Insight into the Mind of a Crazed Author
Book 5, Evolution of Power, is finally finished and available on Amazon!
I’m super excited to publish this portion of Emily’s journey, after spending a month and a half on the editing process.
I also edited and reloaded Book 1 to correct errors I originally missed. I’ll be doing this for Books 2-4 over the next couple weeks as well.
What’s next you ask?
I’m going to Disneyland! (In January that is)
The good news is that book 5 in the Magic Catalyst Chronicles was finished the first week of October as planned.
The bad news is that due to fuzzy obstacles, outside commitments, and other time constraints, I’m still working on the final edit.
The new release date is Tuesday, November 23rd.
To celebrate the release, the first 4 books will be on sale for .99 cents each from Midnight PST on November 17th to Midnight on November 24th.
Below is the aforementioned fuzzy obstacle bring the editing process to a grinding halt by laying on my chest and arm.
Once again I find myself running behind on my projected book release goal of Summer 2021. It appears being perpetually late has become a bad habit for me. For those waiting for book five of the Magic Catalyst Chronicles to release, I promise I’m working on it and hope to be finished by the the end of September, and released by mid October at the latest.
I’m currently working on the second draft of book five, which involves filling in all the details that I typically leave out when I write my first draft. I can’t say how other people approach their writing, but I thought I’d give you a little insight into my process.
I start with a basic outline of the story. Then I take the outline and write the bulk of the dialogue, because the characters and their interactions with each other are the foundation of my stories. Once that is complete, I sort, and occasionally resort, the dialogue into the appropriate chapters. At that point, I go back to the beginning of the book and start filling in all the details I originally skipped. This includes all of the visual details, like character and location descriptions. As well as much of Emily’s internal dialogue.
This is also the place I end up spending the most time. I’m a very visual person, I need to see something in order to try to explain or describe it. So as I go to fill in the details, I inevitably end up getting side tracked with random research. This usually involves me searching the internet for information on anything and everything. I have lost hours looking for clothing and tattoo design inspiration, looking up cars to figuring out who drives what type of vehicle, as well as searching for information on carnival rides, architecture from the late 1700s through the 1900s, and even historical facts like when houses began converting to electricity.
Of course, this isn’t to say everything I write is 100% accurate to the real world. (I consider Emily’s world to be an alternate reality, similar to our world but also different.) But I find that I need a basic understanding of how things work in this world, in order to decide how they will work in Emily’s. Some things may be very true to the reality, while others will be radically different.
And now that I’ve rambled on longer than I’d intended, I thought I’d close out by sharing a few of the places I’d gone for inspiration. Hopefully the next time you hear from me I’ll be announcing the release of book five.
Guide to Colonial American House Styles From 1600 to 1800.
https://www.thoughtco.com/guide-to-colonial-american-house-styles-178049
25 Classic Cars to Drive Before You Die. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/sporting/news/g2165/best-vintage-cars/
When it came to tattoo designs, I looked at a multiple sites, but these two were very helpful for me to imagine what Samil’s tattoos might look like.
COMPASS TATTOO TO GIVE YOU DIRECTION – A GUIDE FOR 2021
https://tattoostylist.com/compass-tattoo-ideas
And
27 Amazing Ship Tattoos with Meanings
https://bodyartguru.com/ship-tattoos
I’m almost positive I’ve said this before, but I’m a terrible blogger. Outside of the occasional release date changes, I find it difficult to find time to post.
But since I’m taking a few weeks off before diving back into book five, I thought I’d try something different. Don’t worry though, book five is in progress. The outline is complete as is the first major chapter. I like to think of my process as organic, each chapter starting with a frame that fills as I review and revise. I’ll resist the urge to provide examples as I don’t want to accidentally give any spoilers.
A little known fact, I don’t like to sit in silence. While I’m writing, I either have B horror movies playing on the TV or music, depending on if I’m working on new content or edits.
That being said, I’ve listened to a LOT of horror movies in the last four months. And while I’ve watched some of the classic slasher movies, I’ve also seen a variety of independent movies.
So I’ve decided to share some non-traditional reviews of a few of those movies. Now I say non-traditional, because I won’t be giving a plot summary outside what you’ll find on Amazon.
Below I’ve broken down what I’ll be covering as well as my first review.
Title, Year, Directors, and Genre of course.
Sub Genres: Everyone has preferences, so this indicates how I categorize which sub genres the film falls into. These are my opinions rather than how the movie is categorized officially.
Humorous: Intentional or not, a yes for humor means I found it funny.
Production Quality: I’ll be ranking this as high, medium, low. There will be a 4th rating of terrible for those exceptionally rare yet awful to watch movies.
Special Effects: Quality of any special effects in the movie.
Acting: The over all cast performance.
Body Count: This is a subjective rating. A high rating usually indicates that the dead includes either all but one or two cast members, innocent bystanders and friends in the area at the time the killer goes after their victim and/or people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Medium means multiple victims connected to the main storyline. Low means one to three deaths. For ghost stories, or haunted locations a separate note may be made regarding previous deaths that affect the story line.
Blood and Gore: Ranking will very.
Mystery
Twist: Some movies have mysteries from the beginning, Some times that mystery takes a dramatic twist, other times the straightforward plot takes a sudden twist. It’s a subtle difference but a difference nonetheless.
Storyline: My opinion on the movie’s concept.
Plot Consistency and Resolution: Whether or not the overall plot was consistent from start to finish and made sense over all.
Ending: Ending refers only to my opinion on how the ending was presented, was it left open for another sequel in a way that was clear or ambiguous.
During /After Credit Content: Everyone’s doing it these days, so I’ll let you know there is anything worth waiting for.
Rewatchable: Would I choose to watch this movie again.
Personal Thoughts: Any other notes I had that didn’t fit in one of the other categories.
Let’s begin shall we.
Title: Drive Thru
Year: 2007.
Directors Shane Kuhn, Brendan Cowles
Genre: Horror, Sub Genres Slasher, Supernatural,
Humorous: Absolutely
Production Quality: High
Special Effects: Worked well with the overall production.
Acting: Good over all, there were a couple characters that were less than stellar.
Body Count: High
Blood and Gore: Lots of hilariously over the top blood and gore
Twist: No
Mystery: Yes
Storyline: Good
Plot Consistancy and Resolution: Good
Ending: Open Ended
During/After Credit Content: Yes
Rewatchable: Yes
Personal Thoughts: If you like puns and movie quotes, you’ll find lots of them in this movie.
Amazon Plot Summary: Horror gets Super Sized when Horny The Clown, the demonic mascot of “Hella-Burger,” starts slashing Orange County teenagers with his meat cleaver.
After a long and arduous battle, I finally defeated the editing monster and released ‘Wave of Truth’ early this morning.
To celebrate, the release, books one through three will be on sale in the US from October 13th through the 19th and in the UK from the 14th through the 20th.
Honestly, I find that the pre-release editing process is the worst part of publishing. It always takes three times as long as I planned to complete the final read through.
So I’ve decided to share a little bit about the process, in the hopes that talking about it will help me remember for next time.
‘Wave of Truth’ was meant to be available by Noon on October the 9th. Of course I was already running seriously behind schedule by Friday morning.
I spent all of Thursday going through the last of the corrections and suggestions from my volunteer editors.
Once that was finished, I started on the final read through. I only made it through the first three chapters, which translates to about 25%.
I started again bright and early Friday morning, and reviewed three more chapters. Which had me at about 65% complete.
Saturday I tackled the last four chapters and finishing the read through right around 1:00 am Sunday morning.
I spent another 3 hours on formatting and final details like the table of contents, playlist, acknowledgements, and publishing. The upload completed right after 4:00 am.
All in all, I spent approximately 40 hours going through Wave of Truth between Thursday and Sunday.
Of course, I forgot that it can take up to 48 hours for the book to be available on Kindle once it’s, uploaded.
Book 4 is finally finished!
I have to admit I’m super excited that I finished by my September 30 deadline. Unfortunately it will be another week before it’s available on Amazon. Right now my volunteer editors are looking over it, once they finish I’ll do my final read through.
Book 4 will be available on Amazon Kindle Friday November 9th.
In my own version of March Madness, all three books in my Magic Catalyst Chronicles are on sale till the 15th for 99 cents each.
Life has been so crazy busy I haven’t had time for updates lately, but I hope to have more time soon.
Till then, I hope you enjoy this special one week promotion.
Wow, has it already been a month since my last post? I really lost track of the time.
I’m so excited to finally have book two, ‘Spark of Knowledge’ wrapped up! It’s uploaded to Amazon.com and I’m just waiting for it to go live to send out the official announcement.
‘Spark of Knowledge’ ended up being around 10,000 words longer than book one, which honestly came as a shock to me. When I started the editing process, it was pretty close to the same length. Some how in the course of editing, I managed to add a lot of content.
With book two, I tried to balance developing the characters and their relationships, with advancing the over arching plot of the series. Only time will tell if I succeeded.
In trying to reach this balance, I didn’t spend a lot of time writing about Emily’s time in school. This was a conscious choice I made. I felt that a lot of the conversations she needed to have with the guys weren’t school appropriate.
Sure, sometimes we choose the wrong time and place to say things. But the guys have been keeping their secrets for years, they aren’t going to start blabbing in public now.
So instead we get the opportunity to see a little bit of their life outside school.
Books three and four are already written on paper, so I’ll start typing them up in the next week. Right now, I haven’t decided where the break between three and four will happen. That’s a challenge I’ll have to face once I’ve got everything typed up.
On the upside, I don’t have to struggle with any major rewrites caused by wayward characters going into the next book. I was able to end book two exactly where it needed to be for the transition to book three, thank goodness.
The good news is I finished typing up the rough draft of book two in the Magic Catalyst Chronicles yesterday.
The bad news is that Samil said something at the end of book one that deviated from my original draft, which has thrown a monkey wrench into the timeline for book two. Consequently, I have some major rewrites to tackle now to get us back on track.
I don’t know if other writers have these types of issues. When I started the series, I had only a vague idea of who the characters were. But the more I wrote about them, the more they came to life. Most of the character interactions and flashbacks were inspired and written on the fly, so I quite literally got to know the other characters at the same time Emily did.
Add to that the fact that I don’t write in a linear fashion, instead I skip around in the books based on where the inspiration leads me. Which unfortunately means this isn’t the first time I’ve had to go back and change things up to ensure continuity in the story. For the over all series the changes I’m working on are definitely an improvement, but in the moment, they are causing my brain to short circuit.
So in order to make it through typing up my rough draft without getting lost in the weeds, I literally had to shut down my brain. I was able to achieve this by listening to reality shows on Bravo while I typed. So in addition to typing the first 24,000 words of book two, I am now completely caught up on Summer House and The Real House Wives of: Beverly Hills, Potomac, and New York. Because my brain was turned off, instead of making changes as I went, I ended up making a To Do list of 30 plus changes, additions, and completely new chapters that still need to be written.
Now once I finish adding extra chapters and making the modifications to the existing ones, book two’s total word count should end up in the same range as book one. Somewhere in the 33,000 to 38,000 word range. And I still feel good about my personal commitment to have it ready for a June release.
Now this was not the blog I originally intended to write. I actually had a totally different topic in mind when I started. But the challenges I’ve been working around these last 11 days have clearly taken over my thoughts, and I can’t seem to talk about anything else.
All this extra angst because Samil changing the way he asked Emily a question at the end of book one . And while I’m sure I’ll thank him in the long run, I’d like to send him to the corner or kick him in the shins right now. I haven’t quite decided which.
Thinking Out Loud 