As The Year Turns

And what a year it's been.

I'm looking back on all my grand plans, trying to figure out if I should be disappointed in myself for not meeting all my goals, or satisfied with what I DID get done.

Suffice to say, I wanted to be done with Jesse #4 by now.  I'm not.  The last two months has been a total wash, though I will say that I think I've made a brainstorming breakthrough and I'll be starting back up with the writing again probably as soon as I finish this post.  I'm so very close, if I can just get over this little bump.  I know how it ends, I just have to get there.

I fully admit, my writing was a victim of stress in other areas of my life.  I know that I've mentioned my Real Job(tm) before.  Well, for the last....oh, probably two years, if I'm being honest...I've not been happy with the Real Job(tm).  In fact, I've been scrambling to get clear of there.  Sadly, I'm not in a position where writing full time is feasible, financially, so getting clear of one job requires a new job.  And in the industry where I work, that's easier said than done right now.

However, over the last three months, I managed to apply/interview/finally get hired at a new place!  I'm simultaneously thrilled and terrified.  I mean, I worked at my old job for eight and a half years.  It's been a while since I had to get all dressed up and go make new friends.  But it'll be fine.  It has to be.  At the very least, it can't be any worse.

So, last day at the Old Job was yesterday, and my first day at the New Job is Monday.

New Job schedule is slightly different (Old Job started at 7 a.m., New Job starts at 8:30 a.m.), but I think I'm going to parlay that into some early morning writing time.  I recall that when I was working on The Musicbox Girl, my Saturday mornings were very productive.  No one in the house is up, it's quiet, I'm not exhausted...  It sounds worth a try.

Also, I find it very poetic that the winter days were getting darker right up until I quit the Old Job, and now when I start the New Job, the days will be getting lighter.  Happy Solstice, everyone!

So.  Goals for the new year:

January - Finish JJD#4, get it out to betas.  I'm about 30K words from the end of a first draft.  Once the holidays are past, I'm going to buckle down and knock this thing out.

January 21st - Peacemaker release.  Advance reviews are trickling in so far, and people seem to like it!  This makes me happy.  It's a fun little story, not intended to change the world, and I hope people enjoy it.  I should probably come up with some promotion events centered around that, but honestly I'm a bit tapped out of ideas given the absence of actual physical copies.  So if anyone has a thing they want me to do, let me know!

February/March - I will be revising The Musicbox Girl per my Lovely Agent's advice.  Kinda looking forward to getting my hands back into this story.  I will also be hopefully assembling beta reader notes on JJD#4 and once MBG is done, go through the Jesse book again.

April - Find an editor & cover artist for JJD#4.  My actual release date for that book will depend on deadlines for these two things.  Starting to look like a summer release for the book, which is apt, since the first three always came out in summer.

Rest of the Year - I want to start outlining/drafting Arcane West #2 (a sequel to Peacemaker).  I also want to start working on a new project that has been driving me nuts called Valkyrie, Inc.  It'll be a little different than some of my other stuff, but it feels like it's going to be fun and I'm excited about it.

Hoping that I can get MBG into a shape where Lovely Agent will want to start subbing it.  She also has Muse to read, and I'm hoping to find out if she wants to try subbing that too, or if I'll be trying to self-pub that one.  Also hoping to make a decision on whether or not to self-pub Night of Fire and Ash, but if I did that, I'd officially have three series going at once, and that way lies madness.  So that one's going to take a bit of thinking.

And of course, once JJD#4 is done, I need to move on to #5.  There will be six Jesse books in the end, and I'm very devoted to finishing the series.  It's just something I need to do at this point.


As we've seen, my best laid plans often go awry, but I like having a starting point from which to veer off dramatically.

Happy Winter-Holiday-Event-of-Your-Choice, and may the New Year be fabulous for us all!

The Latest and Greatest

Once again, my lack of posting astounds even me.  In my defense, though, I've been working.  Like, actual writing working, not Real Job working (though I've been doing that too)

So, what's been going on?

Well, I took the entire month of June to do edits on Peacemaker, and turned those in two whole days early.  Go me!  And just this week, I got an email back from my wonderful editor saying that those revisions have been accepted, so Peacemaker's almost a finished product, and that's a bit of stress off my mind.  Granted, I've never had revisions NOT accepted, but a little part of me is always fearful that she's going to come back and say "this is the suckiest thing in the history of sucky things that suck, do it over".

Right now, I'm working on JJD4.  I'm about 11K words into it, which doesn't seem like very much, 'cause it isn't.  But I've been writing almost every day, even if it's just a little bit, and I'm really starting to sink back into the world again.  It's kinda comfy there, like a big pillow.  A big, fluffy, demon-infested pillow.

I'm still struggling with a title for it.  I thought I had one, months ago, but the more I think about it, the less I like it, so it's back to the drawing board.  Figure, if I'm self-publishing it, I can come up with a title whenever I feel like it, right?

Been learning a lot about self-publishing over these past few months, too.  It's starting to not feel as daunting as it once did.  Ideally, if I can stick to my own self-imposed timeline, I hope to have JJD4 up and functional by March.  All of this contingent on me actually finishing it, of course, and cover art & editing schedules.  My intention is to do ebook on pretty much all platforms, and maybe do a print edition through Amazon's Createspace.  It won't be the same size as the first three books, because they don't offer a mass-market paperback size, and I fully admit that this makes me a little crazy.  They're supposed to match, dammit! Ah well, we take what we can get.

My lovely agent has read The Musicbox Girl, and given me some really great revision notes on it.  She's completely right in everything she said, I just have to wrap my brain around how to fix it.  Right now, that's not going to happen, because I'm trying to work on JJD4, and quite frankly, the writing is different enough that trying to do both at once might scramble my last two brain cells.

I've also sent Muse to the lovely agent, mostly to see if it's something she'd be interested in trying to sell, or if I should just start pondering self-publishing that too.  Honestly, I read through parts of it again, and the whole thing still gives me chills.  It's still one of the best things I've ever written (in my admittedly warped mind) and I'd like to see it available someday.

And, in case you missed it, Peacemaker is up for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  It's also up on Goodreads, if anyone wants to add it to their to-read list. No cover art yet, of course, but I'm hoping soon.  Do you realize that we're actually less than 6 months away from release on that one already??  Time flies when you're having fun.

Remember, Peacemaker will be ebook only at first.  If sales are good enough, they may release it in print later.  I've had several people lament that they don't have a Kindle or a Nook or whatever, but remember if you have a smart phone or a computer, the Kindle app is a free download, and you can read my book right on your phone!

So, current timelines are looking like this:
Autumn 2013 - copy edits on Peacemaker (actual deadline unknown)
November 1 - finish JJD4
Nov/Dec - editing & cover art for JJD4, and revising MBG
January 21, 2014 - Peacemaker release!
Jan/Feb/Mar 2014 - drafting Arcane West #2?
March-ish 2014 - JJD4 release!
Summer 2014 - drafting JJD5?

After that, everything's a moving target.  Heck, half the stuff ON the list is still a moving target.  Ah well.  This is the good life, right?

Goals ahoy!

Ok, my goal this week is to break 30K on project 3. To do so (since I started today at 24,400 words), I need to write 1,120 words a day (Monday-Friday). Today, I wrote 1,156, so mission accomplished!

I also feel rather accomplished because hubby and I finally got the lawn mower out of winter storage, and the yard is beginning to look less like a jungle and more like a yard. Granted, we still have an entire forest worth of downed tree branches from the storms that keep popping up, but think baby steps here.

No news on the submission front. I sent a poke to one agent-with-partial (after doing valiant battle with her spam filter), and another one has promised via her blog that she will have all submitted partials read by the end of next weekend. I harbor secret fears that agent-with-full will once again have to fish my e-mail out of his spam filter (see a trend here?), but I'm trying not to succumb to technology paranoia.