Things are going really, really well with this draft. I have a few moments of stage fright, wherein I convince myself (albeit briefly) that this was a terrible idea and no one will ever want to read my book. It’s more pressure now because of all the absolutely incredible feedback I’ve gotten so far. I’ve had the guts to send the book out to a few people and get their feedback. I’ve gotten a great deal of positive response, and some excellent critique. The critique, in many ways is what I’m dreading and looking forward to most. It’s like being a contestant on a reality show. Every week, I send out another chapter, and every week (so far), I make it to the next round. My fear is that I’ll be thrown something I can fix in a quick rewrite. I’m dreading the somewhat inevitable major plot reevaluation. While I’m fairly certain this is a solid effort at this point and the plot is somewhat water tight, I’m terrified and excited about the idea that I’ll discover something was missed. keep reading »

If you haven’t yet heard of A Game of Thrones, let me be the one to introduce you to it. GoT is the first in a fantastic book series by George R. R. Martin and has recently been adapted for television by HBO. (Check it out Sunday nights if you’re so lucky to be a subscriber).

The reason I bring this up is because I had bought the first book several years ago, in my quest to find some good fantasy to sink my teeth into. This was the height of college pressure – late night projects, internships, multiple part time jobs, a zillion commitments pulling me in a zillion directions. I opened the book and read the first few pages, then cast it aside for almost four years before I tried picking it up again.

It wasn’t even that the book didn’t interest me initially. It actually infuriated me. I passionately hated the series based only on the first few pages of the first book. If there is a harsher critic, I do not know of them. keep reading »

As you may have guessed from my previous post, things did not end well between my HP printer and I. It balked at printing a measly 150 pages, and insisted that I pay $30 for two ink cartridges to do so. Two. Ink. Cartridges. Brand new. And it managed to print half.

So, suffice it to say, we’ve got a new printer that happily printed out my entire manuscript, front and back, without having to manually flip each piece of paper (bonus!) so I’m a happy camper. And the toner cartridge prints – get this – over 2,000 pages (and it’s only $15 more). I know, my printer obsession is a little weird, but at this stage of the book, I need to be able to print it out and edit it with a pen. It’s a LOT easier to read on paper, and much easier to revise. Much as I love Scrivener, I need to be able to print the pages out. Consequently, my old HP printer is sitting in a corner thinking about what it’s done. Running to Kinko’s every time I needed to print out the draft wasn’t an option, as it was only marginally cheaper (and far less convenient) than using the HP printer. keep reading »

As we approach the new year, my schedule becomes a lot tighter. While I still don’t have a set deadline for each week, I try to get through a chapter a week if I can. If the best I can accomplish is jotting down a note about a plot point that would be really good to add somewhere in this book, I consider that a win. I’ve scheduled a week of vacation time to finish it up in the first week of January. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. If I’m ahead of schedule, it means a full week of submerging my face with a scuba mask on into a bowl of cold spaghetti while guzzling ice cold diet doctor pepper and playing long rounds of The Sims 3, because when I game, I game girly. I don’t really know why or how cold spaghetti figures into my fantasy of what it must be like to “relax” and be on “vacation,” but trust me, at least I no longer stare blankly like a confused puppy when people tell me I need to learn how to relax and not work all the time.

As some of you may already know via the tweet feed, I’ve vastly exceeded the original plan of writing a book, and now the plan is to write seven books. This is not a joke. This is not an April Fool’s. This is really, seriously happening, and as each day passes, the rough ideas become more and more solid.

This is utterly terrifying and also exhilarating. I have never done something of this magnitude before, and instead of getting that scared feeling in the pit of my stomach, I’m instead coming at it, full force, night after night, jotting ideas down in meetings during the day, and writing pages and pages every night. keep reading »