Hello! Sorry this is so late — I posted Part 1 on Thursday afternoon and my schedule has been crazy since then. I was so excited to be asked to do another mystery, and as always, I went overboard. This is the same length as Death Becomes Her (around 40 pages) which means part 1 is about 19. Right now, it’s exclusive to The Liason Haven, which you will need to join to read. I’ll be posting at CG sometime in May.

Part 2 is coming on Monday around 2. I hope you enjoy it!

 

Hey, it’s your (monthly, I guess) check in from me! It’s April and time for Camp NaNoWriMo — a month I’ve never been able to participate in since it always falls during that terrible time of a college student’s life — the last month of classes. Everything is due this month — my major research paper (April 22) and my orals (April 15). Oof. But we have a deadline in sight! All of my work is due May 15. That’s it. I’m done my academic career, which means I pretty much get 85% of my life back.

I imagine I’ll take about a week after courses are done to recharge and clean up my entire life, haha. I’ve let so much slip–laundry, cleaning–everything is kind of organized chaos and I’m looking forward to getting that sorted.

BUT I’m also going to be going into writing overdrive, so I’m super excited about that. I decided to take a low-key writing project for Camp this year — I’m going to finalize plot sketches for six projects I’ve been playing with for a while so that they are ready to go. Some of them are in decent shape, and some of them need to be rethought.

I’m going to doing my sketches for Mad World, Books 2 & 3.  Book 2 is mostly planned, but I want to work in some bread crumbs for Book 3 and some characters aren’t doing much in the second half of the book, so I finally figured out how to deal with them.

I’m also going to be doing sketches for For the Broken Girl, Kismet, and Malice. Broken Girl is my rewrite of the Lucky drug addiction in 2006, Kismet is the flash fiction series turned into a novel, and Malice is the sequel to Bittersweet. Burn in Heaven (sequel to A Few Words) rounds out the six projects — it’s actually mostly done but I have no ending yet.

Counting Stars doesn’t need to be plotted — it’s actually ready to go for writing so I might finish that one first and then dig into MW Book 2 or maybe even write them at the same time. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.

The plan is to have one of those ready for July — I want to be able to content being posted for the Liason 20th anniversary this August.

I am super excited about being done graduate school — even if I get a full-time job next year (crosses fingers), I still won’t have to juggle classes and classwork like I’ve been doing. For the last three years, I’ve been working two jobs, going to graduate school, and writing. Really excited to just have one job and writing on the side in my future.

But you don’t have to wait until July for new content! I’m working on an entry for this month in the GHWhoDunIt over at the Liason Haven. I was originally going to have it done for April 4 (today) but I caught one of those awful colds that just laid me out flat as I was editing it, so it’s been moved to next Thursday. I’ll make sure to keep you guys updated and I’ll post the link here then so you can go read it.

I’m hoping to mix in more flash fiction updates. You won’t get any until after April 23, when my rough draft and orals are done, but after that, I’m hoping to go back to once a week.

Thanks for your patience! I’ll see you guys next week!

Don’t get used to this 😉 It’s my last night in Maryland, and I had some free time before I had to go bed.  It’s not Desperate Measures — I want to spend some time on the second part with that and what I want to do might take longer than 20 minutes.

So I dug out Fool Me Twice, and decided to see if I could get closer to wrapping up the flash fiction series so I could put it back into novel development (I am going to rewrite Jason’s return and the Twinning at some point, we all know this)

Fool Me Twice, Part Thirteen

Hey! Checking in from my research trip in Maryland. I’m halfway through the week and exhausted from spending five hours every day in the National Archives, reading typewritten pages from the 1970s. It’s a step up from the 19th c. handwriting I had to read for the last project. So ready to graduate.

I have a flash fiction for you guys — I’ve set it up as part of a series, but we’ll see if I add to it. It seems like it would be an easy solution to my lack of time — to just toss up some flash fic, but it’s still creative energy. Honestly, I’d prefer to spend whatever writing time I can manage on Mad World, but if you guys want fiction updates, I’ll try to do some flash fiction.

This is kind of set in contemporary GH — my idea of trying to save the goddamn show again. I don’t know if it’ll work. These characters are pretty far gone, but it’s a soap opera so nothing is ever over. It’s set a bit in the future, and all you really need to know is that this ridiculous serial killer storyline happened, Franco plead guilty, ended up stabbed. Ryan is gone, Ava is gone. (I figure she should get to kill him and then split town to deal with it, I don’t really care tho). Jason and Sam are done with the Dawn of the Dead shit because that is dumb as hell and I’m too tired to save it. Everything else should be self-explanatory.

First part is short because I’m getting a super late start and only had about 25 minutes to put into it. I set the timer 20, but went over about 5.

Desperate Measures – Part 1

Hey! I wanted to check in and note that I cleaned up the Fiction Graveyard page. I realized that Slide had never been noted on the table as having been reposted (there’s a prologue, two chapters, and I posted the concept for the rest of the story). I have a handful of projects that still need to be reposted from there, and that might be an easy content update over the next few months.

March and April are going to be crunch time — I’ll actually be out of the worst of it come May 1. My orals will be done, my first draft of my research paper, the bulk of that research, etc. After that, it’s maybe two papers and a final draft. Thanks for the patience y’all have shown for the last two months (really three) without new content. I’m super lucky to have you guys.

So one of the things I can probably do is to squeak out some time to finish editing the last few Fiction Graveyard projects and maybe finish the graphics at Mad World (that header was meant to be temporary).

In other news, for my $5 and above Patreons, I released a super rough first draft of an original novel I’ve been writing for about three years, How It Falls Apart. One of the reasons I haven’t finished it is mostly that my free writing time goes to my fanfiction, but it’s on my list of things I want to finish after I graduate. I’m trying to commit to some sort of content being posted there once a month just to thank everyone who keeps the lights on at Crimson Glass, because Patreon is how I pay for my hosting and GH DVDs.

Something else I can probably do that won’t require a lot of time are more articles for my Fanfiction 101 series. I can write one of those in about 20-30 minutes and I can talk about planning and writing any story you guys want. If you’re interested, please check out what I’ve already written and leave a comment.

I’m sure there are some of y’all thinking — if you have time for editing and writing about writing, why can’t you put some of that energy into actually writing? And I get you. I really do.  The thing is that I am putting energy into writing but writing Mad World, Book 2 is emotionally draining and it requires my entire attention. I need to get myself into the moment and just start writing because what I have planned requires my all of my energy and inspiration. Right now, I can’t do that as often as I’d like.

Rest assured, when I get done school in mid-May, Book 2 is getting all of my attention. It’s my plan to release two novels this year — one in August and another in the fall. I don’t know what that second book is going to be — maybe Counting Stars. I’m not sure yet, but Book 2 is coming in August, maybe late July if I can get some real momentum going in May and June. It’s possible and there are already seven chapters written, so I got that on my side.

But I don’t want to disappear for months, and without the energy to write creatively, I’m working on things I can do for you guys that are interesting. So give me some feedback — do you want me to finish off Fiction Graveyard? Write more content for Fanfiction 101? Write more at my personal blog? I need an outlet away from research and school, so I’m happy to do more. I just don’t know exactly what you might be interested in.

I’m going to sign off before this turns into a book 😉 I’ll be out of town next week from March 3-9 doing research in Maryland for my paper, so I won’t really be on Twitter as much (I think, I shouldn’t be anyway). So leave comments here or send me a DM on Twitter if you need anything 😉

Hey! *waves* Checking in. I feel so much better since my last post. I went back to the doctors and got loaded with up more meds, including antibiotics and I’ve felt better in the last four days than in the last two months. I’ve been playing catch up all week with classwork, but I wanted to keep my brain and muse going so I started a small mini project.

I reorganized the Coming Soon page by dividing it into writing categories (Draft, Plot Sketch, Development, and Idea Stage) and then writing cover copies for each project. The cover copy would basically be what you might read on the back cover should you get the novel in paperback. I’ve written ten cover copies to cover ten of my fourteen projects. (Yeah, I’m not sure when that happened, ha).

So if you’re interested in seeing more details about upcoming projects and learning what order they’re probably going to be written (Drafting & Plot Sketches are more likely to come first), then go on over and check them out.

I need a few more days to get completely caught up and back on track before I start adding writing back into my regular routine, so let’s hope my health holds and I can get back to business 🙂

Hey! This is just a brief check in to let you guys to know what you might expect to see in February and March. I had hoped to be able to do more writing over the last few weeks, but of course, I got smacked with being sick right before I went back to school. This means I’m starting my last semester of graduate school already trying to play catch up.

I went back to the doctor today because I was eighteen days into some of the worst chest congestion I’ve had in a few years. It’s some sort of upper respiratory infection and I’m on my second round of medicine, this time with an antibiotic that I’m hoping will clear it up so I can get back into the swing of things. If this doesn’t do it, I need to go see a specialist.

This semester is going to be incredibly time-consuming. I have two graduate classes, one of which is requiring me to write and research a 35 page article and another looking for a 15 page research paper. I have an online class to get my ELA teaching certificate and that’s always a bunch of busy work. And on top of that, I have to prepare for my oral examination so I can graduate in May. This is basically me getting assigned questions from three of my former professors that require me to do a bunch of re-reading and analysis so I can go in and have a long discussion with them. It’s like defending your thesis without writing the thesis, if that makes sense.

All of that is to say that it’s obvious that my writing cannot be a priority this semester. It’s in my top 5 things that are important to me, but right now, it’s Number 5 after my health, my family, my education, and my job. I really really want to write some short stories and flash fiction to keep some updates going but I refuse to make any specific promises.

I love you guys and I promise you — this is the last semester of my education and without that, 85% of my schedule gets cleared. It’s going to be completely different after the first week of May. I just have to put my head down and keep at it.

First step, getting healthy again so I can put all of my effort into graduation!

About a year ago, I told you guys that I had decided to rewrite basically eight chapters of Bittersweet because I wanted to make a huge story change. That meant instead of being four chapters away from being done, I ended up going back to being 12 or so chapters. It took me almost six more months to finish it and another nine months before you guys got to read the completed material.

I finally got a chance to organize all the deleted stuff, and wow, it’s about five chapters worth of things. A lot of the scenes I revised with some minor changes, especially Liz grieving. But the storyline change meant other scenes were cut entirely.

Basically, I had originally planned for the story to follow 2002’s story more closely. Rather than Sonny faking Jason’s death without telling him, I had planned for Jason and Sonny to plan it together. The lie would come when Jason refused to do it without Liz, and Sonny decided to lie to her about it. Nothing I wrote was especially bad, but once I got to the part where Jason had to come back and explain himself, I just–I didn’t like it. I didn’t really believe Jason would ever do that.

So I decided to with Sonny lying to everyone and I honestly feel like that was the best change I could make. Because it allowed me to play with Sonny and Liz’s relationship in more detail, as well as Sonny and Jason more fully. Plus, I knew I could bring in more of Sonny’s history with women. And it gave me a really good way to end the story — Jason and Liz leave town. I’m glad I changed it–

But it left me with about 60 pages of unposted material. So I organized it into three sections. Some of it I’ve already posted under a different rewrite, but I reposted it in this way.  I hope you enjoy and let me know if you think I made the right decision! This can also be found on my Workshop page where I post a lot of my discarded stuff.

 

Hey, guys! I’m just checking in to late you guys know where I am since I posted a few weeks ago.  I have some more firm ideas about what I want to do with 2019 and writing.

Thanks for all the support and encouragement I got after my last update. I really have some of the best readers in the business, and if not for you guys, I would not still be writing.  I recently reread the chapters I wrote for NaNoWriMo in November, and y’all, they’re not trash. In fact, they’re even…good. I sent them to a third party, and she agreed. So I’m putting Counting Stars back on the schedule.

The other project I’ve been thinking about is Kismet, which is basically me rewriting the Jason and Michael 1998 storyline with Liz in the picture.  Once I started really working on it, I realized just how uncomfortable I was with writing 1997/98 versions of some of these characters, particularly Robin. My vision of Robin in this period is mostly from late 98/99 after Carly has made her a much more bitter figure. That’s not fair to who Robin and Jason were in the fall of 97, and I want Jason to move on to Liz without making Robin into a villain.

So I took the extra money I’ve been saving from my Patreons and I bought a bunch of edits from that period. I now have Jason from Nov 95-Oct 06, and July 97-January 98. This gives me a much more accurate idea of who these people are and will make planning and writing Kismet a lot better.

I also got a Liz edit from June-Dec 99 which included ALL of her scenes from that six months, not just her Jason-related scenes. That’s going to help me write her scenes a lot better for Counting Stars. There are few more edits I want to get really flesh out this period, but I feel a lot more equipped to write these characters.

I’m still working on Mad World — in fact, I finished a chapter this week and am putting writing back into my daily schedule. I feel a lot better about what I’m turning out, and I’m more confident you guys are going to get some more content soon.

However, I really don’t like not having new content posting here. So I’m cleaning up some deleted material from Bittersweet that I plan to post later this weekend, and I’m looking into some short story ideas I’ve had floating around to see if I can finish them off.

Thanks again for the support and patience!