What's Up Pussycat?

So I have been a busy little beaver lately. My freelance work is coming slowly but steadily and I have no complaints there, although there is the faint whispering in my mind that I really need to get a website up and running as well as a Facebook page sorted out. That’s something I did begin to do but I never finished so it’s on my To Do list. There’s a lot on my To Do list really. I also wish that I did have a little bit more business coming my way but I suppose that’s the perils of only using one website and not having my own form of advertising.

My planning the Autharium Project (as I am temporarily calling the book I am creating for That Blog Series) is coming along well. I pretty much have the outline done, now I just need to expand the chapter outlines a little, or at least the scene sketches. More importantly I need to actually create my characters. Right now there are only two that I know that I need but they have no name, no personality and no backstory. So basically they are just words in an outline as opposed to real people. I’ve also been thinking about titles. I hate titles, like to the bottom of my soul. It’s why this blog doesn’t have the best name (I will change it one day I promise) and why so many of my Works in Progress have generic explanatory titles that don’t really grab your attention. It needs to grab your attention if I’m to have any hope of getting people to read it. I will be writing the next post that will go on the Autharium blog and this time I will, hopefully, put a version of it up on here too.

The planning came a lot easier than I expected. I can see what happens when and how I can keep the tension up and then let it down again. I also, finally, managed to apply the three act structure to my outlines at last. It’s something I’ve avoided in the past, I didn’t want to restrict my writing or do what everyone else does. Now I’ve actually used it though I can see how it is in fact very, very helpful. I can see where the tension is, how the stakes get higher and higher until it all comes crumbling down. I haven’t followed it exactly (I’ve not got to that point quite yet) but it’s there and the arcs are there and I’m definitely going to use it again. I also plan to do a proper post about it in more detail at a later date too (if I remember).

Don’t think that I’ve forgotten about the One Freelancer’s Journey series either. I’m hard at work on that and should have another post up about it soon. Right now I’m just mulling over some of the content and try to work out ways of phrasing it without making it seem as though I’m lecturing. Writing on blogs, not novels or stories, is something that I find a little tricky, I will admit. I want to get the tone right, I want to keep it casual, but when I start talking about something or explaining something to you all I can’t help but slip into lecture mode and I hate it. I Hate It!

I also want to quickly catch you up on what’s been happening with my WiPs, specifically Love Complications (which will be renamed eventually) and Feral Diaries 1 (which will also be renamed).
The notes for revision on LC are complete. Now I’m working out what needs to go where, the time frame and what new scenes need to be added. It needs a lot of work and I need to actually put in some sort of three act structure. Most of all I need to stop letting it read as though it was written by a teenage girl (which it was) and instead make it read as though it were written for a teenage girl (which it was). The characters need to be rounded out and I need to stop my main character from being such a Mary Sue! Yes, that’s right, I wrote a Mary Sue. In fact it was a little bit of a wish fulfilment novel for me at the time, having everything happen right, just how I wished my life could be. Of course that doesn’t make for good reading so it needs to be shaken up, torn to pieces and reassembled into something shiny and new. And the Mary Sue needs to be burned and destroyed.
Feral Diaries (whose title also needs to be changed), meanwhile is not coming along so well. I’ve been making my notes, I’ve actually gotten quite far in with them, almost halfway. But then I looked back and noticed that in the earlier notes I had been actually outlining the new scenes that I needed to add to the story. I hadn’t been doing that for a while. So I need to go back and do that for the other chapters and it’s starting to feel a little one step forward, two steps back. BUT! It’s not all bad news. A friend of mine, wanting to procrastinate, decided to mess around with some 3D imagining software that she loves to use and actually created an amazing cover for me. I’ll show it to you another day although you could always check out my twitter feed and see for yourself.

But for now, it’s back to the grindstone, I have a few chapters to write for work and then it’s on to transcribing my planning notes for the Autharium Project. Do you have any ideas for what to do with the Mary Sue? Have you ever written a Mary Sue? Do you want me to get on with the Freelancer’s Journey Series? Or would you rather I shut up and share a bit more about Feral Diaries?

Let me know in the comments, I love hearing from you.

Oops! Again!

Oops, I did it again.

No I’m not turning into Britney Spears although I do love wearing piggly tails.

What I’m referring to of course is the fact that I forgot to update my blog. Again. For the hundredth time. I’ve got no excuse, no real reason. I’ve not had a life shattering event, I’ve not been overly busy with work, I’ve not broken my computer. I think I just got fed up with only ever posting the One Freelancer’s Journey series I was working on and as a result I didn’t post anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully intend to continue and finish it. Maybe even shove it into a little book and put it up for sale at some point. But I wanted to blog about more than just the business side of writing for a change. I spend most days thinking about my work, doing my work and continuing that on to my blog, something that I really mostly use for fun and brain farts and rambling sort of took the fun out of the blogging. There is a lot I want to cover and I think I went into it all a little too quickly. Maybe I should have finished the entire series first before posting? Then again the way my mind works I would have finished it and then it wouldn’t have seen the light of day again.

So I figured I’d take a little break from posting about the admittedly dry aspects of being a freelancer and give you an update on my own personal projects. I’ve not started anything new. I won’t lie, there have been one or two ideas brewing in the back of my mind but I’ve decided not to work on those yet. The fact most of them faded away sort of suggests to me that maybe it was a good choice. I have been working on ongoing projects though, like the Feral Diaries Book One and I’ve been working, slowly, on the outline for Wolfe. Not an actual word has been written for that one yet and I’m not even halfway through the editing process for Feral Diaries. But they’re slowly trundling along.

I’ve also been working on a webcomic idea, the same idea that’s been brewing in my mind for well over a year now. It’s coming along. The events and settings are taking shape in my mind and the outlining is slowly coming along. I’m nowhere near ready to begin drawing yet though, mostly because my art skills are really very rusty and I need to do some more practicing before I set anything in stone. That and possibly get a technology upgrade. But those are all in the future.

I think the biggest thing for me though, that’s happened in the last few days is that I’ve signed up with an indie publisher of sorts. I always thought that I wanted to go directly to self-publishing and I will admit that the responsibility and all the little things that you need to do before you actually got your book out there scared me. They scared me so much that I sort of froze up and stopped working towards anything at all. It’s a sad state of events. But now though I found Autharium and hopefully, sometime soon, I can actually have a book or three out there with my name on them.

You may wonder why I’m telling you all of this. Well the reason for this should become apparent in the near future if everything pans out right. For now just keep your eyes open and look out for the eventual next part in the series. Or another of these rambling posts. Whichever comes first.