Life & General Writing Health

• As everyone knows, the last two months have been difficult for literally every person on the planet. We’ve all had our own unique challenges that have made isolation and social distancing an uphill battle.
• It’s been a struggle for me, personally, to deal with mental health as I live alone and was cut off from pretty much my entire social network outside of my online communities. (Thank you to everyone who’s reached out, commented, or even just clicked like — you have no idea what you’ve done for me.)
• I also had some professional difficulties as I was switched from teaching one curriculum to another and my class size doubled. I had four classes (three ELA, one science) of sixth graders with an overall size of maybe 82 students. Now I have six classes of Spanish, Grades 4-6, with an average class size of 28 with an overall population of 170.
• It…was a lot.
• I also had a minor health issue that I didn’t really get into publicly that really took apart my stamina and energy. It was hard enough to get through my classes and teaching, much less writing. It’s mostly cleared up for now and hopefully it won’t come back.
• I still feel good about my writing, and I’m glad that Broken Girl is getting a great reception. As long as my health continues to stay where it is, we’ll be good to go this summer.
• I hope everyone is staying safe and taking care of themselves.

Site & Channel Status

• I have a Mad World series for the channel that will be premiering this week on Tuesday & Thursday. This week it’s twice, but it’ll probably be once a week after that.
• I’m planning a HUGE overhaul to Crimson Glass this summer. As I said, I’ll be moving Mad World over from its subdomain and merging into the site. I’ll also be closing down Damaged and Hand Me Down subsites. I need to rewrite the Word Press coding for CG — it’s a few years old and needs some clean up.
• I also want to revamp the story pages for my longer novels so that they look a bit cleaner and easier to navigate. I have some really interesting ideas about using multiple themes to make each novel its own experience, but I’m not sure yet if that’ll work.
• EBOOKS! I am going to make them a priority this summer. Using Scrivener will make their creation soooo much easier. Half my problem was formatting in Sigil, but Scrivener lets me create a template for the ebook, and then uses my existing writing file to create the book. I’ll have more on that in July.

Return of Flash Fiction!

• I’ve been searching for a way to make flash fiction posting more regular and work for my brand of writing. I’m not much of a impulse writer and I’m not great at coming up with my own prompts.
• I took three basic ideas I’ve been playing with and wrote out short outlines. Basically I decided — what is the premise, who are the characters, what is their relationship to each other, and the ending.
• On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I’ll post a notice on Twitter that I’m setting a timer for 20 minutes, then I’ll write and post the results. I’ll update each series weekly.
• When a series completes, I’ll take the finished product, edit it together, and the post as a complete short story, novella, or whatever it ends up being.
• That starts June 2. I’m looking forward to breaking my writing with fresh content every week!

Story Updates – For the Broken Girl, Books 1 & 2

• Broken Girl, Book 1 has been completed. I’ve scheduled the chapters to post on their schedule. The final chapter will post Friday, July 17.
• Once that’s done, it’s mostly just remembering to occasionally update the main page and post the chapters at Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own.
• I’ve made a bunch of notes for Book 2 so that it’ll be easier to write that when we get there, I have a basic structure already to go.

Story Updates – Mad World, Book 3

• I am officially pushing out the publication date for Book 3. It was scheduled for September, but I think we’re looking more like mid-October.  It’s not something I’m happy about, but I knew that if I hadn’t made decent progress by the end of May, I was going to end up squeezing my revisions again which I did with Book 2 and Broken Girl.
• It’s just too much pressure on myself. It’s better for me to finish the edits on Broken Girl and the ebook this week, then take a day or two of no writing at all before going into it in June and July. Book 3 will be my Camp NaNoWriMo goal this July — and that’s fitting. I have great success in finishing Mad World in July.
• This does push some of my schedule back a bit but not terribly. The plan is to take 6-8 weeks for the alpha draft (June 1-July 31) and then 6-8 weeks for edits (August 1 – September 30).
• That’s about as much time as Broken Girl took once I really got started. I had struggled throughought January to get anything done, but in February and March, I finished the alpha draft then did revisions in March and April. It also built in a lot of extra time for me to be sick, to teach, to rest, etc. Four months seems right.

After Mad World

Here is a tentative schedule for the projects on my planning slate. I’ve broken down the specific details at the bottom of the page. All of these dates are subject to change, but as you can see — I’ll average about three books a year for the next three years.

That would clean out the majority of my planned projects.

Mad World, Book 3 – October 2020

Fool Me Twice Book 1 – February 2021

Damaged – May 2021

For the Broken Girl, Book 2 – September 2021

Fool Me Twice, Book 2  – January 2022

Feels Like  Home – May 2022

Fool Me Twice, Book 3 – September 2022

Malice – January 2023

Burn in Heaven – May 2023

These Small Hours – September 2023

Details

Mad World, Book 3

• Alpha Draft (June – July)
• Beta Draft (August)
• Gamma Draft (September)
• Ebook & Release (October)

Fool Me Twice, Book 1 

• Discovery (August)
• Alpha Draft (September – November)
• Beta Draft (November – December)
• Gamma Draft (December 2020 – January 2021)
• Ebook & Release (February 2021)

Damaged

• Discovery (November-December 2020)
• Alpha Draft (January-February 2021)
• Beta Draft (March 2021)
• Gamma Draft (April 2021)
• Ebook & Release (May 2021)

For the Broken Girl, Book 2

• Discovery  (April 2021)
• Alpha Draft (May-June 2021)
• Beta Draft (July 2021)
• Gamma Draft (August 2021)
• Ebook & Release (September 2021)

Fool Me Twice, Book 2

• Discovery  (August 2021)
• Alpha Draft (September – October 2021)
• Beta Draft (November 2021)
• Gamma Draft (December 2021)
• Ebook & Release (January 2022)

Feels Like Home

• Discovery (December 2021)
• Alpha Draft (January – February 2022)
• Beta Draft (March 2022)
• Gamma Draft (April 2022)
• Ebook & Release (May 2022)

Fool Me Twice, Book 3 

• Discovery (April 2022)
• Alpha Draft (May – June 2022)
• Beta Draft (July 2022)
• Gamma Draft (August 2022)
• Ebook & Release (September 2022)

Malice

• Discovery (August 2022)
• Alpha Draft (September – October 2022)
• Beta Draft (November 2022)
• Gamma Draft (December 2022)
• Ebook & Release (January 2023)

Burn in Heaven

• Discovery (December 2022)
• Alpha Draft (January – February 2023)
• Beta Draft (March 2023)
• Gamma Draft (April 2023)
• Ebook & Release (May 2023)

These Small Hours 

• Discovery (April 2023)
• Alpha Draft (May-June 2023)
• Beta Draft (July 2023)
• Gamma Draft (August 2023)
• Ebook & Release (September 2023)