Adventures in Crafting with Words

I first encountered Sarah J. Maas on fictionpress.com. She was a popular author on there with a very popular first draft of Throne of Glass. I couldn't ve happier for her when the final draft of ToG was published. It's the dream most authors have. This book review is not about ToG and its sequels.  I'm still working on them.  This review is for The Court of Thorns and Roses. When I first started reading I got Beauty and the Beast vibes.  Not the cartoon B&B either but the original tale with the three sisters and merchant father.  But with Fae. You can see the set-up as it's happening.  A mix of modern and fairy tale. Old and new.  Modern sensibilities about relationships and proper sensibilities about relationships mixed in one. Yes, that was a subtle hint towards the main character, Feyre, having a friends with benefits relationship amid people arranging marriages for money, to get enough food to eat. To using marriage to g...

First up, why am I expanding and revising The Bookworm Next Door?   At first I seriously thought that The Bookworm Next Door (BND) was complete.  I had been working on it for over seven years and the overall story never changed.  I've had so many possible endings, but I kept coming back to the one I ended the story with.  Then I hit publish and the prequel short stories started appearing.  Then the questions of "what happened to Aimee?" Kelly?  What about Jennifer?  Wesley?  Gloria and Brady?  That was when I realized that BND wasn't finished.  What is different about the current Bookworm Next Door and the revised and expanded edition? Over a hundred pages of new material.  What caused Grace to be shy and quiet when she's the oldest of X number of siblings?  What caused Aimee to set her sights on David? Some names have changed.  A Beta reader pointed out that she was having trouble keeping Grace and Gloria...

Sometimes you sit down and realize something. Okay.  I sat down and realized something as I was writing Jennifer's part of the Bookworm story. The Bookworm Next Door wasn't finished when I self-published it.  It's a disturbing reality that faced me with two difficult decisions.  I could close the door on The Bookworm Next Door and leave it imperfect or I could rewrite it and make it perfect. I decided to do exactly that.  Perfect is better. So then I was faced with the daunting task of piecing everything together exactly the way it needed. There was also the fact that I was faced with continuity issues with some of the characters names.   Last night I finished The Bookworm Next Door.  It has all of the short stories combined.  It has new material.  It has a never before seen ending that only I knew was going to happen. Is The Bookworm Stories Series over?  No.  There's still Aimee Kirkland's story.  Grace and Kyle....

Is that even possible?  Can Aimee Kirkland from the Bookworm Stories Series be redeemed?  She isn't supposed to be a likable character.  She's one of the mean girls that everybody sees in real life.  That girl that believes that she deserves it all.  Did she learn anything from The Bookworm Next Door ?  Did everybody rallying around Gloria in Along the Road teach her anything about her actions?  But as I released Along the Road and got started on my next installment - what is supposed to be Jennifer's story - I started my outlines and plotting... but Aimee kept popping up.  And then her unnamed sister - now named Amanda.  So, when the Bookworm Series moves out of the high school area and into the college arena we'll see more about Aimee and Amanda and how these sisters deal with their mother's influence in their lives.  Can Aimee be redeemed?  What is going to happen to be the catalyst for this redemption?  I don't k...

At some point I going to need to learn how to work photo editing to make these better.  But it's something and I think it looks pretty good.

As I sit here typing I wonder why I willingly took on the task of two blogs - the etsy shop blog and the author blog.  Because I love to write. School and subbing has started back. No more writing until midnight. Not of I want to function at 6 in the morning when my alarm goes off.  The rough draft of Half-Moon Manor is almost finished. I'm procrastinating on my final writing day because I'll know the bulk of my writing is finished. While this story hasn't taken 8-10 years to write, it has still been on my computer for a long while. I already know that I'll have to go back in an fill in some of the gaps: psychological, emotional, depth gaps.  I have characters to fully flesh out. I have plot holes and probably continuity errors to fix.  Then I'll send it off to Laura, my new editor, beta, and confusing sentence fixer. It'll go to the betas. Book cover. Back cover blurb. Kindle set up. Physical book/createspace set up. Promotion and marketing. Goodreads. ...

Coming to a kindle nearst you, hopefully - the still untitled Prequel Short Story about Brady and Gloria. It just needs a beta read a title...that's the tricky part. I received my first goodreads review the other day.  Not an actual review, just the stars, but I'm good with that.   3 stars. Not great, but not bad for showing something started 8 years ago.  I can honestly say my writing style has changed since then.  I can see it from what I'm writing on now.  But it got me thinking, as a reader how would I rate my own story?  I submitted it knowing there were issues that I would not be able to fix without whole rewrites of sections that had already been rewritten so many times.  My characters, I believe, were spot on. Each had a psychological reason for acting the way they acted. Behaviors met personalities. Personalities met character traits and circumstances. If I had added the material in the shorts into the story it would have been chunk...

I'm working on a few projects and it is making my head spin.  Either I'm stretching myself too far or my brain is staying, 'You worked so hard on completing The Bookworm Next Door. Take a break.' I still find myself going through all of my writing folders looking to see what items of potential I have already scribbled down. I have MANY writing folders. Some empty (yes, I clean them out). Some jumbled together. Some pieces are just so bad that I feel like I should just delete them, even as I can remember where and why I wrote them.  How can you just delete a part of your history like that?  I can't.  So I'm focusing on 3 things. 1. The Girl Next Door Prequel Shorts. Gloria and Brady are next in line and while I know where I'm going, getting there might be the issue.  This one is slightly more complicated than The Bookworm's Make Over; I can't just write it out in two days and send it to a beta. Brady has a complex back story thanks to Kelly. 2....