I set my timer for 30 minutes, but I wasn’t quite finished the scene. So this was finished in 39 minutes. This is a second attempt at the magical story I started in October (Homecoming). I mentioned that the stuff in the workshop would be fluid and that if I didn’t like the way it was going, I would just start it again.

So, here’s Homecoming, Take 2: Part 1

Now that we’re passed the first week of December, I wanted to give you guys a better sense of where Crimson Glass is going in 2018.

Starting December 31, I’ll start posting Bittersweet. From December 31 to January 7, I’ll be re-posting Chapters 1-8. They haven’t been hugely rewritten, but they’ve been cleaned up and slightly to adjust to better suit the later part of the story. You don’t have to reread, but I would recommend. Re-posting them here at CG will just make it easier for me to re-post them at the other archives.

Then, starting January 8, I’ll be posting two new chapters of Bittersweet a week on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Bittersweet will run through March. After concluding, we’ll be taking the month of April off, and then in May, my hope is that Mad World will be ready. More on that in a second.

On Fridays, I’ll be posting a workshop item. I’m workshopping a few alternate universe ideas: the murder mystery one I started in the fall, the Scottish story, the magic story, and then I’m playing around with a few others.

Regarding Mad World: I’ve actually re-envisioned the story and it’s going to be almost an alternate version of the show set in the summer of 2003. It’ll be divided into three parts: a rewrite of the panic room and the kidnapping as the first book, and then the next two books deal with two more events set — the original Mad World idea moved back to 2003, and then a third one wrapping things up and dealing with the end of the Ric storyline.

There’s no reason to think I won’t be able to make the May 2018 publication date for Mad World. I’m scheduled to finish Bittersweet this week, and then I should be almost finished the first book in MW by the first week in January, and I’ll just plow through books two and three in January, February, and March.

I’m working on Damaged, it’s still a struggle to make storylines fit together and I haven’t given it enough attention. I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s not working for me, and I’m not there yet. I will be, eventually. It’s not the first time I’ve put Damaged on the shelf for awhile, but we’re at two years now and I feel super bad about that. I’m hoping that once I figure out why Season 3 is being annoying, I can plot that and Season 4 at the same time, at which time I plan to conclude the Victor storyline. There’s no thought for a Season 5 at the moment.

So in 2018, you should get about four full-length novels from me as well as various workshop items, short stories, and possibly Damaged. But you will be getting Bittersweet and all three books in Mad World. That’s a promise.

I’ll be back tonight to kick off Workshop Fridays 🙂

I’m going to make this quick and sweet because I’m pretty tired and it’s been a long week. It’s December 1, so where are we with Bittersweet?

The end of the semester seemed to sneak up on me suddenly this week and I had two ten page papers back to back, so I haven’t been able to do much writing. I still have about 10 chapters left to write, which I hope to get going on this week. I’m hoping for at least one day when I can just do nothing but write because I know I can knock out a few chapters all at once if I just had the time.

The good news is that I doubled how much I had for Bittersweet, going from 11 chapters to about halfway through Chapter 23. I have the first twenty chapters already sent to Cora, and I’ll be sending the last of it when I finish. Still on track to come back in January.

And to celebrate surviving November, I have a Micro Fiction for the Workshop. Written in 17 minutes without proof reading for typos: Micro Fiction: Tequila Surprises

 

Earlier today, I crossed the 50,000 threshold for National Novel Writing Month, which means I won. Yay for me 😛 What does this mean for you guys? Not a lot to be honest.

I’ve finished twenty chapters — but there are thirty-three planned which means if I write a chapter a day, it will still be another two weeks before I’m done the story.  But hey, I used to have eleven and a half chapters, and that’s where Bittersweet stood for almost two years, so nine more chapters in three weeks is a great step forward and I have every intention of finishing the story in the next two weeks.

In fact, I’m over the hump. The middle chapters,from about 12-19 were the hardest because I had to do a ton of foundation work to make 20-33 work. The same way that 8-20 of The Best Thing had the situation only moving incrementally until everything happened really fast. So I’m hoping to clear out all of Saturday to just write. If I can not relapse with my cold, if I can lock my door and keep my family out, that’s actually doable. I could easily write four or five chapters in a rush particularly once I get to a certain part of the story.

So I’ll keep you guys updated on how this is going, but we’re in the sweet spot and my schedule is a lot looser at the moment. I took off a few extra days from work so I could devote extra time to school and then have time for writing. I’m in a good space in all aspects of my life (except my car broke down, but that’s neither here nor there :P)

You’ve already read excerpts from Chapter Ten. Here is an excerpt from Chapter Eleven.

Continue reading →

Hey, just checking in another update. I wrote a ton this week (around 15,000 words) and I realized I had kind of…taken this story in a direction that didn’t quite work. It doesn’t really change much and I only have to go back and rewrite a few scenes in the last four chapters, but *fingers crossed* I should be around Chapter 22 by the end of the weekend, if not further along. I anticipate finishing through at least Chapter 30 during November, and finishing off the last four in the first week of December.

I’m currently at 39,826 words, so I’ll probably finish the 50,000 word goal sometime this week.

Since I had to delete some material, there are two snippets that aren’t going to be reused in the revised versions that I really liked. One of which is spoiler material, so I’ll that back until I post Chapter 19.

But this snippet with Gia telling a story doesn’t give anything away and was funny–at least I thought so 😛

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“Hey,” Elizabeth said as she and Gia joined the group. She slid her arm around Jason’s waist waist, his went around her shoulders as she curled into a half-embrace. “Sorry we’re late. Gia got into an argument with the officer who gives out tickets in our neighborhood.”

“It was 9:01 and we were right in front of the car. She wants to write me a ticket, she’s going to have do it over my dead body,” Gia declared. “I threw out Marcus’s name, but of course she’s a bitter ex-girlfriend.” She scowled.

“She nearly got us arrested,” Elizabeth offered with a roll of her eyes.

Courtney managed a smile, and AJ had some amusement in his eyes. Which is why she had told the story.

“How’d you get out of it?” Bobbie asked, folding her arms rightly across her chest. “The last time Gia got into an argument with the parking officer—”

“By the way, when are you due in court for that?” Courtney asked.

“There is no way that she can get me for double parking. By the time she got there, the other car was gone, which means at best, I’m a shitty parker—”

“You keep getting cited for disorderly conduct, they’ll never let you be a lawyer,” AJ told her. “Right, Diane?”

“Well, if you have the right attorney…” the redhead produced a card from nowhere. “Diane Miller.”

Gia took the card. “Let me tell you, if my idiot brother keeps breaking the hearts of the female officers in the parking authority, I’m gonna kill him. You do criminal law, too?”

And this time, she saw a ghost of a smile at the corners of Jason’s lips which made her feel much better.

“Anyway,” Gia continued, tucking the card away, “I would still be there fighting for the common man—”

“You were parked illegally, Gia,” Elizabeth said, rolling her eyes.

“—but Elizabeth started to hassle me about places we needed to be. So I took the ticket. But I’m not happy.”

---

 

 

Hey! I just wanted to let you guys know how it’s going. We’re a week in and I’m at around 14,000 ish words which is great. I’ve written three chapters and I’m about halfway through a fourth. If I keep that rate up (four chapters a week), I might not quite finish Bittersweet, but I’ll only be a chapter or so away.

Had a bit of a setback today after writing 1100 word scene from Elizabeth’s POV that really needs to be from Jason’s POV. I had the same issue writing The Best Thing. My first draft of the opening scene was from Elizabeth’s POV, but TBT is definitely Jason’s journey and everything was easier once I started making his voice more present. So I have to rewrite it. But it’ll be better for it, I’m sure.

Make sure to follow me on Twitter or check out my Twitter feed widget because I’ve posted a few small snippets from Bittersweet thanks to the new 280-character limit.

While I’m working on NaNoWriMo (going great so far, added another 1100 words today!) I decided to add a workshop series with the various opening scenes I wrote for Bittersweet to kind of demonstrate how tough it can be to open a story and how if it doesn’t work, there’s nothing wrong with going back. None of these are bad — in fact, the deleted chapter is actually relatively good. But I wasn’t happy with my timeline or the tone I was setting for the Jason and Elizabeth relationship, so I kept going back until I found something that worked for me.

Some of the dialogue ended up being used, some of the prose as well. But they just weren’t quite right. That’s the beauty of NaNoWriMo — you can try out all the ideas until something clicks. Eventually it will.

I just finished the last NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) session for today and I clocked in at 5,022 words and three completed scenes. Pretty excited about that. I won’t be blogging everyday, but make sure to check my Twitter feed. Maybe I’ll check on once a month.

To celebrate a really good first day, I’m giving you the finalized soundtrack for the story — the songs for each chapter to kind of give you some hints about the mood of the overall story.

Only Bother (Corey Taylor) is not available on Spotify, so I’ll have to upload that separately. I hope you enjoy this and I can’t wait for you guys to get to the material I wrote today. Because I love it!

So when I started to revise Mad World, I added extra material. The first chapter was going to start right at the hospital after Elizabeth collapsed when finding Carly in the panic room. But after finishing this chapter, I realized I didn’t need all the material I was going to write — it didn’t really serve the story.

But it’s 4200 words that don’t suck. So you can consider this a sort of preview since nothing that happens here really contradicts the rest of the story.

Still hard at work, revising! Enjoy this preview.

Mad World: Deleted First Chapter