Saturday, April 14, 2018

Upstream Updates: April Edition!


It's been a few weeks, but so much has happened since then!


The Starborn Legacy

To begin with, I am just about to put the second round (and hopefully the last!) of edits on my short story for the upcoming anthology! I am super-excited about this, more so because when I got the first edits back last week, there were a lot of changes and tweaks made, and I feel like every one of them has made the story even better than the first time I wrote it! It's a great story by now, and I can't wait to see it in print!



The Dragon's Mark
 
Next on the Short Story Docket, the "Cinderella + Dragons" story I wanted to write was just not coming for me... I even had a mock cover and everything, and so many potential plots, you would think I would just be rolling in the words by now.... but no! Not even the advice and aid of the people who volunteered input would help make the words go like I wanted them to... Discouragement was imminent...
Then a friend happened to mention the epic plot I had come up with for "The Legend of The Ecrivaine", which, as some of you might know, was the theme for the second "volume of The Suggestion Box series. All of a sudden, in the midst of struggling to come up with something entirely new, I realized that I could just as easily re-purpose an old plot, the same way I did for "The Starborn Legacy." All of a sudden, the plot unfurled, my muse decided to cooperate, and I am pretty sure I can get something slammed out by May, just like I wanted!

Speaking of "getting things slammed out.....

The Last Inkweaver


Huzzah! We now have 12 chapters, I'm finally OVER 50,000 WORDS (which, okay, I know I supposedly had back in November, in order to "win" NaNoWriMo, but in reality, about half of my winning word count was just the notes I had drawn up for it, not so much the actual story... but now that is not the case!) and the beauty of it is... I just compared where in the story I'm at in Draft 2 with where I had reached by 50K in Draft 1... and there's SO MUCH more story there, even as I'm going SO MUCH slower through the actual events of the plot! I know it's exceptionally wordy at the beginning, and it probably still is even at this point, but the fact that I was able to expand and expound, go farther and deeper with the characters is a massive encouragement, and I can't wait to see how many other changes unfold as I keep writing! For now, Callista, Terra, and Rowinna have survived an encounter with "Blackrope", a mysterious black vine with the viscosity of pitch, that seems to have a mind of its own and tends to spread all over everything... They have effectually joined forces with Matthias, who promptly took over as "the man of the group" and is leading them to Aberon... which, for those of you who followed Draft 1, you know doesn't turn out very well... Exciting times!


Other Goals: Word Count Tracking and Reading

Also new this month, is keeping track of my writing with a site called WordKeeperAlpha.com. It's been absolutely fantastic! I can log words, and the graph shows up in pretty, customized colors, different for each project I'm working on... it's a great tool to have, and I'm pleased with all I've been able to do with it; even the "uncategorized" writing counts, and I'm getting the hang of all the writing that I actually do in a week or a month!

As far as reading goes... The next indie book I'm reading to feature is Fire's Song by J. E. Mueller; I've also been back to the library a couple times, picked up and read Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, got the next book in Sue Grafton's "ABC Mysteries" series, featuring Kinsey Millhone (Letter S! I'm nearly done with the alphabet!) and also picked up Veronica Roth's Carve The Mark. I'm curious to see how well she does outside the Divergent series.

How about you? What have you been up to this month? Let me know in the comments!

Catch You Further Upstream!

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