Upstream Updates 2020: December

Life Stuff

I can't believe all that has happened this year! From buying my first car, to getting stuck at home when the pandemic shut the world down, to celebrating the arrival of TWO nephews (different sisters, one in May and one at the beginning of this month), to getting furloughed for about two months after the start of the new school year (and then getting recalled to full time after the initial "soft recall"--to say nothing of all the stuff that went down in my writing escapades! This year was absolutely full of it, let me just say!

Monthly Stats:
Words Written: 33K+
Books Read: 4/4 (I made the goal!! To bad I was already behind...)

BUT THEN....

2020 Stats:
Total Words Written: 394K (Oh my goodness, almost 400K! But at the very least, I started and maintained the habit of writing at least 30K a month, which is NOT something I had been able to do before!)
Total Books Read: 43 (not quite 50, but close!)

Writing Milestones

Blog hop of 2020: The Bookish Spring Blog Hop

For as many blog hops as I did last year, who knew that the Bookish Spring Blog Hop would be the only one? I didn't! But it was fun, anyway, and worth revisiting! Here's to next year, and hopefully the chance to do more hops!

Anthology of 2020: Myths and Monsters

The year began with a limited-run, mythology-themed anthology to which I submitted my "formerly Wattpad-exclusive" fantasy tale "The Water-Man"--greatly improved from that first draft, might I add! This was my second limited-run anthology, and it came off pretty well! (If you are interested in reading "The Water-Man" yourself, you can find a link to it under the Wattpad Works tab!)

The interesting thing about the whole anthology-submission process was the fact that for Myths and Monsters, I was going to submit "Priscilla Sum" as my story--of course, it was nowhere near where I wanted it to be by the time the deadline approached, and we all know (since it took the bulk of this year!) that there would have been no possible way I could have ever gotten it down short enough to fit within the word-count limits... so that was all well and good! The great thing, too, was that it gave me the opportunity to actually do something with a story that I originally wrote thinking it was never going to leave Wattpad till I was a seasoned author and could definitely publish it myself! I never thought of changing it up, doing it differently--but the suggestions coming from a seasoned beta-reader were so thoughtful and excellent that I am very glad I did that!

WIPs-Of-The-Year!

Back in January, of course, I was sure that The Last Inkweaver was going to be my foray into self-publishing, I'd chalked Princess of Undersea up to a "valiant first effort", but not much in the way of continuing--I just had no idea what was possible for that! I had just gotten Inkweaver back from a hired editor, after all, and her input led me to make some pretty dramatic changes (and also introduced me to a method of tracking those changes--the Notecard Method--that I found to be highly effective!) Then, also, I had really pushed myself to develop "Priscilla Sum" because I thought I was going to finish it and be ready to submit it in four months, so those were the main two projects I thought I was going to be focusing on...

2020, man... what a year for upsetting people's focus!

By February, I had begun talking with both the PR guy who offered to promote me (and my then-defunct--more or less--book) around in his vast network of indie author promoters, and also the guy who published Princess of Undersea in the first place... by March we had all decided that the best course of action was to start the ball rolling for a re-publishing, re-vamp--of course, that severely limited what Mr. PR-Guy could work with, since I was now an author without a book... But things started happening and it was at that moment that I really began to come to grips with the fact that The Last Inkweaver probably would need to be Shelved for the foreseeable future. (Note that I said "Shelved" as in "placed a bit lower in the docket of projects I want to get to at some point", not just "shelved" as in "abandoned forever"--have you seen The Shelf yet?)

This whole time, I was doing my best to get "Priscilla Sum" written, with so many plot changes and scenes morphing that what I originally thought was going to be seventeen installments of decent length ended up a thirty-three-part behemoth ranging in chapter size from "modest" to "whole entire short story"! I did finish it though... Eight months later.
But that wasn't all! In June, after the release of Myths and Monsters, I started afresh with a new short story for yet another anthology (coming early 2021, I believe!)--this time, I couldn't just "spiff up" an old tale, because the theme needed to be sci-fi, and I, as most of you know, write mostly fantasy. But thanks to the "Flashes of Inspiration" series, I actually had the start of something that I really felt like I could work with--and hence "Finding Her Niche" happened fairly quickly, and definitely in time for the deadline!

The fourth WIP this year, which is still ongoing, is "Season 3" of The Clan Of Outcasts! What, you thought they were done once Jaran and Beren were back in the castle, and they'd all sent Troy back to where he belonged in the dungeons of Justicia? So did I. But my "mental muse" was particularly antsy this year, and once I started thinking about these characters and a bunch of new characters, I couldn't stop--and so Season 3 started off with characters all over the place! This is going to be massive, people--I just hope I'm writing for a bunch of readers who really dig this kind of stuff, not just throwing all this creative energy into the massless and unfeeling void.

But anyhow, the biggest change of the year by far would have to be....

Launching The Undersea Saga

It was something that definitely bothered me about the "reviewer tribute story" I wrote a couple years after publishing--sure, there were enough "additional character slots" to invent a role for the eight people who had reviewed my book--but in the process, I did a few things and made a few changes... included a few character cameos that shouldn't have happened, with the way that Princess of Undersea came out. Well, then I started considering the idea of leaving things open to maybe have the possibility of a sequel, if I found myself in a place where I could do that sort of thing. I already knew that it would entirely be possible to use the story of "Pinocchio" as my inspiration--not a full-on re-telling like Princess of Undersea was, but more or less something similar to that. I knew it was going to be set in Crossway, hence the title could end with "of Crossway", just like the title for the first book--and that's how I ended up with Fugitive of Crossway.
Of course, then that led to me not being too incredibly excited about having a duology where the second book didn't really involve the characters from the first book... So then I started thinking about how I could bring the tale back to focusing on Ylaine and Nathan and the rest--and that's when I came up with a potential re-telling of "Snow White"--but instead of a jealous queen wanting to get rid of her stepdaughter the princess because of her beauty, I could tie it into the story I'd already established, of the proposed mermaid heir to the throne of Undersea falling under the influence of someone who had been jilted by the royal family of Undersea at sometime in the past, and getting lured into getting rid of the young Queen of Overcliff because of jealousy over her influential position, and just about everything in that idea was going to work--I just needed a third book to round out the series. Luckily, one of the side characters I had come up with for the "tribute story" introduced the potential of a fourth region, Outwest, which would be the only region named ironically on purpose. Fun Fact: "Undersea", "Overcliff", and "Crossway" were all originally intended as place-holders till I could come up with something else; "Undersea" was under the sea; "Overcliff" was over the cliff; and "Crossway" was named thus because it was across the way from the main island kingdom; but "Outwest" I envisioned as this wide expanse of sparsely-settled land, much like the Australian Outback--the ironic part was that I was calling it "Outwest" to call back to the "Wild Western" days of American history... but the region of "Outwest" is actually situated to the east of Crossway. So I had someone I could use as a main character for a fourth re-telling, I had a setting... and, lo and behold, I came across an old idea I had to write a re-telling of "Aladdin" but make it steampunk--which, as many people know, is roughly the same time period as the American Old West. So now instead of steampunk, the "Aladdin" story is going to take on a more Western feel (although I could still "steampunk" it up!) and I've got many ideas of how I'm going to pull that off!

Not the least of which is the concept of Fairies in the Undersea Saga, which was something I originally threw in to give a plausible origin for the magic that was going on, like with Ylaine's voice, and the magic spells that her godmother knows--but although I threw in a brief discussion about the fact that there were three types of fairies: Air, Water, and Land--I really only dealt with two of them. According to the way things shake down in Princess of Undersea, the Air-Fairies are the ones who can bestow magical Gifts upon either humans or Merfolk, like the Gift of Song Ylaine has; the Water-Fairy magic is more the hands-on sort of stuff, like potions, charms, and spells, and that can easily be taught and trained from one person to another; but what does that leave for the Land-Fairies?

WELL.... I had an excellent idea when I was coming up for the concepts to include in the "Aladdin" re-telling... and then I figured out a way to kind of drop even more hints in one of the tie-in short stories that I'll be including with Fugitive of Crossway--Fun fact: Just like the "Tales from Undersea" I had in Princess of Undersea, each book is going to have two or three tie-in stories that either provide background information, or is just a really fun side story set in whichever region is featured in that story. So the book Fugitive of Crossway is going to include "Tales from Crossway," and so on. So keep a weather eye out! I may or may not actually have any fairies at all in any of the books, but their influence is definitely about to get a whole lot bigger as the series moves on! Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, launching the series has given me the opportunity to turn the page originally reserved for *only* Princess of Undersea into a page where you can find links to everything to do with the whole Undersea Saga: this includes first-draft excerpts, interviews and blog posts sorted according to whether it was for the first edition, or the second one... links to read-alouds and interviews (to which I'll be adding a few more in the weeks to come, so feel free to keep that on your radar!) and even the short stories!

Wattpad

I have done quite well with adding to Wattpad this year as well! A total of seven stories completed this year, with about three of those being ones that I started near the end (or in the middle of) 2019, and the other four being ones that I started here in 2020.

The oldest one was Once Upon Love, a contemporary college romance re-telling of Edmund Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Ever since I studied the play back in high school, I've wanted to do an adaptation of it--if only to change the ending from a tragedy to more of a rom-com type deal. I also ended up trying to rectify the notion of Cyrano being so much older than Roxane by allowing the two characters to at least be a little closer in age (like, he's almost done with his second Master's degree, while she's still working through her second year of a Bachelor's degree). I actually abandoned it after the first couple chapters because I'd written the whole thing as a teenager with no idea what college life (or even "adult" life!) was actually like, and now-adult-me was cringing at the wild inaccuracies and assumptions that teen-me had made! I had stopped for a good long while, but then back in March, I received a notification that someone had actually commented on the story! If only for the sake of that one person, I went through the task of rewriting at least a few of the parts that were the most out-of-date, and wound up finishing it out!

A Writer's Tale #3: The Sheriff's Showdown I completed posting, intending to write and start posting the next book in the series (this was still before things went sideways and I ended up abandoning pretty much all other projects to focus on launching The Undersea Saga) but obviously that didn't happen... I don't think I even got anywhere close to returning to this series all year, in spite of still managing to write about 30K per month, after March!

Then there was the rest of The Prince And The Rose, which I started posting after the popularity of The Dragon's Mark. Once I finished that, I went ahead and started posting Red, The Wolf. 

The two fanfictions I posted this year started with The "Return" Of MacPherson, actually the first genuine fanisode I ever wrote, which involved turning a very old unpublished story of mine (It's on The Shelf, titled Fairies Under Glass, if you want to read the few excerpts I've posted on this blog!) into canon for the show Warehouse 13. 

After a whole lot of hemming and hawing, I also decided to post Poor, Unfortunate Soul, the Once Upon A Time fanfiction that became Princess of Undersea. (Talk about "first drafts"!) 

The one that I started this year that's still in progress is Priscilla Sum--the tale of a college student who goes on an archaeological field trip and finds out for certain that her adoptive parents are secretly immortal deities over an ancient Greek sect... If you want to read any of these, just follow the hyperlinks and they'll take you right to the stories!

So there you have it! A look back on my year of writing! If you want to see a recap of each month, you can click each hyperlink below:

January <> February <> March/April <> May <> June <> July <> August <> September <> October <> November

What's in store for 2021? That's coming in another post! What was your greatest accomplishment of 2020? What are you most looking forward to in 2021? Let me know in the comments! Meanwhile....

Catch You Further Upstream!