut out like a custody battle and a lot of the Carly/Courtney stuff was changed. But that’s up to you guys, let me know.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have plans for what’s next, but I haven’t been able to get to much of it this last week with the papers. Hopefully I’ve got the balance worked out and I’ll be able to get back to Bittersweet, finish the last few scenes for a revision of the first eight chapters and get them off to the beta. I don’t know what that’ll happen, so just watch this space. Now would be a good time to sign up for updates.

I will, however, be changing this layout to something much less…pink sometime this week.

Thanks again guys. I need a nap now 😛

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So as I sit here in Macroeconomics, which I had hoped would offer me space to write since the lectures are relatively useless because all the material and assignments are online — I’m struck by how difficult it is to write fanfiction when there’s someone sitting behind me and someone less than a foot away from me on either side. Ha. I can get some plotting done, but it’s been difficult to find time to actually write. (Plus, I have a Macro exam and two papers to write, one 5-7 pages on America’s new empire at the turn of the century and 8-10 on the influence of post-colonial thought on writing global history all due by next Tuesday.)

So I may not have as much this month particularly to devote to long chapter stories. But maybe I can carve out some smaller short stories.  Anyone have something they’d like to see in a story? This is a call to inspire me 🙂

The Best Thing’s final chapter is still scheduled by posted on Friday, so stay tuned for that 🙂

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Hey! So by now, you’ve noticed that I didn’t update The Best Thing yesterday. I finished the last two chapters, but I’m waiting for Cora to get back to me — I asked her to rip it apart and suggest any changes. She’s worked almost as hard as I have on this story, and I want the ending of the story to be as good as the first thirty-two chapters.

I started graduate school about two weeks ago and I’m taking a full load of classes. Two graduate level History reading seminars with about two hundred pages each a week reading, an undergrad Macroeconomics course I need for my Social Studies certification, and two online teacher education classes. I’m also auditing an American history class to help me write my research paper next semester. I’m getting tired just thinking about it, haha. Oh, yeah, and I’m working three days a week 😛

This is exactly the adjustment period I had anticipated last fall had I started on time. I should be on a normal schedule and routine after this week. My Macro class is being graded completely on online tests and homework, and the teacher is useless so far, but I have to attend those classes. That looks like my best bet to get some writing done during the week.

The good news is that Bittersweet already has nine chapters completed. I still have some editing to do on them, some scenes to revise before I give them back to Cora, but at some point, I will have enough buffer and beta’d chapters to deliver the fresh content I promised.

I’m not thrilled with the header image, haha, and the pink hurts my head. But I’ve been playing around some of the other editing. I’ve made the story lists on pages like In Progress and the completed Alternate History and Universe pages. I plan to leave this layout up just through Valentine’s Day. Changing won’t be much of a problem. This layout is much easier to change.

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Hey! So briefly, as you can see, CG has a new layout. We’ve switched to two columns. I removed some of the sections, but you can find everything up in the primary navigation bar below the header. If there’s anything you want me to bring back, let me know, but I think this looks a lot less cluttered.

I’ve made a lot of improvements–there’s still a few more I want to work on but this is as close to the best version of a CG layout as we’ve had since the site relaunched two years ago.

The only thing I didn’t do was the header image, haha, which is why it looks like that. That’s my temporary one until I finish it. I should have that up by tonight or tomorrow, but I didn’t want to leave the site down.

Let me know if you find anything wonky!

ETA: Header image is updated, though I’m still eyeing a change.

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