Upstream Updates 2020: June

Life Stuff

Summer is here, and I can't believe it! This month hasn't been as "busy" as others, but it's definitely flown by! Outside of writing and reading, I've gained a new nephew (and he's just cute as a button!), started harvesting the blueberries growing on the 6-foot-tall bushes in our backyard, since they're just becoming ripe, and finished off the weirdest school year ever--participating in at least one staff parade and two different video montages! I miss interacting with the kids, though... But in light of how much things changed over the last few months, I can only wonder how much different it will be by the time school returns in September!

Monthly Stats:
Words Written: 30,000 (and still climbing!)
Books Read: 5/5

Writing

The Last Inkweaver

Woot! I've successfully gotten through the irksome "beginning" and I have moved on to copy/pasting whole chapters from Draft 2 onto Draft 3! All told, I have added about four chapters' worth of information, I was able to reinforce Callista's relationship with her parents, and made her a more intentional character in the story, an active participant that makes choices that affect the events of the narrative, instead of one who finds herself shoved into events already in full swing.

Now, even though I'm copy/pasting, I still have to be careful of the way I have written these Draft 2 pieces--the difficulty in not writing it all over again (I will not! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!) is that I need to be careful about the way that I've written the characters.

Take Terra, for example. Since I added the plot point of a reported investigation into "possession of contraband items" on her family, I've turned her from a flighty, oblivious ditz who gets excited about doing the wrong things, to giving her a reason to resent the established norms, and a purpose in trying to pursue a "mission" into finding out about the Wordspinners--a people group she sees as a means of escape, a people who are "free" in a way that she wants to be. She's not likely to want to get back to going to Gramble City and the Finishing School, as much as Callista is, because that system just wants to conform her to their standards of what is "proper." She's thrilled at the prospect of digging beyond the face-value of things and finding out information and people that these authorities profess to seek out, but have been unable to find.

More and more, I'm excited with the success of the Notecard method I'm using. It's definitely helped me keep events moving in the right order, and with every notecard I can add to the "done" stack, I know I'm getting closer and closer to the end of a fresh, excellent draft!

Princess of Undersea: Revised Edition

The revised edition is off to the formatter's, and we're working on redesigning the cover! I commissioned some artwork from a local artist, and the result was AMAZING!! Stay tuned for a cover reveal sometime in the next month. Hopefully, if I can figure out what I need to do and get things lined up, I'll be ready to re-release in September--and I can say with reasonable confidence, a series is coming! In fact, just the other day I sat down and wrote out a climactic scene that I'm super-excited for in Book 2, and it felt really good!

I also got inspired to sit down and write fresh blurbs for all 4 books! Like this one, for the new-and-improved Princess of Undersea:

Deep under the water, Mermaid princess Ylaine has only ever wanted one thing: her father’s recognition and approval. King Davor of Undersea, however, is obsessed with launching a war against the ignorant, pact-breaking humans. Ylaine believes that if she can convince her father that not all humans are evil, he might listen to her, and call off his plans for war. Such a thing has been impossible, till the day he willingly trades a most precious gift to have the thing that she hopes will help her make peace between the realms: magic that transforms her into a human.

Safe in the palace of Overcliff, Prince Nathan seeks his own comfort, and dreads the day when the people of his failing kingdom will depend on him for their well-being. His father, King Theodore, remains distant and forgetful, while the Royal Council runs things—and as far as the Prince is concerned, he is free to continue doing as he likes. When a mysterious stranger arrives on the island, he begins to realize that all is not as it seems—and threats can come just as easily from across the sea as under it.

Ylaine’s reckless daring soon thrusts her right into the middle of a scheme more diabolical than she ever imagined. She has three days to find a way to make the Prince take notice and find the strength to lead his people, all without divulging her secret—or both their realms will be doomed forever.

For those who have read the book already--does the new blurb still feel relevant to the actual story? Even with the changes I made, the story itself is roughly 80% the same. There were just some interactions that never felt quite right, that I was able to change and improve--and also the addition of the short stories I think makes a huge difference!

If you haven't read the book: Does this spark your interest? I really hope it does!

I felt like the first blurb did more to highlight the "romantic involvement" side of the whole thing, which I was at first trying to circumvent--and the revisions helped me succeed even more in making their story less about the "falling in love" part and more about the "becoming good leaders and stopping a power-hungry villain" side of things. It's less of a "light and fun fairy tale" and more of a "inspiring fantasy" tale.

Anthology Submissions

Myths and Monsters has been out for nearly a month! Have you read it yet? It's still 99 cents--and when you do read it, please review! I'm really anxious to know what people think of "The Water-Man."

Meanwhile, I finalized the edits for Warping the Tapestry, the second anthology from the Tapestry Group. (Our first anthology was Cracks in The Tapestry) As soon as we have a cover, I'm only too thrilled to share it with you! I think you're really going to like the stories we've cooked up--especially "Finding Her Niche." It's not your ordinary superhero story!

Blog Serials: Priscilla Sum is nearing its end!

And it's about freaking time, am I right? Here's the thing, I've been working on this since January, and it's only now that I've gotten to the part of the story that inspired the whole thing!

Just to give you a picture of what shenanigans I go through for this story: I have used Google Translate for pretty much all the Greek phrases and words I've used thus far. In this last installment, the team finds an inscription on a cave wall that may or may not give directions on how to get to the inner temple they've been seeking. The only problem is, the inscription is all mixed up, so taking it at face value doesn't net any words. They have to sit down and figure out how to get the letters in the right order, before they can then move to translating what the inscription actually says.

That's what I wrote, anyway. It's one thing to write about a coded message; it's quite another to actually do the encoding myself. Oh yeah. Because I wanted to give readers a sense of what these kids were up against, I did that whole thing in reverse.

Step 1, I decided what I wanted the resulting inscription to say.

Step 2, I put it into Google Translate and swapped it back and forth to make sure the meaning stayed consistent. There is honestly nothing more damning than running a phrase through a translation software and it coming out the other side completely botched and you don't know because you didn't check. Well, that wasn't going to be me, so I checked and re-checked to make sure it still worked.

Step 3, Now that I had the finished inscription in Greek... I had to mix up the letters in exactly the way I described in the narrative, making sure each symbol was in the correct position so that the solution would produce the inscription. And, digital keyboards being what they are, unfortunately I couldn't just type things out, or even copy and paste... NO. I had to draw myself a grid, parcel out each letter in order, and then click each individual letter to place it correctly.

The result? Pretty dang legit, if you ask me! (Here's the link, I'll let you decide: "Priscilla Sum" Part 20)

Finally, I've gotten everybody down into the tunnel system that supposedly leads to the inner temple somewhere on the island. Finally, Pris is starting to get the picture that there is something not quite right about one of the members of their team--never mind the fact that she's convinced that the demon going after her parents just might be possessing somebody in the camp. Finally, I can start putting things in motion that will bring about the big climactic battle! FINALLY!

If everything cooperates, I should be done with it by about mid-August--we'll just have to see whether I can ride this momentum I've found and get the rest of the serial completed without needing to post it right away, or whether I'll end up needing to write really fast to get the first post of Clan of Outcasts, Season 3 written in time to post that when Priscilla Sum is done!

Wattpad

I've managed to get back in the habit of updating on Wednesdays again! Unfortunately, I've had to put Once Upon Love on hold, since I'm at a part in the story that REEEALLLYYY needs rewriting, and I just don't have the bandwidth to do that right now.

The "Return" of MacPherson is winding down--not that very many people are interested... But just last week I was able to add another chapter to Flashes of Inspiration, (since I have at least two new pieces that I've posted on the blog just this year) and I started posting Red, The Wolf on Wattpad, so you can read it on there, if you like my fairy tale twists!
(Speaking of which... there are more of said "fairy tale twists" coming as sequels to Princess of Undersea, so I can't wait to reveal what those are as they come out!)

I do have a question, for those who have Wattpad and follow me on there: Would it be helpful if I had a "How to Read My Stuff" guide? Like, just a quick read-through listing all the titles I have there, and roughly what categories they belong in, so you can know, "Okay, so The Day of Reckoning is a long one, and The Telmar Trilogy is a 3-book fanfiction, but if I want short reads of multiple genres then I should read a Suggestion Box or Flashes of Inspiration..." Would that be helpful?

Reading

And now we get to the tough part of the blog post of updates...

I'll be frank with you, I pretty much read all the quick stuff in April and May. That meant that the titles left for June were the really long ones, and frankly I've been pining after being able to go to the library.

HALLELUJAH, the wait is over!! Just this week, libraries opened up for "No-Contact Hold Pickups" so I can start placing holds again and getting some fresh titles!

But there are still some titles I want to read at least before I do that. The two indie "featured review" books allotted for this month were Excelsior by George Sirois and Anamatus by Derrick Tribble. The first one went pretty fast, since it was an ebook, and the second... it's a physical book, it's kind of small type... and the first 100 pages or so went really slow, making it hard to get into. Hence, I am only about halfway through it, but at least now it's getting quite a bit more interesting--we've left the realm of "the part of the story addressed in the blurb" and I'm finding it a lot more interesting with more characters to learn about and whatnot!

In slightly-less-interesting news, I finally made it to the end of The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks and it was every bit as sluggish and confusing at the end as it had been at the beginning. Like a "discount Lord of the Rings" but with half the solid lore foundation and virtually no characters who were truly interesting at all... despite the author's constant insistence throughout the narrative as to which characters the reader ought to find interesting... None of them were, sorry.

I did finally get so desperate to read something new earlier this month that I pulled out my copy of Bedknob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, which I had pulled out of the "FREE" box at the last library book sale I went to (wayyy back in January, can you believe it???) and finished it in like two days.

I'm also reading The Fallen by David Baldacci, which is the fourth book in his Amos Decker series. I really like Decker as a character. He's got a fascinating dynamic, and I can really get behind the people interacting with them, the mysteries he encounters always tend to be on the more complex side, because it relies heavily on his perfect memory... which is, at the point I am in the book, kind of failing him a little, so he's having to deal with that on top of solving the case he's already on.

Goodreads is telling me I'm still behind in my challenge... but I think if I just manage to read before bed these last few days of June, I can finish the books I'm reading before the month is out, and be back on track for July!

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So that's where I'm at with everything so far... I've got some exciting things coming in July, so be sure and check back in regularly so you don't miss anything! I'd love to hear from you! There are some questions I asked this month that could really use some feedback--about the "Wattpad Reader Guide" and about the new-and-improved Princess of Undersea blurb. If you could comment with your thoughts below on those things, that would be great! As always....

Catch You Further Upstream!