Life Stuff
I'll just say it, getting sicker than you've ever been really sucks the life out of you! It eats up your time and your strength... Almost like being hooked up to The Machine!
2022 started with me and all the rest of my family coming down with Omicron in various stages. Mine started with intense fatigue and a sore throat in the second week of Winter Break, (so, right around Christmas/New Years) and by the time school started again, I was moving slow and short of breath, but at least the joint-buckling aches had gone away! I thought if I just walked slow everywhere, I could get by, but by the afternoon, my principal stopped me and sent me home to recuperate. Y'all, I spent the rest of the week doing everything I could to fight it: taking meds, resting, drinking tea (me, a non-tea-drinker, managed to develop a taste for Throat-Coat tea (with lots of mallow root and slippery elm), albeit with an inordinate amount of Starbucks Cinnamon Dulce creamer mixed into it! By the next week, I could breathe and I wasn't coughing much, so I returned to work victorious and hoped things would get back to normal.
The trouble was, being sick for so many weeks really slowed down my writing and reading habits... like, almost completely stopped any sort of motivation or momentum I had going. My plans to hit the year running with the second draft of Fugitive of Crossway? Pfft. I didn't feel like reading much, so it was taking a long time to finish ebooks and such.
Then, in March, I all but confirmed that I wasn't just "shedding because my hair was too long and it had been three years since my last good haircut"... I was actually losing hair from all over my scalp. Like, I could hardly run my fingers through my hair without pulling out a few hairs, even just shaking my hair, I could watch them float away down my arms. And when I got my hair wet? Yikes... Whole palm-fulls of hair. I went from having "fine, thick hair" to a scraggly mane of "barely enough hair for a ponytail" in about a month. I took to buying a bunch of wide cloth headbands and wearing them to hide my seriously janky hairline, as spots around my temples had thinned enough to see my scalp through the hairs that remained. It was an awful couple months of not seeing any improvement at all, and wondering how long I'd have to coddle my own scalp... It finally stopped actively falling out by the end of April, and by now, I can see small one-inch spikes of new hair growth poking up through the longer hairs, so that's encouraging, to say the least!
Suffice to say, I have not hit my monthly writing goal of 25K a month even once this year... At last count, I've only just barely cleared 60K, all told so far. It's dismal, but here's to a better and brighter second half!
Writing
Fugitive of Crossway
I'm just glad I was able to plunk out all my notes and get those finished up before things went sideways, because no matter how many days passed without any kind of motivation or energy to write, I knew I could always come back to it.
The toughest thing about second drafts, though, is figuring out what to keep, and what to add, and specifically how the small details need to change. I think the thing I'm running into with Fugitive is something I've expressed before, that this wasn't like Princess of Undersea, where it was a short story told in separate installments with certain details and transitions glossed over. It was much easier going back through the pieces I had for the fanfiction and adding and embellishing scenes to more fit a novel's storytelling style, than it is to now take what is essentially a novel and figure out how to cut things down to size so it doesn't feel like it's dragging or overblown!
With that being said, I think I probably won't make a big deal about how long it is anymore. I can't compare Book 1 and Book 2, when both are essentially telling enough of their own respective stories as it is. Perhaps Books 3 and 4 will end up a similar length to Book 2, and it will look more like I planned it this way all along!
At this point, I've only just finished Chapter 1, and the thing that I've changed is putting more things right after one another in the first scene. Rather than starting in the evening and overlapping into the next day, I just started in the morning and put everything into the same day, using the events themselves to pass the time, rather than telling a story like "and then Main Character went over here and did this", "and then Main Character went Over There and Did That." The difficulty came in trying to figure out how to work the secondary plot and make it more related to the first! One chief complaint from my "alpha reader" (my brother, who read the first few chapters of the first draft) is that Mellisande, my secondary Main Character is rather confusing and he has no idea why the two stories are connected, so at first it feels like gratuitous self-insertion. (Which, if I'm being honest, it kind of is... but I don't want that to be the whole summation of her character!) The thing is, her connection to Simon and the others isn't really revealed until like Chapter 7 or so, which means I am faced with the challenge of trying to make her relevant in the chapters building up to that. It took me about six different tries to come up with an opening that is as attention-grabbing as the very start of the book, but at long last, I figured it out, and was able to complete the chapter. So now it's on to Chapter 2, and beyond!
I'm really hoping I can get the rest of the draft done in these next couple months. I am desperate to have a second book on the market!
Fairies Under Glass
There have been quite a few changes from the very first time I wrote it. I went through a couple different choices with the name of my main character, just because I wanted it to fit more into the new style--so "Casey" became "Lewis", and the fairy character whose name had always been more of a placeholder "Sheerya", became "Ashwyn." The names that didn't change, however, are those of Krasimir Schlimme--the villain--and his bodyguard, Adolf. Those names are just so diabolical and fitting, nothing will ever induce me to change them.
I think the most interesting aspect about going back and rewriting a story I wrote so long ago is the fact that when I wrote it--I hadn't even graduated college yet! My concept for "Browning Academy" was definitely something I'd made up without any concept of how a formal education worked, I was just making things up based on what I'd read in books and such.
I think the most interesting aspect about going back and rewriting a story I wrote so long ago is the fact that when I wrote it--I hadn't even graduated college yet! My concept for "Browning Academy" was definitely something I'd made up without any concept of how a formal education worked, I was just making things up based on what I'd read in books and such.
Now, having worked in public schools for almost ten years, I feel like I am more able to infuse the story with some of my real-world experience. Sure, Browning Academy is really an odd institution with its closed campus and requirement for students to register for "work experience", but it's not completely outlandish. I think it also gave me the leeway I needed to give Lewis friends around him that he's meeting up with, or they're interrupting his day to hang out with him, so it's not just him all by himself with the fantasy folk.
I've nearly gotten to the point in the story where things are really going to go sideways (I suppose it would be the climax? I am trying to decide whether there is an actual point where everything in the story culminates before the actual ending... but that just goes to show the kind of stories I used to write when I first started!) and I've almost completed my notes for how the rest of the story is going to be revised in this serial... but if you haven't started it yet, now is as good a time as any!
Reading
In January I finished two books. Pendragon: Merchant of Death by D. J. MacHale, I wanted to be impressed with it, I was ready for a chaotic, fun adventure... but reading it kind of left me with the impression that it aimed for a reading audience much younger than what I was expecting. I mean, I know I'm not the age range for Middle Grade or Young Adult--but really, I have found selections of very good writing in spite of the target age range, and this... wasn't it. The narration felt very Middle-Grade-ish, but some of the events and scenarios felt more advanced, like it was directed more at Young Adult readers because it would be too intense or too graphic for Middle-Grade readers! I don't know. It just wasn't my thing. The other book was a Reader's Review featured read: Death Rites by E. A. Copen, and you can find my review of that title at the hyperlinked text.
Then in February, I only managed to finish one book, Archenemies by Marissa Meyer. It's the second book in her Renegades trilogy, and I really love what she's done with the story and the characters! I don't mind the romantic subplots she puts into her stories because the story is still compelling when you disregard it!
March, I believe I actually managed to get out to the library, so I had more new books to read, and more motivation to finish them! I read Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs, the next installment in the Miss Peregrine series, and I think a satisfying conclusion to this particular story arc (as I believe the next three books kind of put the characters on another arc, while this one had a lot of closure for the mysteries presented throughout). I really enjoyed how he developed the lore and concepts, and the way Riggs uses strange antique photos that would normally be discarded as "flawed" somehow, or just ended up poorly exposed, damaged, or just aged, and turns them into illustrations for the scenes he describes in his narrative is highly inventive and really lends a dose of realism to his urban fantasy world!
That was also the trip to the library when I discovered that Anthony Horowitz had written a sequel to Magpie Murders, called Moonflower Murders! It was a thick book, but I powered through it. I love the way he gives it all the feel of a classic Doyle or Christie whodunnit, even going so far as to include the fictional "novel" said to have contained clues to the mystery at hand in the actual book itself, so readers can go "direct to the source" themselves, and venture to solve the mystery along with the characters. Brilliant.
The two indie books I read in March were Argentum by Debbie Manber Kupfer and A Promise Due by Amy Hopkins. The former book came as somewhat of a surprise because it had been so long since I read the first book in the series that I kind of forgot that the tone was less "middle-grade" and more "Young adult" so some of the scenes were a little more graphic and intense than I anticipated! The latter, however, was just as delightful and enthralling as I wanted it to be--but for more specific impressions, you can click on the hyperlinked titles to read my featured Reader's Reviews.
April, I finished reading the library books with One By One by Ruth Ware, Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton, and Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. I've decided that I like Ware's style, she can really write a mystery! I thought I was reading the signs and following the clues, but the red herrings really got me this time around! Dragon Teeth was a bit of a departure from Crichton's signature "science fiction" and more along the lines of The Great Train Robbery in that he crafted a story around espionage, survival, and the human aspect of things, rather than science, technology, and speculation. Skyward was "Branderson" at his best, crafting a "City-of-Ember-esque" world where the society that lives underground is told certain things about the possibility of life on the surface that are supposed to keep them from going above, keep them in their prescribed roles for the benefit of the ruling class... until one plucky youngster (a girl this time) gives into her dissatisfaction and sets off to discover the truth... Some excellent, unique concepts at play here that I can't wait to read more of!
I only read one indie title in the month of April, and that was Danarko by Maxina Storibrook. You can read my official review by clicking the hyperlinked text.
Then in May, I didn't get out to the library for any more books, so the only other titles I read were two anthologies for which I wrote Reader's Reviews: Mythical Doorways which was an anthology by the Fellowship of Fantasy, and Cracks in The Tapestry, the anthology I participated in along with the Tapestry Group. Again, check out the hyperlinked titles for the full reviews.
As for what I'm currently reading, I'm about three quarters of the way through Threats by Numbers by Kimberly A. Rogers. This Rogue Spotter Universe series ties into her Therian Way series which I loved--and also, which is getting a reboot, an update, if you will. The main characters, Lauren and Mathias, don't really strike the same chords in me as my favorite Therians, Baran and Raina, but the mystery she's setting up in this book is plenty intriguing, so I can't even be mad about that! I've also got two books on my nightstand: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson, which is sending off some very different vibes from anything else of his that I've read, and Supernova, the last book in the Renegades trilogy by Marissa Meyer. I also stopped by the library recently and picked out six books, but there's no telling how many of them I'll finish by the end of summer! So... maybe see you in the next quarter? Or perhaps I'll update again in December!
At any rate, whatever happens, you can be sure I will...
Catch You Upstream!
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