Do you ever feel like you don’t have anything interesting to say? That’s pretty much how I’m feeling these days. I know you’ll tell me that’s not true. Maybe it’s not, but I still feel that way. My writing is coming along, which is good. However, I’m still not able to actually write by hand. My right thumb is still giving me a time when I hold a pen. I’ve been slowly chipping away at typing up what I’ve already written and I’ve also started a couple of short stories. I need to take a look at them and I know they’re not finished yet, but once they are I’ll be sure to let you know. The first people to set eyes on them will be my newsletter subscribers, so if you’re not already subscribed, you should be! Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on getting more Behind the Scenes like photos of me and my son, or of my crazy cats, as well as things like my short stories and giveaways I’ll be doing too!
So, as I said, I’ve mostly been working on typing up what I wrote earlier this year on my WIP. I’d thought about attempting NaNoWriMo this year, but I’m thinking it might not be a good idea right now. I recently had to hand my laptop over to a friend of mine who is also a tech guru so he could replace the keyboard. Thankfully he loaned me his laptop for a week or so until the new keyboard arrived and he was able to install it. I was grateful to have his laptop to use, but it wasn’t the same as having my own to say the least. I’m happy to say that my laptop is back where it belongs, right on my desk. He even was nice enough to upgrade it a bit and put a new hard drive in it as well as helped me clean up some of my files. I had/have WAY too many old photos, documents and all sorts of other random things saved to a 1 TB hard drive and I really had no idea what a lot of it was! I had old backups from my old phones or my mom’s old phones and we even found my old MySpace profile picture! Needless to say, we had a few good laughs yesterday as we went through my old files. Anyway, I don’t want to get into all of that just now.
I’m slowly but surely going to sit down with each of my characters and interview them. I’m still deciding if I’m just going to do my two MC’s and a couple of the secondary characters, or go all out and interview all of them. There are 10 (so far) in total, which might be too many to interview, but who knows. I think one every month might be manageable. Plus I’m also thinking about including some bonuses for my newsletter subscribers, so again, make sure you sign up!!
I’m still sitting on the outline for the second book in this series. I don’t really like to call it a series since I don’t yet know how many books will be in it, but I don’t know what else to call it. I need to take a look at the outline again before I sit down and actually start writing. Did I tell you that outlining used to scare the pants off me? I never used to want to outline because I felt like I was locked in, but at the same time, because I didn’t outline I never finished anything. I’d have an idea, sit down and start writing, but by the time I got about 10k words written, I ran out of steam because I didn’t know where I was going. So I recently started looking into different ways to outline/plan stories that I could actually use. I found that if I plan out the big parts of my story I can fill in the little things as I go. So I don’t plan every single scene and all ahead of time. Instead, I plan out the major chunks of the plot and fill in smaller parts so I still feel like I have freedom and I’ve finally gotten over thinking I’m stuck with the outline I already have. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that if I feel the need to, I can change anything about the plan for my story…it is, after all, MY story, right? I’m the one writing it here. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to this point, but better late than never I suppose.
Anyway, since there isn’t much else going on with my writing I don’t have too much to update this month, but I didn’t want to skip it because that’s a slippery slope. I do hope you enjoy reading these short updates and hope you’ll stick around for more to come! Feel free to comment here, e-mail me anytime, or find me on Facebook.