I wrote a new Micro Fiction, Mail Order Bride, because I didn’t really have the energy for a full hour and I also had this idea playing in my head.

I’m making headway in getting caught up with reading and taking notes that I put off last week to draft Mad World. I had a few extra hours yesterday and started doing some revision exercises.  I didn’t actually edit anything, but I started looking at scenes, tracking narratives and characters arcs. I found some holes — I’m going to need to add about 4 chapter in the front of the story, and probably sprinkle another 2 or 3 chapters in the middle. Just adding content, playing around with what I wrote.

I won’t know until maybe the end of the week just how much work I’ll be doing — if anything needs a big overhaul or just light editing and addition of new scenes.

I still have to fix the broken links from the changing of the Flash Fiction page to Workshop; I just haven’t had a chance yet.

Earlier today, I completed drafting Mad World. I’m super happy about that — it’s the first project I’ve been able even put “Finish” anywhere near since February 2016 when I posted the end of the The Best Thing so to just get to the end of a multi-chapter story makes me happy

That being said, one of the major reasons I finished it was turning off my inner editor and not stopping to edit or rewrite scenes before moving on to the next chapter. This means there’s work to be done. I’m basically rewriting my entire Lucky story because I had a good idea two weeks ago. And my Carly subplot needs to be refined and tweaked towards the end. My Jason and Elizabeth central narrative needs some tweaking to make it a bit more deeper, a bit more resonant, and I changed course on the PCPD narrative halfway through and wrote the rest of the story as if I had already rewritten the first half. So, yeah, it needs work.

Also, I mentioned that I had rescheduled a due date for a paper but now I have to do that paper this week. I also kind of…put off some readings and note taking in order to finish today. I’m not sorry — I’m glad it worked out that way but now I have to do some catch up to get back on track.

So I’m going to let Mad World sit for a week. I took a revision class and the instructor recommended an even longer sitting period before going to revisions, but I’d like my huge round of revisions to be done before November so I can do NaNoWriMo again.

I’ll still be doing a Fiction Workshop next week, but I’m putting Mad World aside so I can look at with  more fresh eye. Right now, I hate pieces of it, ha, and I may like it better in a week.

Still…it’s currently at 236 pages and 90,000 words so that ain’t shabby for three months of work 😉 I’ll be updating about it periodically on Twitter as I rewrite and revise and checking in here as well.

Workshop Update

I wrote Sky is Falling, Chapter 3 in about 50 minutes.

Life & Mad World Progress

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should, I’m always tweeting about writing lately), then you’ll notice I’ve been posting about getting closer to the ending of the first draft of Mad World. It’s going so well for me that I actually moved around a due date for a paper at school. I get to pick the week I want to write a paper, and I had planned on this week because my Tuesday and Wednesday classes were cancelled in the evening.

And then Mad World started working, and I thought…I could finish this first draft this week if not for this paper. So…yeah. I made what a lot of my people in my life would say was an irresponsible decision to put my fanfiction first. But it’s not just as simple as putting fanfiction first, it’s putting me first. My creativity. My happiness. This project is going so much better than the last few (how long did it take me to get to 17 chapters in The Best Thing?) This is going back to A Few Words territory where I wrote that sucker in a month and ignored everything else. When I let my creativity be in charge, it’s good for me.  Even my classwork is going faster because I’m concentrating more evenly, devoting time to everything that matters so I’m just…happier.

I tweeted about it this as well, but part of the reason I’m feeling more settled in my priorities is a podcast called Big Strong Yes from Chipperish Media. It’s a book club that reads self-help books, but not the normal ones. We just finished Rising Strong by Brene Brown, and if you’ve ever read it, you’re going to see a lot of that book reflected in Mad World. I owe a huge debt for Elizabeth’s characterization and her therapy. She’s going through the Rising Strong process in this novel. We’ve just started Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert which is devoted to creativity, and I’m just already excited by it. So if you’re like me, and you’re constantly putting what makes you happy on the back burner or struggling with priorities, this podcast might be good for you.

Okay, promotion aside, what does it mean that Mad World is nearly finished? I’m finishing the Discovery Draft, which is me turning off the inner editor. In July, when I was writing for Camp NaNoWriMo, I kept letting myself get stuck on scenes, rewriting scenes. I spent three days on Chapter 8 and while I like the changes, it really set me back time wise. I’m used to polishing chapters as I go, getting them as close to publishable as possible before going on to the next. It’s how I wrote The Best Thing, All We We Are, and the first two chunks of Bittersweet and Mad World. It’s not a bad thing, but it does slow down my writing process and sometimes I lose the momentum. So a discovery draft is me turning that off and just writing, which means I get the big parts done.

That being said, Mad World needs a bit a work. There’s some scenes that need to be written, an entire subplot I need to write, another I need to finish, so I’m thinking to take most of October to do that. It might go slower, it might go faster. I don’t know. I’ll keep you guys updated on that process.

Site Maintenance

Also, I tried to mess with the subscriptions plug in so you no longer get every single post I make — just these summary ones on the main page, which will cut down on the amount of email you’ll receive. Let me know if you typically receive emails and aren’t getting any since I’m testing it.

There are still broken links from the change over to Fiction Workshop format. I hope to ferret those out this week and fix them. I’ll keep you posted on that as well.

I also think I’ve fixed the share options, so posts should share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (which…exists but I don’t use much)

When I last updated the new “flash fiction” series, Sky is Falling, I mentioned I would be basically workshopping it as a flash fiction series and that I would be probably rewriting the King’s Command flash fiction series as well. I’m actually going to overhaul the Flash Fiction page and its entries in order to really work with this idea.

There’s little change to you, except that the names of the page will change and I won’t be numbering them anymore. I’ll be trying out smaller concepts and ideas, as well as longer ones. Do I have enough material to keep going?

Like I said, you guys won’t really notice a difference. I just wanted to explain why the page name changed and the entry titles are going to look different going forward. Oh, and also — I have to fix links on the Recent Updates page, so for now, if you’re looking for Flash Fiction entries mentioned in previous post, you need to find it using this link: Workshop. I’ll be updating the links later after work.

I did a ton of writing on Mad World this week and I’m finally in the sweet spot. I had the chance to write the scene that was at the center of the reason as to why I took the story out of the 2004 universe with the Brooke and Alexis stories and focused it more firmly on Elizabeth in 2003. It’s always really satisfying to finally write a scene you’ve been looking forward to months.

I’m scheduled to finish the first draft sometime this week, and I’ll keep you posted for an official release date.

Just a small post to keep the main page updated.  I updated the Recent Updates page with the last week’s worth of news. I also fixed the Flash Fiction page which now lists the Micro Fictions in their correct order and now lists the new series, Sky is Falling.

An on that note, I added a new chapter to Sky is Falling yesterday: Flash Fiction #12: Sky is Falling, Chapter 2.

Please remember that I am writing this particular story in 60 minute or less chunks and have sworn a blood oath to myself not to reread for editing or spelling as a way to shut my inner editor up during first drafts. When this story is done, I plan on looking at the whole thing and making changes to make a full-fledged regular novel, but I’m work shopping it in Flash Fiction. It’s basically the same thing I’m doing with A King’s Command, but that one is kind of stalled because I don’t know who the villain is and I either have to introduce a new character (which means there’s no mystery) or make it one of the existing characters (and I limited my options). So I might just scrap it and start that one over again. We’ll see.

Thanks to everyone who commented, wished the site a happy birthday, and said nice things 🙂 After so many years, it’s just kind of amazing that we’re all still here 🙂

A few hours ago, I said I’d hoped to have something for you later. This is what I have. I wrote a Micro Fiction Sunday, but by the time I got to the end of it, I knew I wanted to play with it as a longer story. But I didn’t want to put it in an idea log and let it die.

So I’m trying something new. I made a quick outline — setting up characters, who their circles are, the basic elements of the world, and a sort of idea of the endgame. And then I set the clock for sixty minutes and wrote.  I’ll do that once a week and whatever emerges, will be that week’s chapter.

Flash Fiction #11: Sky Is Falling, Chapter 1

If this method works, I may continue doing it after I finish this story. Maybe I’ll do it more than once week, we’ll see. I carved out an hour a day for writing, so I’ll take one of these hours at minimum and give you this chapter. I don’t know what day yet — so we’ll play that by ear and maybe I’ll settle into a routine.

When it’s over, I’ll go back and edit for spelling. Maybe for content, we’ll see. Hope you like it.

Today, September 19, is the anniversary of the day I opened a small General Hospital fanfiction archive on my old website. Back then, it was just called Mellissa’s General Hospital Fanfiction and it would not be named Crimson Glass until 2004 when it moved to its own domain.

A site crash eliminated around 20 stories, though I’ve been able to resurrect almost all of those save a few short stories and two longer chapter stories. One Day at Work and In the Middle are still missing. If anyone even has access to partial chapters (both were once archived at The Canvas), I would love to even have parts of that story.

I’ve written a few retrospectives about the site over the last three years since we moved to our permanent home.

A Look Into Crimson Glass Past

Banner Retrospective #1

The first is a look at the oldest version of the site I could find in the Internet Wayback Machine, which is a cute look into my haphazard design skills and the stories I had at the time. The second post is old banners for stories when I posted primarily on message boards.

For this, the fifteenth anniversary of my fanfiction archive, I thought I’d just kind of look what where I was then as to where I am now and give you some links to the oldest stories from those days, and also give a bit of a status update on the site and the writing.

I was eighteen and starting community college the fall I opened my website. I spent more time writing than I did on my studies and dropped out by that spring. I kept writing until my first hiatus in in 2004, which lasted about year until late 2005. I had started a job which meant I couldn’t watch General Hospital live anymore. Then I got a DVR in November 2005. That’s the longest period I watched the show and wrote — 2005-2008. I was still watching into 2009, but not writing.

And then I took a break until 2012 watching. I started watching for a long time, but didn’t feel the juice to write and didn’t really have the time. I had gone back to school full-time in 2008 which part of the reason I stopped writing. I got my bachelors in May 2013, and then went to London. I had more time on my hands and in January 2014, I began moving my site to this domain. Mostly because the old site had expired and I didn’t have any archive for about two years. I felt bad about it and I didn’t want all my work lost. So I moved it to a temporary home and then started to build the WordPress site from scratch.

I still didn’t think I would return to writing, but then I wrote The Things You Can’t Undo, an episode tag for Elizabeth and Britt. And then…I rewrote Shadows. And on a bus trip to Wales, I rewrote Poisonous Dreams in my head as A Few Words Too Many, and we were off and running.

In the nearly four years since I built this current incarnation of the site, I’ve tried to gather almost all of my writings, even as much that had been lost. Thanks the Internet Wayback machine, I was able to find a ton of old short stories. And then a few enterprising readers sent me old stories. Stories I didn’t remember (Silent Reverie), stories I had lost in crashes (No One Else Sees Me and The Ends of the Earth), and stories I genuinely thought were lost forever (Surviving the Past). Now, to the best of my knowledge, with the exception of One Day At Work and In the Middle, every story I wrote with chapters is here in some shape or fashion. Some might be missing chapters. Some are unfinished, but there’s a lot to read here.

I’ve done my best to organize the stories in ways that you can find what you want easily in my Find Stories menu link. This link allows you to sort stories by the year they’re set, the year they’re written, which couples or characters are featured, by title, by length, and even if there’s a holiday in there. I haven’t been as great lately tagging the stories, so I have to go through and do that. But there’s definitely a way to get there and find what you want. I’m working on adding summaries to the Title page, but it’s slow going.

So here’s where we talk about story status. Most of it you know — I’ve had a lot of changes in my life since 2014. I’m working two jobs, going to school full-time, and my family has grown by six kids. My cousin has one boy, my brother has one of each, and my sister gave me two nieces and nephew. I’ve also had health issues. Creativity issues. The list goes on. I’ve also had trouble making writing a priority.

That changed this summer. I gave you guys a few flash fictions and micro fictions, but I also wrote a huge chunk of an novel, Mad World, which I hope to finish this month given some time and energy. I’m at a point in the story where I think if I could just get in the zone, I could probably finish it off in three days. So it’s about finding time for that zone.

For the site, almost everything I wanted to complete is done. I still have to finish adding summaries to the sorting by title page, and add tags stories added in the last year or so. I want to finish the Fiction Graveyard, but the stories left require heavy editing which is time better spent writing in my opinion. I also want to get more older stories available in ebook form, but that also takes time better spent for writing. So I know where you guys would rather my energy go.

While y’all are waiting for Mad World, Bittersweet, and Damaged, I want to make a concentrated effort to do more shorter stories. More Micro Fiction (20 minutes) and Flash Fictions (up to an hour). I’m making some tentative plans and you might see some of that later today or tomorrow. We’ll see.

I had thought about posting the first chapter of Mad World but it’s not ready — the scenes need editing and some even need rewriting. So I looked through what I’ve been working on, and I do have a few things for you to celebrate this anniversary.

I put Bittersweet on hiatus for personal reasons last year and then kind of lost the thread in writing it. I’m going to tackle that as soon as I get Mad World done. What you guys don’t know is I actually wrote more than the eight chapters that are posted. So what I’m going to do is give you a scene from a later chapter in Bittersweet as well as a scene from Mad World. Neither of these are beta’d beyond chapter content (no line editing). And I’m not gonna give you a lot of context for them. But it’s just a preview and an assurance that these things are here and I’m writing.

Bittersweet Excerpt

Mad World Excerpt

A while ago, I created a post with my favorite stories, so I’ll link that here for some recommendations to read. If you’re looking for my older stories, Surviving the Past is probably the oldest story I’ve written that I would probably would not set on fire. You can also check out the Year Written sort page to get a sense of my evolution as a writer.

I’ll wrap this up by saying thank you so much for the last fifteen years. I may not get paid for my writing and I may not be a “real” writer, but I feel like one because you guys are still here, still patiently (or impatiently, haha), waiting for what I do next, and I cannot articulate what that’s meant to me. Here’s to another fifteen more 😛

I hope to be back later today with something else for you, but I don’t want to promise it before I know for sure.

So we’re two weeks into the semester. I worked really hard to get myself on a study schedule that would not leave me working and studying every waking hour. That really killed me last year and was the major reason I didn’t write much at all. So I set up a study and work schedule that, as long as I don’t get sick, gives me Fridays and Saturday,and Sunday afternoons off from work and school (with the exception of about 4 hours on Friday for my teaching Practicum.)  Basically, I’ve scheduled myself a decent amount of the weekend to relax, read, and write.

I’ve also kind of set up a morning schedule that gives me about a half hour of writing time, but it’s been tough to get myself out of bed at 6 AM when pretty much all my night classes and shifts at work leave me getting home at 9 PM the night before.

All that is to say that I’ve made my writing a bit more of a priority than I did last year, and that’s mostly because this summer, I remembered how much I like writing. I’m working on Mad World, and it’s about halfway done. I got a bit stalled on a chapter because this scene is ridiculously difficult and I have get myself an afternoon to write it.

Today, I have another Micro Fiction for you, a continuation of the horrible title, Birthdays and Anniversaries. I wrote it in about 20 minutes and 30 seconds earlier today, and I wrote as an Author’s note that I like this concept and I’m going to play with it as a short story so this will probably be the last time I feature it in the Micro Fiction.

I’ll be honest — this nearly passed me by, but the seminal Jake’s scene happened eighteen years ago today. August 27, 1999. I actually missed them the first time around. When Lucky died, I took a break from GH. I love Liason, but Jonathan Jackson!Lucky was my first crush and I pretty much cried for a month. I was fifteen and I thought the world was over because Liz and Lucky were done, and they’d burned my true love in a fire. Would you believe that my mother didn’t let me stay home?

So I tuned back in when Lucky came from the dead, and my God, was I punished for it. I’m sorry to Jacob Young, but seriously — he made me hate Lucky for YEARS. It wasn’t until Greg Vaughan came on that I could look at my beloved again.

But I was watching in the summer of 2000 and I immediately saw how amazing Liason could be, but alas Jason left and I went with him. I tuned in and out due to high school, but after graduation in 2002, I was recovering from foot surgery and I started to watch during Elizabeth’s kidnapping. The rest is history.

So thanks to Twitter for the reminders and GIFS. We’re a crazy fanbase to still be going strong after all the knocks we’ve taken but I’m proud to be a member of it.

Writing is still going really well. I got little stuck on a few chapters in the middle of Mad World — crucial scenes that I rewrote several times before moving on. I tweeted a few times about it, so make sure you’re following me on Twitter to keep up.

I broke through the damn and I’m about halfway through the first draft. I have just enough time to finish the first draft before school really heats up next week, so once that draft is done, I’ll have a better idea when you can expect it. I’m leaning towards November. Once I start posting, though, you’ll have the assurance that it is completely done and there won’t be any hiatuses.

I wanted to post something yesterday about this because, well, yesterday was the official twenty-year mark for Rebecca Herbst on General Hospital.

I’ve been writing fanfiction about General Hospital for nearly as long as Becky has been on the show — I started with Elizabeth/Lucky fanfiction in 1998 back when most GH sites were on Geocities and we organized our fandoms by mailing lists, not message boards. Elizabeth and Lucky were my first love and my first foray in creative writing.

I can still remember watching that first episode on August 1, when Elizabeth showed up as a teenage badass who didn’t a give fuck about anything or anyone. I rushed home for a year to watch her scheme and plot to get the guy and then battle back from her rape. As I got older and busier with school, I wasn’t always able to keep up or record on our VCR, but I kept tuning in. I got a DVR in 2005, which made it a lot easier.

I loved Jason/Elizabeth from the moment I saw them on screen, but didn’t start writing for them until the summer of 2002 when I found The Canvas. Whatever that site turned into, I will always be grateful for them because I found a voice in my writing that hasn’t stopped since (despite a few breaks). I discovered many of the readers I still have today and also a group of amazing friends at Liason/Liz Underground who continue to be some of the strongest, funniest women I know.

I created Crimson Glass on September 19, 2002 but I started publishing fanfiction on August 3, 2002 at The Canvas with Deserving, a story that has been lost to rewrites, crashes, and being banned from The Canvas. It’s been fifteen years which seems insane to me but I wouldn’t change a thing. So I’m posting today, in the middle of these two anniversaries.

Elizabeth Webber remains one of my favorite television characters. I don’t always watch regularly these days because the rest of the show has never meant as much to me, but for twenty years, Becky has brought this character to life and I think it’s safe to say my life would be much different had she left the show as quickly as Jennifer Sky and the character of Sarah Webber. The character of Elizabeth was originally about fourteen or fifteen when she started (she turned 16 in 1998, then 18 in 1999), and I was thirteen so part of me feels like I grew up with her on screen. I will always remain #LizFanFirst.

Thank you for reading my silly stories and giving me a reason to keep writing.