Life Stuff
Yes, it happened
to be my birthday last week, and I found lots of ways to celebrate:
hanging out with friends, meeting my sisters for coffee and breakfast, taking a
long, luxurious bath with a
real bath bomb (now that was fun!), and of course, reading and
writing a whole lot!
ALSO... You might notice that The Upstream Writer has had a bit of a facelift! Yeah, I decided to change the fonts a little--what do you think? You like these, or should I choose something else? Let me know!
I
have a lot to update you on, so sit tight and enjoy all the fun
things I have in store!
Writing
The
Last Inkweaver
YUSS
I am officially finished! I know I celebrated this very thing once
already, several years ago--but there's just something infinitely
more satisfying about this time around. Maybe it's the fact that I
changed things around and made it work
(as far as I can tell) so much better than it did before--now I just
need to hear from beta readers who would be able to tell me whether
or not the new plot actually holds water. I'm not sure if it still
needs a third total rewrite, or if I am good with what I have, just
needs some tweaking here and there. It is by no means immaculate, I
know there were some parts I wasn't shy about slamming more words
than necessary into the scene--I just need to know if it still works,
or how else I could say what needs to be said and cut out the extra
stuff that's not needed. Who knows? Might not happen before next
spring, but I'm definitely going to do my best to get this out there!
(I just hope it doesn't take me another two or three years to write
each of the next three books in the series!) If you're interested in becoming a beta reader, just leave me a post on my Facebook Author Page!
Anthology
Release
At
the end of September, the Dreamtime Fantasy Authors (the same group
who brought you Dreamtime Dragons... and
yes, I'm still a part of it!) released a second anthology, this one
called Dreamtime Damsels and Fatal Femmes.
The theme was, of course, strong women who "save themselves",
and it was for this theme that I cooked up the story that has now
become a series on my blog, "Red, The Wolf." It became
apparent when I was first writing it to submit that the full
plot line was going to be far
too long for the short story, not like my story "Arthur and The Egg", written for Dreamtime Dragons,
where I started it on the blog and then finished it for the
anthology... no. It was a big plan, and not even just cutting it off
at the beginning and promising the rest later was going to cut it. I
ended up writing a slightly altered and "abridged" version,
if you will, for the anthology... So you'll have to read there if
you're curious how it might have ended,
after reading what all I have in store for poor Red here on the blog!
I would also highly recommend the anthology for the sake of the other
stories involved... If you're the least bit curious, and this is the
first you've heard about this production, feel free to check out all
the >SNEAK PEEKS< and >FUN FACTS LISTS< I posted over the
month of September.
New
Anthology Submission
Boy,
I just never stop, do I? No, writing short stories is just too
much fun, and yet another
anthology group I've been published with, The Tapestry Group (my
story "Heartsong" was included in their anthology Cracks in The Tapestry), is also
looking to publish a second volume of stories, this one more of a
sci-fi theme. For once, I
didn't actually have a story ready and in-hand to offer, so I took
one of the Flashes of Inspiration series
(specifically the one called "The Legacy of Heroes") and
tweaked it and rewrote it--actually made it longer,
instead of having to cut it down--and ended up with a truly smashing
piece that was well within the
word count limit! A first! I called my story "Finding Her
Niche." Not sure if this one is going to be a winter release, or
a spring one... but as more details develop, I will be sure to pass
them onto you, my readers!
Blog
Serials Return!
Next up on my list of "current projects" is the return of not just one but two blog series that I started earlier and didn't get very far on!
The
first is, of course, "Red, The Wolf" that I mentioned
before. I tweaked a few parts, and as of last Saturday, we've
officially entered the part of the story that's completely
different than the "abridged
anthology version"! Instead of driving the peddler off the
mountain, Red ends up giving chase to the white wolf who has
repeatedly terrorized the small village--she can't help noticing that
it "attacks" at regular intervals, and doesn't seem
threatened by the humans... Certainly this wolf doesn't consider
Queston his "territory", as Red has claimed it for several
years now. When will it end?
The
second series that made a return, now that I'm supposed to
be getting ready for NaNoWriMo, is "The Prince and The Rose",
my re-telling of "Beauty and The Beast."
For those who
hadn't heard of it yet, I started the short story on a whim, after
seeing a pretty inspiring picture, as a means of providing a new
"backstory" for the original Disney film, filling in the
gaping plot hole that wasn't wholly addressed--namely that the prince
might have actually been very young when "cursed"...
Then after I'd written just that one scene, I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to write a version of Beauty and the Beast where the Beast Prince actually learns his lesson and is actually quite penitent and gentle--while the "beauty" who is supposed to fall in love with him ends up being more of an "ugly stepsister" type, vain, selfish, arrogant, and absolutely disinterested in having anything to do with her monstrous host? I got about halfway through the story a while ago, and put it on hold to focus on other things... but it's my goal to at least finish it in the next week or so. (or else I might have that as a secondary project, working on it into the beginning of NaNo!)
Not yet the thumbnail for the serial, I just put it together for this post! |
Then after I'd written just that one scene, I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to write a version of Beauty and the Beast where the Beast Prince actually learns his lesson and is actually quite penitent and gentle--while the "beauty" who is supposed to fall in love with him ends up being more of an "ugly stepsister" type, vain, selfish, arrogant, and absolutely disinterested in having anything to do with her monstrous host? I got about halfway through the story a while ago, and put it on hold to focus on other things... but it's my goal to at least finish it in the next week or so. (or else I might have that as a secondary project, working on it into the beginning of NaNo!)
As
if that wasn't enough... I had a week where I was absolutely stalled
on both the fantasy
stories I wanted to finish... And guess what
made a miraculous comeback after being "dead" for OVER A
YEAR?? Yep! "Priscilla Sum" is coming to The Upstream
Writer once "Red, The Wolf" is done! I had been stymied on
it back in the day, and disappointed by the lack of interest, but it
came to me pretty easily and I finished out the scene that I'd been
working on. What is more, there was one plot aspect I hadn't been
very clear on, and that was a certain character with a terminal
disease. I hadn't been entirely sure what kind of disease to use, and
so when the time came to mention it in a conversation, I randomly
specified that it was a "blood disease" that required
regular transfusions, infusions of medication, and taking of pills,
but that it would still be almost certainly fatal. Of course, that
meant that I would actually need to have a specific disease
now, since the story was rapidly approaching the part where there
would be a hospital scene and my main character Pris would be so
desperate to save him that she would actually attempt to use an
ancient "healing crystal", even though she doesn't believe
in the supernatural. This leads to the release of the demon trapped
inside the crystal.... But anyway, one Google search of "terminal
blood diseases" yielded quite a few, and I found one that
exactly fit the parameters I needed:
it's treated with infusions and medication, closely monitored by
doctors, but it's so rare that there is no cure, and though the
treatments might keep it at bay for a time, it is definitely fatal.
The only detail that
doesn't work is that it affects men and women over 50, and this
particular character has supposedly had it for "most of his
life" and he's a college student... but I think it is
fudge-able, don't you? Anyway, so I have that to work on, too!
Coming
Soon: NaNoWriMo
Speaking
of NaNoWriMo.... November is upon us! Now that I've completed The
Last Inkweaver, I am looking to
finish up the A Writer's Tale series.
The first two novellas, The Dragon's Quest and
The Commander's Courage,
are complete and posted on Wattpad, and I'm about halfway through
book 3, The Sheriff's Showdown.
I'll be finishing that one, and (hopefully) writing the majority of
Book 4, The Corsair's Deception, over the month of November.
I'm still writing out the plan, but the benefit of using these
projects is that the basic plot is already written, I'm just
expanding and strengthening it, enriching it with more thorough
details about how it connects with the main character Laura, both in
her past (the original stories she wrote and abandoned that gave rise
to these various worlds) and what it means for her future (in the
lessons she learns about writing and storytelling while living
through these different adventures).
Laura is currently in a Wild Western town, facing the prospect of a
coup staged by the gang of bandits who live in the bluff and make a
sport out of defying the town's sheriffs and running them out of
town. In the next book, she'll be making the transition from Wild
West to a pirate ship, where she becomes the galley maid for a crew
led by a woman captain, and there will be some very narrow scrapes
and important lessons she'll learn there too. I think it's going to
be fun!
Wattpad
Just to update you on where my Wattpad stories are at:
I've added a never-before-seen installment to the Flashes of Inspiration collection on there, so if you liked it when I did
that series here on the blog, I highly suggest you hop over and check
out "The Traveler", a story I ended up splitting into two
parts. The origins were kind of unconventional: it started out as a
prompt from a friend asking "If you could spend a month inside
any book, which would you choose?" And in my twisted little
head, that turned into "But what if you couldn't choose
to travel into the book? What if you were cursed or something
to enter a book every so often, or else you would be randomly drawn
into any book being read by someone else? So you choose a book you
know by heart, and you deliberately choose parts of the book where
nothing much happens, so you can be in and out without risking your
life or disrupting the continuity of the book. AND THEN, what
if you ended up getting trapped in the book while you were in
there?" And so I wrote a few scenes of what that might look
like, mostly from the perspective of the fictional characters,
actually. I hope you do read it, and I hope you like it!
The second thing I did was I started posting my absolute
beginner's attempt at creating a modern adaptation of Edmund
Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac, which I titled "Once Upon Love." I always loved the witty
character, and the scrapes and escapades of thwarted love and
vicarious wooing--I just didn't like the tragedy part that means one
of the main characters dies at the end... and so I had a whole bevvy
of twists and ties and references to the original. THE PROBLEM
IS.... I was reading over it as I was preparing to post it... and
the dialogue is awful. I don't know what I was thinking. I
know it was early in my attempts at writing seriously--but I think I
wasn't altogether sure how to turn a theater play script into
a narrative novel. So the dialogue turned into something like
"pretty much the same as the archaic English of the original,
with some haphazard attempt at a CliffsNotes "translation"--so
much "halfway between" that I'm reading these lines
thinking "THAT IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK." Much less modern
people! The trouble with that is that, looking back at it now,
I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. I tried putting tweaks on the
first chapter, but I couldn't change much without disrupting the
whole "flow" of the conversations, which were flowery and
overblown to begin with! Grr... It's frustrating, but at least the
story has a few followers, from what I can tell, so I keep updating
it in spite of my best judgment... (*le sigh*)
Reading
Well!! I've managed to read a bit more over the last couple months
than I ever expected to! Especially with how full my days are now
that school is back in session (remember I work in an elementary
school? No worries; I didn't expect you to...) but I managed!
Since the last update, I've finished The Lost World by Michael Crichton--not quite as thrilling and novel as Jurassic
Park, but definitely building on the quasi-scientific principles
laid out in the first one!) and Pride by Ibi Zoboi--absolutely
everything I hoped it would be. Zoboi definitely did Austen
proud! From there I went to the library again and got a whole
bunch of very thick books! So... instead of reading the books
I actually own (which are still on my nightstand, don't
worry!) I plowed through Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds
by Brandon Sanderson (who'd have thunk it? Definitely didn't see
that one coming--but I enjoyed it very much!), Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (yay! Miss Peregrine's Peculiars! But.... oh heck,
there's NEW problems???), and Into The Water by Paula Hawkins.
(Not quite as screwy as The Girl on The Train, but every bit
as twisted and mystifying!). I also acquired and panned through A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. I got it because a) it was cheap,
and b) I had quite enjoyed the movie, in spite of bawling at a lot of
the scenes.... I wondered often whether the book was going to have
the same effect.
Answer: Yep. Very much yes. I barely grazed the scene in question and
I started choking up in less than a minute. So yeah, words are
very powerful when you have adequate visuals to go along with
them!
All that I have left on my nightstand are The Sentence is Death
by Anthony Horowitz (the sequel to his "self-insertion
extravaganza" The Word is Murder--Loved it very much, and
I have high hopes for this one) and Long Road To Mercy by
David Baldacci (new series, this time with a female protagonist at
the center--dear David please do not screw this up! He's done
good with female side characters before, but his main focus was
always still the male main character--this is going to be different,
and I hope in a good way!
As for ebooks, I completed the Firebird Fairy Tales trilogy by
Amy Kuivalainen with the rousing finish of Rise of The Firebird--epic and wonderful with every page! I moved on to
Desert Runner by Dawn Chapman, my first real dip into the wonderful and wacky
world of GameLit in a very long time--and I enjoyed it! My only
caveat was that the novella-length felt too short, ended too soon...
I might keep a weather eye out for the "boxset" of the
trilogy, and nab that as soon as I could, just so I can feel like
I've seen an entire story arc and not just one "campaign"
of the whole "game," if you get my drift.
I also read Starstruck by S. E. Anderson, a book I've been
curious about ever since I started following her page and saw little
tidbits about it... Then some of the other writerly people whose
opinions I trust were gushing about it, and I raised my hopes
even higher. Friends, it exceeded my expectations. The story
was everything I wanted it to be. Go back and read my review (click
on the hyperlinked title) and if any part of it sounds interesting,
definitely pick it up because you won't be sorry!
<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
Whew! I told you it was a lot... If you're still reading, I'd like to
say Thanks for supporting me and reading all of this and
coming back to my blog--it's people like you that make doing all of
this on my free time (outside of a full-time job) worthwhile!
As always....
Catch You Further Upstream!
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