I updated The Best Thing, Chapter 32 today, and barring any crazy rewrites that might be needed on the final two chapters (I’m expecting to have to redo a few scenes, maybe add some more) we’ll be wrapping this up on February 5, 2016 or maybe a week or so later.

At the moment, Bittersweet has eight chapters that are with Cora, but obviously our priority has been to finish up The Best Thing. I myself have made some changes to the first eight chapters, I’m waiting to hear her take on my first eight. I’ve started writing the next part of the story. I hope to have Bittersweet midway through February, but I’d rather push it to March and make sure that you guys get the best version of this story possible.

Damaged is still scheduled to come back in March, but it depends on how the next few weeks ago. I’ve started graduate school this week and it’s going to be another week or so before I’m able to really get an idea of how much time that’s going to take between attending classes and doing the work. My plan is for you guys to have new content every week, but I may miss one or two here and there. When I constructed that schedule, I really didn’t think I’d have bronchitis for the better part of December and January. Even now, it’s lingering and sucking my energy up.

I hope you guys enjoy this turn in The Best Thing. Super excited for you guys to finally see the end of the story. I hope to have the ebook giveaway up before the end of the story, but I will definitely be posting the various outlines so you can see just how different this story turned out.

See you guys next week!

Hey! Just a small update to mention that I added Chapter 31 of The Best Thing on Friday. Remember to subscribe to the site using the link to the right under “Subscribe to this Blog” You’ll get brand-new chapters delivered to your emails seconds after they’re posted so you’re not always dependent on me remembering to add a post to the main page.

I also got around to updating the page that lists updates without chatter. I always forget to do that, sorry!

And in more important news — I finished writing The Best Thing. After roughly twenty-one months, I finished the last chapter (Chapter 34 to be exact) on Saturday. It felt weird to finally be writing the scenes I had been planning for ages. I’ve sent them to Cora, so I may not be quite done with the story, but the first draft is officially done, so that’s a major part of the battle. We might actually stay on an actual schedule after all. Now I can concentrate on Bittersweet 🙂

So yes, The Best Thing has finally been updated after nearly four months. Unless there’s there’s some sort car accident in which I am immobilized, we are going to finish this story sometime in February. I have three chapters beta’d and ready to go and my plan is finish things this weekend. I know, I know, I’ve said it before but this time I’ve figured out why I’ve been stuck.

It’s my own fault, too. This story has been difficult to write all along because I’ve constantly challenged myself to write from Jason’s POV at least as often as I write Elizabeth–if not more–and to really explore Sonny’s illness. And that’s hard because it forces to get inside the head of a paranoid egomaniac suffering from bipolar disorder. It’s hard and it takes longer, but every time I stop challenging myself to write this story the way it should be, it suffers. I’ve stopped fighting it. I’m over my bronchitis, and other than grocery shopping tomorrow and seeing Star Wars, I have completely cleared my schedule for two and a half days.

As always, thanks to Cora, who with her invaluable feedback, helped me to stop pretending the end of this story could be written any other way.

I’m updating The Best Thing tonight. If I finish the last three chapters and get them to Cora on schedule, I’ll do another update on Wednesday, and then next Wednesday as usual. Thanks for your patience, guys, it’s about to pay off.

I’ll be posting The Best Thing in January, Bittersweet in February, and then Damaged, Season 3 in March. See you guys next week 😀

So to make up for my general lack of being around this month, I went ahead and posted the second half of Tangle, up to and including the Chapter 17 that I don’t think I ever posted. Chapter 18 was about half finished when I abandoned that version of the story, so like the repost of Mad World, I posted what I had left. Unfortunately, the outline for Chapter 19 disappeared so I’ll have to look through my files with a fine tooth comb to locate it.  I don’t have an ETA for the rewrite, but I’m hoping sometime in 2016 🙂

I know that it seems that updates slowed downquite at a bit at Crimson Glass this last year between health issues and crazy mojo sucking real life issues, but looking back I actually completed quite a lot so I’m going to stop being hard on myself. You guys are fantastic, I’m the one who yells at me 😛

The Best Thing – I had a slow year on this one. I only wrote about fifteen chapters, with three more remaining. Still fifteen isn’t awful considering how much I didn’t write between 2009-2013 😛 With an average page length of 11 pages and word count of 4000 per chapter, that’s a 165 pages and 60,000 words.

All We Are – I completed seventeen chapters, clocking in at 162 pages and 63, 149 words.

Damaged – I completed Season 1 with an additional 96 pages and about 35,000 words and wrote all of Season 2, with 204 pages and 94, 665.

With taking into account several short stories, that’s 627 pages of content and 217,849 words in the last year. There are actual published authors who haven’t written as much as I did  this last year. So while, yes, that was a bit a slow down from 2014, 2015 wasn’t too bad, so I’m going to forgive myself for not updating as often as I’d like. I like to think I post quality material and taking a bit of extra time to make sure it’s good is not a bad thing 🙂

However, 2016 is going to be different. I’m doing a lot of writing and planning to stay ahead of myself so that updates will be a bit more even and frequent. I don’t enjoy going entire months without new content, so that’s one of my New Year’s Resolutions to myself.

So have a happy holiday season, enjoy the rest of Tangle, or peruse one of my other holiday stories or hey, read last year’s All I Want For Christmas. See you guys in 2016!

Sorry for disappearing the last two weeks. I caught a cold from either one of the germ-infested students I teach or the dirty children my sister gave birth too. It’s really a toss up at this point. Anyway, I’ve spent the better part the last week hacking up a lung and binging Grey’s Anatomy because that required no brain power. I stopped watching that show somewhere in the fourth season and I’d forgotten how good Season 1 and 2 was. Anyway.

I’ll be back sometime tomorrow or Thursday and catch up with the last two weeks of Fiction Graveyard. I hope to bring back The Best Thing in January, but my writing energy has been sapped. Every time I get a cold, I go down like death. I’m the worst sick person. See you guys in a few days. Have a great holiday!

I’ve updated the Fiction Graveyard with three new chapters of Tangle. I’ve been asked if I plan to continue it or simply leave it unfinished as I move on to rewrite the story. I have the ending completely outlined, so for the moment, I’ll be posting the planned scenes in their outline form so you can at least visualize how I intended to end this version of the story. Whether I come back one day to complete that version, I can’t say.

Your Christmas throwback: Noel, a Jason-centric story set in 2005 as a response to a challenge to write a version of A Christmas Carol, and A Second Chance, a Christmas story set in 2002 where Elizabeth rewrites her past.

I’ll be back next week with more of Tangle, some more Christmas throwbacks, and possibly, a new site feature. We’ll see how my week shapes up.

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.

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!

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!

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 🙂