Upstream Updates: October 2019!

Life Stuff

Happy Birthday To Me!!

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."

Not yet the thumbnail for the serial,
I just put it together for this post!

 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!)

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!

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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!