Pro-cras-tin-ate!

It's been about a month since my beta readers and critique group have given me their feedback on the latest draft of The River Maiden. The general consensus is that the characters and writing are good, and the story is mostly good but there are too many questions left unanswered for a first book in a series. I had come to this conclusion on my own before many of the readers even got back to me, but it was nice to have that confirmed. So there appears to be a good deal of rearranging, revising and rewriting to go into the next draft before it's ready to be shown to potential agents/publishers.  Since I have already outlined the next book in the series, I have some timeline gymnastics to work on.  There is the question of what to reveal in the first book, without completely ruining the plot of the second.  Also, the question of how far the romance in the first book can/should progress and how that might change some of the tension in the next book. There are storylines to be dropped and others to be built up. Needless to say with almost 250 pages of content, this is a daunting prospect, and one that I've been chewing on in the back of my mind like a particularly tough piece of literary beef jerky.

Fear not! I have not been idle while gnawing away on my various writing dilemmas. In fact, I have been even more active than usual though just not in the area of writing. (I know terrible to get out of the habit of working every day, but there it is.) So here are some of the things that I've been up to instead of revising The River Maiden.

- Taken on an Instructional Design consulting client.

- Added a Clearance section to my etsy store and marked down a bunch of items to go in it.

- Organized/customized our closet in the master bedroom complete with drawers and shelves.

- Planted my vegetable garden, succulent garden, herb garden, shade garden, water garden (with fish) and fairy garden

- Completely revamped our deck from it's previous jumbled state into a gorgeous oasis including container gardens, a new gazebo, social area and even a workspace for writing/editing outside while the kids play.

- And last but certainly not least, binge watched 4 seasons of Dr. Who.

I know, I know. I should have been working on The River Maiden. The good news is that I am getting back to the grind. Even though, I'm working for my client during the hours of the day that I would have previously devoted to writing, I have a plan. This morning I got up at 5AM and came downstairs to work on some reading and editing. I know this has worked for other writers with day jobs and I have high hopes. My characters and my story are usually the last thing I think about as I'm going to sleep at night, so maybe getting up and getting to work before any of my other responsibilities intrude will be a good model for getting things done. It went pretty well this morning. We'll see how well it works when I get to writing some of the new material.

Oh! I should also mention that in honor of Stoddard-palooza (Our month long family festival from our anniversary to our birthday's) I will be giving away my historical fiction shorts this month, though not at the same time. Right now The White House is free on Smashwords. I'll keep it that way for a couple of weeks. Then it will go back to its regular price and A Fond Kiss will be free. I hope that Amazon and Barnes and Noble will be adjusting their pricing accordingly, but I don't really control that the way I can on Smashwords. So, if you haven't read them or have read one and not the other, check them out this month to get a free taste.

Sitting on it

It's been a while since I've updated the blog. This is mainly because I was pushing hard to have the book ready for beta readers by Christmas. Unfortunately, the flu got in my way by running through the family not once, but twice since I finished writing the book. When you throw in holiday preparations and a rather slow Alpha reader, you have a recipe for disaster. So I missed my deadline (GASP!). I know, it was a self-imposed deadline and I was sick in bed or bowing down to the porcelain god, but still I have an innate aversion (or dare I say horror) to missing deadlines. I mean the "dead" in deadline is there for a reason, right? On the upside, much of the time I spent in bed sick was spent thinking about my characters and the feedback that my Alpha reader, my husband, gave me and mentally plotting out the next book in the series. I also spent plenty of time thinking about my next move. Namely the question facing a lot of authors today; Do I zip this out to market via KDP and CreateSpace or do I attempt to sign with an agent and get a wider distribution and maybe a little marketing help (and yes I know that help would be very little)? On the one hand, publishers are loath to take a chance on a new author with a series, and they would take a bigger chunk of the pie so to speak. On the other hand, it takes a lot of work to get noticed out there in the big bad reading world and my little historical fiction shorts while getting terrific reviews, aren't exactly selling like hotcakes. So, while my piece of the indie pie might be bigger, the pie itself (at least so far) is barely even snack size. What's a girl to do? I'm going to sit on it. That is to say, I'm going to hold off  publishing this book until I have something more. Here's the plan:

1) I'm outlining the rest of the series, or at least the rest of the series involving the main characters as they stand now. This will give me a clear picture of where it's going and it will enable me to write a synopsis of each book.

2)Using the bird's eye view of the series from Step 1, write a pitch for the whole series with which to query agents. I believe that this series could be very commercial. I also believe it will fit nicely into the newly minted "New Adult" category that seemsso popular right now. It has enough of contemporary fantasy aspects to appeal to a young audience, but the characters and subject matter are definitely more mature than Young Adult. Imagine a Twilight style love triangle (no vampires or werewolves, I promise) with DaVinci Code style themes and you're coming pretty close.

3)Query, query query while working on my platform and trying to build an audience. That will likely include a trailer or two that I already have worked out in my head. Luckily I know a good filmmaker, my brother, who I might get to help me with that.

4) Write, write, write the second book. Hopefully, this one won't take more than a decade to write.  But the writing/editing of it will most likely determine the timeline of the rest of the plan. I'll keep querying until I get a bite or finish the second book. If no agents or publishers have bitten (I really promise there are no vampires in this series.), then I will likely publish them myself in close succession. That way I can hopefully whet the reader's appetites with the first two books enough to get them to buy a third and fourth, fifth, and who knows by then I might even plan a series for the next generation of characters.

At least that's my plan, and it feels pretty darn good to start off the new year with a plan.

Now for some details about the first book. The working title right now is THE RIVER MAIDEN. Here's a working cover. 

And here's the pitch:

Raised by her Scottish Grandmother in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Sarah MacAlpin grew up with one foot in the old world and one foot in the new world. She's worked hard to get to where she is and at 25 she's got her life planned out, that is until she meets Dermot Sinclair.

Plagued by nightmares of a tragic past and murky visions of the future Sarah pushes on toward finishing her dissertation. In spite of her hard work and planning the world around her seems to be spinning out of control. Her relationships with her boyfriend and her best friend are falling apart and the new guy in town seems to be dogging her every step. He's friendly enough and can help with her research, but she can't help thinking there's something that he isn't telling her.

If you're interested in reading further. There is a large chunk of the book available to read on Authonomy. If you read it there, please leave feedback. It will only help me. If you're interested in being a beta reader (kind of like a beta tester for software) and getting to read the whole thing once the edits are done (naturally in exchange for your feedback), please let me know in the comments here or through my Facebook page.

Thanks as always.

I hope you all will have as exciting a new year as I expect to.

So, what's your book about?

The picture you're looking at is a picture of the complete first draft of my first novel. It's in need of some serious editing, as any first draft should be, but it's done. I actually managed to put all the action that's been going on in my head onto paper.

I know you're probably thinking, 'Wow, big deal. We all write books. Hell those NaNoWriMo people do it in a month." And maybe you're right. But, have been working on this book off and on since shortly after I married my husband. In the time that it's taken me to get this plot out of my head I have;

• had two babies
• changed jobs three times
• been laid off TWICE (1 company went out of business, 1 eliminated my department)
• bought a house
• started a small business
• survived postpartum depression
• wrote and self-pubbed two short ebooks
• and beat myself up about eighty gazillion times for not finishing the book sooner

It finally took my younger child going to school to give me enough hours in the day to actually move the needle on this thing more than a millimeter at a time.  Once I was able to treat it like a job, albeit a part time one, it only took me a little over a month to fill in the blanks on this outline I've been toting around for the last year or so. And now, I've finally done it. Now my head is filled with visions of possible covers and book trailers and marketing plans.

"So, what's your book about?"

I confess I am frequently flummoxed by this question. Seeing as I've lived with these characters in my head for over a decade, I really should be able to sum it up easily. But if I say what the whole series is about, then I'd give away some major spoilers. If I say what inspired it, that would probably just be confusing to people who aren't Scotia-phile  genealogy folklore and politics nerds like me. That would also totally skip over the spiritual aspects of the journey that the main character is on. If I described it from that purely academic standpoint, you would never get that at it's heart it's a romance but not the kind that most people think of when they hear romance. There's a mystery, but it's not a mystery. There's paranormal stuff and some romance, but it's not a paranormal romance (No vampires or werewolves. I promise). There's danger, but I don't know that I'd call it a thriller. There's a love story...sort of.

Clearly, if I'm ever going to market this thing, I'm going to have to get a lot better at the 30 second elevator speech. I'm hoping that the editing/rewriting process will help clarify things. And I might want to settle on a title.

In the meantime, you can find some excerpts here.

Don't Fear the Rewrite

About ten years ago (yes really, that long ago) I got the idea for the novel that I'm currently working on. It came in the form of a prologue. I know prologues are out of vogue, but I've checked and rechecked my reasons for having one, and I'm definitely sure it's the way to go. I wrote the prologue and was pretty happy with it. In the intervening years, I have outlined and written about half the book, other short stories, researched, had a career in corporate training, had two children, bought a house, sold a house, and generally lived a life. All of those things have contributed to my maturing as a writer. So, last year when I picked the novel up again after a hiatus, I read the prologue and was thoroughly unhappy. It meandered through the heads of the characters involved without direction. The descriptions were overblown and some of the dialog was down right syrupy. In the years since I wrote the original prologue, the characters have become clearer in my mind. I have even outlined a whole series of books with these characters. Two of them in particular aren't alive, during the main story line, so the prologue is the first of just a few places that the reader will be able to get their perspectives. The prologue should focus on them, and its original edition did not.

My years of writing training materials as a corporate trainer have conditioned me to write to an outline. It also got me used to working to a deadline, which I always managed to by keeping to an "always moving forward" way of working. If I get stuck on something, I move to something else until my mental block clears itself, or I find the information I need to finish. That's also why I always have multiple projects going. I'm always moving forward on one of them. So with that in mind, I was loath to spend valuable time going back and completely rewriting something that I had checked off my novel writing to do list. I told myself that I just had to get the rest out before I could go back and rewrite the prologue.

The trouble is, I floundered somewhere around chapter 9. As I was writing the rest of the story, the characters and events included in the prologue solidified in my mind more and more. I seemed to lose my way with the rest of the plot. I couldn't stop thinking about that prologue and how important is was to tell that story well before I could get the rest of it right. I finally had to bite the bullet and rewrite the darned thing. That's just what I've spent my few hours of true writing time for the last week or so doing, and I couldn't be more pleased.

What was unfocused and immature, is now true to the characters whose stories need to be told there. It has depth and subtext and foreshadowing that suggests where the overall series in addition to that novel will go. It doesn't reveal too much, but gives the right amount of characterization and a tantalizing glimpse of the heroine's back story. And best of all the writing doesn't make me want to hurl my iPad across the room as the original version did. It also has the added benefit of making me feel so much more focused about moving forward. I know some things in my outline need to be changed, what needs to be added and taken out. Rewriting took extra time that I could used to advance the plot, but it's also helped me refocus. Now, when I advance the plot I know I'll be moving in the right direction.