New Year, New...well, all sorts of things

Happy New Year! Okay, so the general state of "the world is on fire" hasn't quite been put out. (I'll make my statement of if you in ANY way support the terrorism and insurrection that went on at the Capitol last week, you can see yourself out now, and I won't miss you. BYE.) Not much else to do besides keep slogging along, I guess. Fingers crossed that better times are, in fact, ahead.

I did reach my goal of finishing the main writing of my latest book before the end of the year, though the editing process went into January. Since it was a lot longer than anything else I've written recently, obviously editing took longer, too. And since I had plenty of time to think about and overthink things, that's exactly what I did.

First of all, I decided I didn't love the title of Elemental Forces. It wasn't terrible, but I thought I could do better. After thinking about the characters and some recurring themes and imagery, I played with a few combinations. To my surprise and delight, a Google search of my top choice didn't show anything notable with that title. So now, the book is A Flame Among the Stars. Very fantasy-esque, right? I'll go make that new tag now. Maybe I'll go through and re-tag the older posts, since there aren't too many of them.

Next, I debated long and hard about the idea of submitting to a different publisher. I'm very happy with everything the team at Decadent Publishing and I have done together, but as they're a general romance publisher, I considered submitting someplace more specific for my next lesbian romance. I did some research on publishers who focus on lesbian fiction, narrowed it down to a few possibilities, and selected what I thought would be the best fit. Since everyone has different requirements for submissions packages, it took me longer to put everything together for this one. I waffle back and forth with how confident I feel, but at least I can say I took the chance. And if it doesn't pan out, I have some backup plans.

Onward to the rest of 2021! I don't have, like, an actual calendar or anything (though maybe I should), but I am planning out the rest of my writing year. I do always like to take a break after finishing off a project, so I've been reading some books that have been sitting on my Kindle for a while, and I'm going to start The Witcher 3 on the Switch tomorrow, which I'm going to assume will take me at least a month to get through since I can only play at night after the kids are in bed. After that, though, I think I've decided on what I want to do next, but plans can always change. Stay tuned!

Racing Toward the Finish (or, Link Party!, Part the Next)

Hello, my lovelies! I hope this winter holiday season is treating you well, or whatever 2020's version of well is. As we race toward the end of this year, I've been racing toward the end of my work-in-progress, Elemental Forces. Even without having gotten to the very end yet, it's the longest thing I've written by a wide margin since the kids were born 5.5 years ago, so that's exciting. I don't want to jinx anything or invite more misfortune into this year, especially after what happened the last time I did that, but I will say that I think I will hit my goal of finishing up the main writing of this book by the end of the year. (Will I get it fully edited and ready to be shipped off by then? Ehhh, let's not push it.)

Since I've been working like crazy on the book, I don't have an interesting blog post ready to go. But it's been a while since I last posted, and I do have an assortment of fun links and promises of more in the future. I'll drop these here for now to hold you over, and if I don't manage to check in before then, enjoy the rest of your holiday season and Happy New Year!

Blazing Justice at The TBR Pile - As the name might indicate, the reviewers over at The TBR Pile have been busy busy busy this season, but they finally got to Blazing Justice and loved it! Their 5-star review of it means it'll be entered into their Book of the Month contest at the end of December, which I will absolutely keep you posted on. (Now would be a good time to follow me on Twitter if you haven't already done so, as I've been hanging out there a lot this pandemic.)

In January, The TBR Pile will also have a feature on Hunting Astrid, complete with a real blog post I wrote. As always, stay tuned for further details!

Speaking of Hunting Astrid....

Best Lesfic Reviews - I get nervous about submitting to review sites, because of course I want people to read and review my books, but they're not obligated to love my every word, and I know I'm not supposed to interact with reviews anyway, and so on. Best Lesfic Reviews is critical yet fair, so I was especially nervous here, and then pleased with the outcome. Again, I know I'm not supposed to interact with the reviews/reviewer, but I did wind up having a nice conversation with her via email, and it was fun to get her ideas for future installments. (Oh, did I mention my editor suggested this could have series potential? YIKES.)

Broome's Books LGBTQ+ Book Reviews - Another great summary and review by another great person I'm glad to have met. And now my own to-read pile is getting longer and longer thanks to the rest of her site! Years ago, I dabbled with posting book reviews as part of my site here, and it is really hard to keep with everything, so I'm so appreciative of readers who take on this often thankless task.

Off to Some Kind of Start, Part 2

Remember a couple years ago when we were all going back to our old projects at critiquing our opening lines? It's that time again! Writing/blogging buddy Krystal Jane recently posted her new collection, and someone on Twitter just asked about favorite blog posts, so here we go for Round Two. I'll pick up where I left off and see if I've actually gotten any better at this. (I'm guessing not.)

 

Here's Part 1 to recap, from July of 2017 (apologies for the text colors, a casualty of the site redesign)

Hunting Astrid is still brand new and sparkly and shiny, so let's see how my latest release fares under the microscope.

 

“There you are. You almost missed all the fun.”

“Sorry I’m late.” Astrid hurried into the room and wheeled her chair out from underneath her desk. “Some sort of malfunction with the train. We were stuck for half an hour.”

Her coworker Lily snorted without taking her eyes off the screen in front of her. “So much for the best technology this corner of the galaxy has to offer.”

Hello, sci-fi! I've become a fan of starting stories in the middle of a conversation, like here. Not the snazziest, not the worst. I promise things pick up quickly in this opening chapter.

***

How about some fanfic? I did write a lot for Fire Emblem: Three Houses over this summer, which kicked my motivation for my original works into gear. Here's the opening for the first one, which was actually the first fanfic I wrote in quite a few years.

Aelfric couldn’t understand the strange looks and hushed whispers that had followed him around like an irritating swarm of bugs over the course of the evening. After all, why wouldn’t he have wanted to attend Sitri and Jeralt’s wedding? It was a joyous occasion, one the monastery didn’t often host. Such love should be celebrated, he declared to himself.

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of digging that first line. And a note to anyone who's played the FE3H DLC: FUCKIN' AELFRIC, MAN, AMIRITE!? (i rite.)

***

Let's take a look at Fire Beyond the Frost, whose long journey to publication has been chronicled here. To recap: the book was published a year ago after sitting on the shelf in need of a good cleaning for a few years. Before that, parts of it were originally a story written for a former friend's role-playing forum. I have no idea what got edited when, so here's a collection of words that were written sometime in 2019, 2013, and/or 2011.

Dr. Catalina Frost looked out the small window of the spaceship. A few men from the crew scurried around the launch pad of the Blackhill Spaceport. The vessel would be departing within moments. A pleasant female voice came over the intercom, informing the passengers to move toward their seats and prepare for takeoff.

All right, so we know Catalina's going somewhere, which is kind of the point of the whole book. Not too bad. I don't hate myself.

***

Rewinding a little farther, here's the intro to Closing Montage.

The large brown box sat on the doorstep, unremarkable, cast by the shadows of the dwindling sunlight. My heart raced as I pulled the car into the driveway. Though I couldn’t see any writing or labels from where I sat, I knew it didn’t contain another shipment of medical supplies or more useless gifts from well-wishers. This package was special.

You know, this one's better than I remembered it. It drops plenty of hints about the upcoming story, plus it has an element of mystery: what's in the box???

***

Lastly, because I like odd numbers for these types of lists, I'll give you a sneak peek at my WIP, Elemental Forces.

“On your left!”
 

Meg dove to the opposite side, tucking and rolling across the dusty field. The small dragon she’d been battling followed after her, but before it could launch another attack, Ronan brought his sword down on the creature’s neck. The sharp blade sliced its head clean off and it fell to the ground, sunlight glinting off its reddish scales as it gradually stopped twitching.

DRAGONS! FUCK YEAH! I wasn't lying when I said I like starting in the middle of the action sometimes. You know what I also like? DRAGONS!

So there's my latest compilation. Nothing downright awful in here, unlike last time, so maybe I am getting slightly better at this. One can dream, anyway!

Structure/Pacing in Romance (specifically THOSE scenes)

I'm still happily chugging along on Elemental Forces. I passed the 20K word mark and have plenty of story left to tell. While I don't have a firm word count estimate just yet, this is shaping up to be the longest book I've written in quite some time.

Believe it or not, I don't have a written outline here. At this point, everything's plotted out pretty well in my head, so maybe I'll never get around to making one. But as I've been thinking over the structure and pacing in this project, I realized that I have two distinct categories for my books, and most romances probably fall into one or the other. And those categories are differentiated by...wait for it...*drumroll*...the sex scenes.

(The rest of this post will probably not be sexy. Sorry to disappoint.)

Category 1: One Sex Scene

All the novellas go here, which makes sense. (Hey, sex scenes take a lot of words!) I guess in these books, the primary plot/conflict/focus/whatever you want to call it is the good ol' "will they or won't they?" and everything gets wrapped up in a pretty little bow at the end when the characters finally bang. Excuse me, get their "happily ever after." Sure, other plot stuff happens, but it's all leading up to the big moment. To be fair, in some of my novellas, the one sex scene doesn't come right at the end, as the characters still have to work out their relationship issues before riding off into the sunset, but the concept stands.

Nothing is absolute, though, so there are some slight exceptions. Elysium, while novella-length, *technically* has two sex scenes, but they're back-to-back, so lumping them together is fair. Likewise with Seductive Suspect, which hovers on the border of "long novella" and "short novel" - the two sex scenes are adjacent to each other, and then the resolution of the mystery part of the plot comes afterward.

Category 2: Multiple Sex Scenes

It's not a surprise that the longer books go here, and then that got me thinking about various plots and their purposes. "Happily ever after" is still always the primary goal of romance, but the length of the route to get there varies. I admit this is where I sometimes struggle with the pacing. When the main characters get together relatively early on, the plot has to keep moving. It's easy to say "time for a sex scene, yay!" but the scenes also have to mean something and not feel gratuitous. I also realize this is highly subjective, as a look at any book with conflicting reviews will indicate. This also probably gets into the topic of romance vs. erotic romance vs. erotica, which I'm not going to touch here.

When writing Disintegration (which I'll likely re-release sometime in 2021), I was extra super careful while plotting out the progression of the sex scenes in the book, of which there are many. Almost, if not all of them are relevant to the plot, each building on the one that came before it. On the other hand, in Fire Beyond the Frost, there might be one or two in there that aren't necessarily relevant to the overall plot, but hey, they're fun, so why not. Then, while I was reviewing The Edge of the Sphere for its eventual re-release (no date set yet), there was even a sex scene I'd completely forgotten about. OOPS.

So, those are my two categories I've discovered. Is one better than the other? No, of course not. Does one take more careful plotting than the other? Eh, possibly. Most writers have cut huge chunks of work out of their final product, and I'm no exception. As noted above, there's no right answer for when to include these scenes, or how many to put in, and so on. If it works, it works, and I try not to ask too many questions when it *does* work!

Hilarity May or May Not Ensue

So, I think we've all realized by now that I'm not one of those people who is SUPER SERIOUS, ALL OF THE TIME about her writing. That's not to say I don't write serious stories, because I definitely do...I just frequently laugh at myself while doing so. To be honest, I often find people who always take things seriously (assuming it's not a life-or-death situation) to be exhausting, but hey, you do whatever you need to do to get through your days.

I won't make any comments as to whether or not I'm "funny," as I know how subjective humor is. Maybe I've made people laugh here a few times over the years, maybe I've just made them roll their eyes at my flippant attitude before they move on. For what it's worth, while I have my "fiction writing" voice, as we all do, my "writing about writing/blogging" voice here is pretty close to what real-life me is like. I've said before, while I'm sure I'm not everyone's cup of tea, I like to think I'm fun to be around in most situations. But again, who knows.

On to the writing about writing part! I've written in a whole lot of romantic sub-genres, but I don't know if I've ever set out to write a true "comedy." Some of my books/stories are intended to be lighthearted and maybe a little fluffy, and even in some of my darker stories, the occasional odd situation or snarky remark slips through. (That might be tied to my "real me" voice, but I digress.) And now that I'm thinking about genres, I'm starting to wonder—can you even write "just" a comedy without including some sort of sub-genre? (Romance, mystery, adventure, etc.) Like, is "contemporary comedy" a thing just like "contemporary romance" is? Clearly, I am not among the people getting paid to create categories on Amazon.

(I just took a tiny break from writing this blog post to take a look. Lots of romantic comedies out there. There was a "wilderness" comedy on the first page of Amazon hits, which I would file under "adventure." And Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was also near the top, which I did enjoy, and parts were funny, but I don't know if that was the point of the story? Moving right along.)

Outside of my little website here, I have written stories explicitly intended to make people laugh, in the form of fanfic. I'd even venture to claim I was successful, in that my old Dragon Age and Mass Effect comedies were always my most popular fics, and they're still getting hits and comments and bookmarks and everything 7-8 years later. (UGH, I'M OLD.) Recently, I've been experiencing the same trends with my Fire Emblem: Three Houses fanfic. So, I know I *can* do it, but I'm also aware of the contextual differences between writing something humorous in an existing universe vs. starting from scratch with everything.

I'm still making great progress with my new project, Elemental Forces. I'm still not sure if we've established it can be a "comedy," but it's definitely on the more lighthearted end of the spectrum. I'm not attempting to land joke after joke after joke, but I made an effort to set the tone early on, and that tone (hopefully) is "this book will make you smile and feel good." As I mentioned in my last post, it's heroic fantasy and, of course, romance, since I consider myself a romance writer first and foremost. Since it's romance, there will be some emotional and poignant scenes in addition to the fun ones, because I'd argue you can't really have a romance without those, but THAT is another topic for another post.

In the meantime, I'll switch back to my Word document now, because I am still writing up a storm and it feels GOOD! (Might as well end on a "smile/feel good" moment!)

Full Speed Ahead

 (requisite reminder that Blazing Justice is available on Kindle Unlimited now!)

Guys. Everyone. Y'all. Something crazy is happening.

I am writing and I am writing fast.

Well, fast for me, anyway. I know there are writers who crank out thousands of words a day and go back to edit them later, and I know there are writers who lovingly pore over each word as it caresses the page and have little editing to do at the end. Neither of those approaches is right or wrong. I personally tend to hover near the slower end of the spectrum, like it or not.

I've discussed before about how once I had kids, it was often difficult to 1) carve out time for writing and other hobbies, and then 2) actually be productive and not just zone out in a rare quiet moment. The kids are getting older (they started virtual kindergarten this week!), and while I wouldn't necessarily say things are getting easier, the new sets of challenges maybe aren't as physically draining all of the damn time. There are definitely days where once they're in bed, I just want to park myself on the couch and click around on the internet, but I often try to at least get something done.

So. The new project. I spent some time this summer writing Fire Emblem: Three Houses fanfic and marveled at how quickly I could pop out a short story. Maybe it was finally time for me to apply that to my own original writing?

I decided I wanted to stick to a similar genre in the hopes that the energy would carry over, so I started my new heroic fantasy* romance on August 30th. For the most part, I've been maintaining my pre-childrearing rate of at least 500 words a day, and I'm four chapters in. Since it's fantasy, I'm relying on some popular tropes (because everything uses tropes to some extent anyway and you will never convince me otherwise), but I'll be playing around with some of them at the same time. It's light and fluffy, but the characters have depth and heart. Most importantly, I'm having fun, and that's contributing to the words spilling out on the page. 

 

*Before getting started, I spent some time, of course, on TV Tropes reading about the differences between high fantasy, low fantasy, heroic fantasy, etc. This is definitely heroic fantasy. The dragons show up in the third sentence.

 

Will I be able to keep this up for the whole project? Perhaps. I'm bound to hit a slump eventually, or have to deal with a section that's just not working out quite right, and so on. But for now, I'm really satisfied with my writing output for the first time in a very long time.

 

New title tag in 3...2...1....