Updated with All We Are Chapter Twelve.

So I’m not going to lie. About this time last week, I could see July 15 approaching fast. I had publicly announced The Best Thing would return at that point, but I hadn’t quite finished another chapter. I really didn’t want to push it back.

And then something magical happened. I wrote four chapters in four days, which gives me an entire month of posts. And I made a decision to cut a section of the story that might have worked, but I think it might have dragged the story out as well. And it was causing my writing to drag as well. If it’s not working, cut it. I think it’ll shave one or two chapters off the total count. I’m excited for you to read some of those chapters I finished over this last weekend.

Damaged is still on schedule to return on July 18, so next week will be a return to constant posts from me. You have All We Are on Mondays, TBT on Wednesdays, and Damaged on Fridays. All We Are will be wrapping up by the end of the summer, I’m working on Chapter Fourteen now, and only have four more after that’s finished. If I can manage to finish it all by some time week, I’ll get the ebook formatted and put it up the way I normally do–with a giveaway.

The site was running slow for a while but I made some changes in hopes of maximizing performance. I did some upgrades and my host, Dreamhost, was actually super quick in making the biggest change — a database had to move servers or something. If you’re ever looking for a webhost, Dreamhost is amazing. Their basic plans are super cheap, and even my plan around $15 a month. Give them a looksee if you’re in the market. I’ve been with them since 2006 and can’t imagine going anywhere else.

Oh, and another thing! I was working on a scene for Chapter 14, All We Are, and I wanted to confirm a detail. So I turned to my trust Liason DVDS to help me out. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned CurlyQGrl’s DVDs. I’ve been buying GH DVDs from her since 1999, with my set of Lucky and Liz on VHS, ha. They were amazing, but lost in a housefire. While I was in London, I invested in replacing that set as well as obtaining my own Liason DVDs, some Scrubs edits, and a 2004 Elizabeth Returns DVD which has her interim storylines between the end of LiRic and the beginning of LL2.3 (which is my own personal code for her storyline with Greg’s Lucky.)

Her collection is vast and immense and goes back into GH history waaay into the 1980s. You should check her out.

Hey! Just a note for Damaged readers. When I posted the final episode for Season One a few weeks ago, I mentioned I would be taking the site offline in order to redesign it for the next season, add more content, and reformat the previous episodes to better fit the format. Damaged is offline as of today, but will return on Monday, July 13, 2015 so everyone can get accustomed to the new layout. Damaged, Season Two: Prodigal Son will be posted Friday, July 17.

However, with the help of Cora, I’ve taken the initial group of episodes, edited them, and reformatted them into eleven episodes that compromise the new season. You can wait to read them in their new format when the site reopens or check out the ebook I’ve created for that purpose.

I know the site may have been slow over the last week, maybe even longer. I get a decent amount of regular visitors every day and with the site being powered by WordPress, I’m using a lot of processes on my server. It was an issue about six months ago and I moved servers. Apparently, we’ve outgrown our old settings and I’ve had to upgrade again.  I’ll know in about a week of it’s been a good use of the money. Hopefully 🙂

Hey! I know a ton of you guys read the updates  when they’re emailed to you, which is why I include the title of the story with the update (All We Are, Chapter Whatever). Well, it was early this morning and my internet is being extremely bitchy, so I posted the wrong title for some reason. The chapter that was delivered is clearly All We Are, Chapter Eleven.

Sorry for any confusion!

I was so bored with the blue! I’m still not completely sold on the header image, but I wanted to get this up. Let me know if the greens and yellows are problematic for anyone and I’ll darken them.  This layout is based on the winner of the poll a few weeks ago.

In addition to the new summer layout, I also finished the Sort By Title feature, updated the Featured story with If I Don’t Try With You, and cleaned up some of the columns. No one seems interested in the music/artist section in the columns, so I’m letting it go. I’ll clean up the music page at some point.

The social media links have been moved to the About page.  I have to go through some of the stories and edit the soundtracks to get rid of the Grooveshark links. That site shut down a little while ago, sadly. I’ll continue linking to Spotify, which you can listen to for free if you sign up for an account.

I picked If I Don’t Try With You as the featured story because I personally love it and if I say so myself, it’s one of the best pieces I’ve written since I came to writing last year.  It’s part of the Hand Me Down universe, but it stands alone since it picks up directly from Michael’s shooting in 2008. Please check it out if you haven’t yet.

I also decided to do a separate page for just listing basic updates, so if occasionally you miss something in the chatter, you can bookmark the Recent Updates page. I’ll update everything there in a basic list format without any frills. All the facts, none of the nonsense 🙂

I’ll be back on Monday with a new chapter of All We Are 🙂

Well thanks to those who responded to my survey call 🙂 My responses doubled and I have some great feedback so far. I still don’t have a ton, but I saw the same type of suggestion/complaint a few times in a few places, so I jumped on it because I think it’s something I can offer a solution to in the short-term while I work on incorporating it into the new layout in a better way.

Under the Sort menu (where you can sort stories by the year they’re set, the characters, or the couples featured, and even find specific holiday-themes!), you can now sort By Title, which is an alphabetical list of the stories on this site. It’s not yet complete–I still have to add Ficlets and Short Stories, but all longer stories are now listed.

So if you’re looking for Damaged, you can find it under D rather than remembering I list it under the site as an Alternate Reality story or if you want Daughters, but can’t remember it’s an Alternate Universe, you can also find it there under D. Hopefully that helps the site be a more friendly.

It’s a manual list at the moment, so it’s a bit time-consuming but I haven’t ruled out maybe adding story descriptions to it at some point. We’ll see.

I hope that helps!

I also have heard your calls about making updates easier to find. I tend to get very chatty as I update so sometimes they’re lost.  I’m working on something that will be easier, but for the moment, there’s a a section in the colum on the right-side of the page where I have Updated Novels and Recently/Completed New. This will be the majority of the new additions but it’s not as organic as it could be. I have an idea for that I may launch later in the week.

So please check out the Sort By Title page and please keep responding to the survey! I want you guys to be able to find a story to read within a minute of clicking on the home page, so anything I can do to make that possible, I’m willing to look into!

Just popping in to note that All We Are Chapter Ten has been added, a bit later than I had hoped but a dentist appointment is a crappy way to start the day.

If you haven’t filled out the survey yet, please please take a moment to do so. It takes less than five minutes and I will be eternally grateful.  I want to rearrange the side columns to feature the stuff you guys use more and eliminate some of the clutter, but I only have 7 responses and I know there’s more of you out there. Take a second and show some love 😛  I can’t finish the new layout until I know what content is going where.

I finished two chapters of All We Are just on Saturday, and I am FINALLY in the best part of the story, which makes me so happy. I’m going to take my laptop and hole up at either a library or Starbucks tomorrow to get a few more out. I work better at home when no one is here, and my parents are home again. I’ve got to get my own place, you guys. Seriously.

Anyway. I’m also digging back into The Best Thing which finally started cooperating yesterday and it looks like I wasn’t ambitious with the July 15 date. If I can get a decent amount of chapters of TBT done before July 15, I’ll bump All We Are up to two chapters a week.

Damaged will be back July 17. I’ve decided to go with Fridays for the posting, so that’s your official return date. Around July 1, the site itself will be offline for about a week so I can finally finish off the changes planned (including cleaning up the previous episdes!).

And finally, I’m torn between three concepts for the project I take on after All We Are wraps up.  Bittersweet (a rewrite of 2002), Mad World (a rewrite of the old version) and Burn in Heaven (the sequel to A Few Words). I’m going to play with all three of them a bit more, but hopefully something will gel.

Hey! So I mentioned that after I completed the current story arc for Damaged that I would be putting the story on a planned hiatus for a month while I wrote the next group of episodes. That has now happened. There will be a few changes over the next month — I’ll be taking all the episodes currently on the site, merging the shorter ones into one long one per day, and then putting them all under one umbrella season. So, all in all, there will be eleven episodes. So, in my head, I’m saying Season One is completed. Season Two is underway.

So head over to Damaged and get reading if you haven’t yet, and please let me know what you might want to see going forward. I’ve got the next season mostly plotted, but I’m always open to more ideas.

That being said, with Damaged on hiatus, I’m turning my attention back to this site. I’ve created a survey to try and focus in on what parts of the site you guys enjoy the most and find useful so I can either cut back or emphasize accordingly. I’m also looking for any suggestions for making the site easier to navigate, etc. So if you have maybe five minutes to take a survey (it’s anonymous!) I would love it!

Click here to take the survey!

I’ll be back on Monday with All We Are, Chapter 10.

Hey, sorry I didn’t post this earlier today. I forgot to schedule it this morning, and then I was stuck at work all day. We’re finally back to posting at least one of the in progress stories, so yay!

So there was some concern that because I put Chapter 9 up last week with a password for the Patreon supporters, that I might make this story only available to them. I think that’s my fault. I mentioned I would be posting All We Are again starting Monday without realizing I was posting on a Monday (ha). I meant this Monday. All We Are updates are moving to Mondays. Chapter 9 is live, and Chapter 10 will be up next week.

I will never make a story exclusive to the supporters. Not because they don’t deserve it (you do and you’re awesome) but it almost feels like a punishment for those who aren’t supporting. You guys are amazing and that’s just not going to happen. Any bonus content will usually usually early previews or deleted scenes. For example I threw out an entire chapter and a half of All We Are last week. I’ll be posting that for Patreon supporters in a few weeks. I hope that clears it up!

All We Are – Chapter Nine

So I don’t post here as often, mostly because I’ve been updating Damaged more than the stories I work on here.  So first things first, I’ve switched Damaged back to weekly long episodes of at least 10 pages. The shorter episodes were an interesting experiment but it didn’ t work for me. I posted one episode early this morning, I’ll post another on Friday, and the final one for this arc next Monday.

Also, on Monday, I’ll post Chapter 9 of All We Are. However, if you’re a Patreon supporter, I’ve posted the chapter early.  For the moment it’s password protected, and the password can be found once you’re a supporter.  You find the chapter by clicking on the Patreon link, then the Creator Post tab.

I don’t want to make a ton of content exclusive for supporters, because it’s not fair to those of you who have stuck by me through everything, so I think I’ll stick to occasional extras (like deleted scenes) or early previews.

All We Are returns next Monday, and The Best Thing July 15.

So the last week of May is here which means I’ll be slowing down quite a bit of a work after the next few weeks (not much call for substitutes in the summer). I’ve had a ton of things planned for ages, but health and time restricted a lot of it. My health has bounced back in spades with the exception of some rough allergies this weekend and my time is easing up. So I thought a preview might be in order.

Supporting Crimson Glass

Every time you visit this page, every time you read and comment, you make my day. Especially those of you who’ve stuck out the last few months as my updates trickled to a stop. My writing has picked up and I’ll be back to posting more in June, and everything will be back in July.

I posted a few weeks ago about creating a Patreon page in hopes of defraying some of the website costs. They’re minimal (I pay $11 a month for a fantastic hosting plan at Dreamhost and about $15 in domain costs a year), but I’ve been borrowing the money from my parents for the last few months. I’m back to work, but my student loans are coming due as well.

I completely understand not donating because I can barely afford to support my favorite podcasts at Storywonk (they just added a Veronica Mars podcast to their writing seminars, Buffy, Outlander, and Star Trek podcasts so yay!) and time are tough for everyone.

The way Patreon works is if you were to pledge today, you would be charged on the first of the month. If you pledged June 2, you wouldn’t be charged until July 1. That’s why I chose a monthly campaign.  I also edited the rewards as summer kick off.

From May 25 to June 30, if you pledge $1, you can request an update to any story on the site OR the first chapter of any story I’ve listed on the Coming Soon page or talked about in the recent story status pages.  I will post all requests by the end of July at the latest. 

If you pledge $5, the reward remains the same: you can give me a plot for a short story which I will write by the end of the summer. 

I hope that maybe makes some of you who might have considered supporting the site lean towards it a bit more 😉 You have an entire month to consider it. Once you pledge, I’ll contact you for the requested story.

So check out our Patreon page for more information!

Story Updates This Summer

Damaged, though a bit off track this week, is scheduled to continue every week until 18 June 2015. I’ll take off a month to plot and write the next arc, which will be posted starting 18 July 2015.

All We Are will return 15 June 2015. I may bump that up if I can get a decent buffer completed.

The Best Thing will return 15 July 2015. This will give me enoug time to get All We Are and Damaged on a good footing and complete enough buffer chapters so preclude another huge hiatus.

I haven’t quite decided what my next project will be, but I hope to be a position to announce that later in June.

Site Updates This Summer

I’m working on the summer layout but haven’t quite settled on the colors I want to use. If you could consider the three palettes below and then vote in the poll. Click on the images to get a better sense of the them if you’d like.

 

[socialpoll id=”2273592″]

The ebooks page has been updated with my expected releases for the summer (The Witness, I Shall Believe, and All We Are).  I should have covers for them shortly. If there are any of my novels (save those listed or short stories and novella collections) you’d like to see in ebook form, let me know in the comments.

Your Weekly Roundup

Not much to update for this section — Damaged was only updated with one episode earlier this week. It was a busy week and I didn’t finish writing in advance. I’ll be forestalling that with the next arc by taking time off (haha, planned for a change) in order to get a headstart.

A new short story, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, was posted. I’m so happy to be writing again. I can’t wait for you guys to read what I’ve written for All We Are.