9 posts tagged “phoenix rising (the phoenix cycle)”

The house has fallen through.  This is upsetting on so many different levels, but it also means that I have a LOT less stress and a bit more time to focus on my writing.  There's still fallout to deal with: getting youngest into a better school than her home school, cleaning up the financial mess left behind, recovering or adjusting routines that were disrupted and now either need to get back on track or will need to be readjusted to things like youngest's change in schools, and so on and so forth...oh! And unpacking.  We had started packing and the house has kind of...fallen apart in the craziness, so, yea, will be cleaning up, de-fleaing, and unpacking again.  Not particularly thrilled with how things turned out, but I saw what was coming and got my grieving done before the final ax came down, so I'm angry at what happened (and how), but ready to move forward with what we need to do.

The good news is that I kept up on my Assassin's Choice revisions.  I'm halfway through v6 and should have it finished and ready for beta readers by December.  At least that's my hope.  I've been so focused on A.C. that my other projects have been pretty much set aside for the time being.  I might be able to pick them up with less on my mind and less to do, but I'm not going to worry about it if I don't.  A.C. deserves to be done; I've been working on it for far too long and it's just time to get it off the plate and maybe out the door.

Why would I hang onto it after it's done?  My main concern is the chance of a multi-book contract.  I don't see my Alden books taking 2 years or less from start to finish, and most have indicated that 2 years is generally the time expected between books in a series.  So I need to get the second book to the point that A.C. is at now before I run A.C. itself around.  There may be a day when an Alden book will take 2 years or less, it's just not today. ;)

As for the other novels in process: Blood Charms is ready for me to start the building draft (which is the draft before the rough draft: a lot of information is supposed to go into the building draft, but I'm not sure that's what will happen here), and Phoenix Rising is about ready for the rough.  I've not been working on any shorts, and haven't been submitting much either.  This is one of those things I knew to drop since the house stress was already making me crazy.  Submitting shorts is already a frustrating process, so I really didn't need that on top of the house stuff.  I probably won't get back to submissions until the new year.  The current focus is A.C., Charms, and Phoenix.  Once A.C. is finished, I'll be moving on to book 2 in the trilogy, Quest for Ehlarayn, which is already stripped back and ready for me to get back to work on.

In other news, the husband is in culinary school and very happy.  Unfortunately, he also lost his job, which is actually only bad because of the lack of a paycheck.  The job itself was making him miserable and being run in an unethical manner.  We plan to report and sue, it's just taking us time to get it all figured out...and to find a lawyer.  In the meantime, he's looking for work in the industry.  He's not done a resume snow storm as of yet since midterms are a big concern for him right now, but he's started putting a few out, and the school will be holding a career fair especially for its culinary students next week, I believe.  We're looking forward to it.  In the meantime, we're looking a little on our as well.

So, it's going to take some time to get us back on our feet, especially with the job situation the way it is, but I'm ready to move forward and work on it.  And to get back to a full schedule of writing.

I know all this up energy I've gotten since freeing myself to focus on my writing will eventually be interrupted bad a bad day or two, but right now?  Totally enjoying this energized, motivated, "this is what I should be doing" feeling.

And it shows.

This week, between new words and revisions, was a 13k week.  I can't even begin to remember the last time I had a 10k week, much less a 13.  Even days I have to run around and do domestic things like grocery shopping and picking up medications have been productive writing days.  The Phoenix building draft is now over 51k, I just finished a new version of A.C.'s chapter 33 (two chapters combined, lots of cuts made, and not so much revisions as rewrites—it'll need another go before I do my v5 polish), and just finished the outline for a new project, Blood Charms.  I've also been tinkering with a short, "Pretty Things" and submitted 2 others.

I think the personal changes are helping too.  I wake up tired, do my workout (3 times a week), and have the energy to get to writing even if I woke up tired.

Next week, I'm bumping up my count goal to 1k/day and 6k/week.  This is for new words, and I'll be sitting there for a bit until I'm sure the habit has reformed.  Shouldn't take too long.  I've already learned to do the new words first or my time gets eaten up by other things.  I just have to remember not to forget Phoenix in the process of working on the new project.

And speaking of domestic duties...must run out and get milk and eggs.  Writer or not, being a mom never ends.  ;)

There's just something about deciding that you WILL do something.  No hedging, no "if I can", but a definite "I WILL do this."

2009 started with a little bit of a stumble—I was still struggling with chapter 30 of A.C., but I've since kicked myself in gear.  Today, chapter 30 will be done and posted (along with the 4 previous chapters) to the workshop and sent to my two readers (in a 10 chapter section).

Which also brings up the fact that it's sometimes silly what finally gets us motivated.  In this case, I thought about writing a new short...and ended up finishing off chapter 30.4 revisions in 2 days.  I guess writing a new short is a threat to me?  Whatever works, right?  The only problem with this is that I do indeed need to write a new short.  A Christmas one for a private advent calendar, so I'm going to have to get over it being a threat soon.  I write and revise too slow to wait until we're too much further into the year to get started.

So far this month, I've written or revised a total of 11k.  In new words, I'm holding steady at 3900/week for the moment.  It was a bit of a stretch, so getting back into the habit of making that particular goal each week is more of a priority than trying to push more words just yet.  These words have been split between world building for both A.C. (which is now pretty much done) and Phoenix 1 and working on the Phoenix 1 building draft.  The other projects haven't been touched much yet, and that's fine.  I probably need to get A.C. off my plate first.

There are two things I'm really trying to put into play as I recover from the mess that was last year: 1. knowing my limits and being patient with myself because of them, and 2. easing back into things and being patient with the process.

Knowing your limits is as important as understanding your process, I think.  This doesn't mean you don't try to increase your limits, just that you realize that you have them and may need to build upon them.  Otherwise frustration sets in and you give up.  this was a real problem for me last year because my limits had decreased because of my health issues.  I needed to allow myself to heal before I pushed, but was just too used to pushing to convince myself to do that.  This year, I am measuring success a little differently.  Yes, I want to reach my goals, but I want to enjoy what I'm doing (for the most part since I'll probably always hate revisions) and reach those goals a bit more consistently.  To do that, I have to realize where my limits are, find the point where it's a challenge, then take the time I need to actually consistently reach that goal before I try pushing some more.  Last year, when I made my goals at all, it was more of a "Oh, I made my goal this week!  time to add more for next week."  Habit building just doesn't work that way for me.

Baby steps can be frustrating, but right now, that's what I need to take.  So, I've got a long way to go before I'm where I want to be, and I might have put too much in the goals to be able to reach them all.  The good news is that I still have a lot of year left.  And if I don't reach them all, I'll at least have a better idea of where my challenge point is and either cut back a project or two or keep the same number for next year.

And, really, THAT progress, that understanding of what I need to do to be happier in what I do and be less frustrated with myself and my writing, is a better achievement than the word count so far.

Now, about that exercise problem....  ;)

My progress on A.C. and Phoenix has been slower than I would like it to be.  Granted, a lot of that was the physical problems that literally slowed me down and forced me to bed.  Without a laptop, doing any kind of writing was particularly hard.  With my iron levels as low as they were, it isn't any surprise that all I wanted to do was sleep.  So, I'm not kicking myself at being so far behind on either book, but I am disappointed in general.  I was hoping to be finalizing v6 of A.C. by now and getting it off the beta readers.  Instead, I'm still floundering my way through v4/5.  And I had hoped to be working on v3 revisions of Phoenix by now, but I don't even have a rough draft done.  Like I said, it couldn't be helped—being sick for 8 months took a lot of wind out of my sails, so to speak.

So the first thing I've done to help myself out is to readjust my goals for the two books for this year.  I'd like to just get the v4/5 version done for A.C.  And a rough draft for Phoenix would be nice, though I suspect that might be pushing it a bit.  I may have to be content with just getting the building draft done plus a whole lot of world building.

Which brings up a point quite briefly: just because you're writing in the same world doesn't mean no more world building.  In this case I need a whole bunch of different locations developed and I'm in a different time period than A.C.  So, yea, a lot more world building on my end.  The good news is that most of the basics are pretty set: magic, the gods, and so on, giving me a ready foundation for what I need to do for the other book.

Anyway, the second thing I'm doing to help get me going is to sign up for some challenges through my writing group.  Now, admittedly, I do this every time they hold a challenge, but I decided to join into this one a bit differently than in the past: I've focused my challenge choices so they apply to these two novels, especially A.C.  Now I do have a critique challenge in there, but the other two are novel revisions and world building specifically.  Neither has a high goal at the moment, but I will push them higher if I can.  I won't know if I can until I'm close to completing the ones I have: revise 7 chapters in 8 weeks and do 24k in world building.  I had to resist adding other goals that could derail me by giving me too much to do—I need to keep my focus on the two novels at hand and what I need to finish for them.

The one down side is that I've cut my weekly word count goal for Phoenix itself, the reason being that I need the world building before I can go too much further into developing the book itself.  That's part of what the building draft is all about: pulling together the information you need for descriptions and whatnot and putting all of it in the where it's needed.  When you get to the rough draft stage later, it's just a matter of working the details in that you need where you need them and spreading them out a bit.

Trust me, it works, for me anyway.

My weekly and daily goals are now adjusted a little to make the challenge goals the priority.  I'm actually not too worried about the world building stuff.  Between the two books, if I can't come up with 24k, then I'm just being lazy. REALLY lazy.  But the revisions do worry me.  I'm in the last 11 chapters, yes, but I'm also in the chapters that are going to require the most change.  Some are going to see drastic cuts.  Others are just plain going to have to be rewritten.  I suspect in the end I'll have 8 or 9 chapters instead of 11, but the chapter a week thing just may not happen with the amount of work that needs to be done to get there.  But I guess that's kind of what challenges are all about:  you reach for something you're not quite sure you can make and hope you actually do get there.  If they were all easy, it wouldn't be a challenge, right?

I've been doing so much editing work lately, even when I get the chance to work on my own stuff, that I'm feeling the lack of writing in a bad way.  So today we work on Phoenix 1.  I'm not quite ready for the building draft, which is the next stage of its development, but I can skip around so what I'm missing is no big deal.  Right now I'm pulling all my world building notes out of the notes draft and creating my world building list.  Once I have that done, it's on to actual writing—scenes, dialogue, action, pov, all of it.  This is the stage just before the rough draft, and there's still story development going on, but this is when the excitement really begins.  No more (or very little) exposition, narrative, and summary.  The rough draft will expand upon this draft, intertwine the descriptions, and so on, but this is where it all starts.

It's exciting!

Phoenix Rising has been sent off to a writing buddy for a plot check.  The notes draft isn't quite done—it needs some actual notes—but the story itself is.  Politics play a big part in this novel and I needed someone who likes that kind of thing to make sure they work. Last thing I want is to get to the point where I'm posting it for crits with my writers workshop and find out that the politics really don't work so the whole thing has to be stripped back to a point where I can fix them—probably back to the outline.  I would have sent it off at the narrative draft stage, but there isn't really enough in that stage to see this kind of thing.  It can help with general plotting, help makes sure the subplots are fairly woven in, stuff like that, but it's not so great at something like this because there's just not enough of it to see how well it works.

While my buddy checks it, I'll be adding notes and starting some character profiles and the like.  I'll also be continuing with A.C. revisions.  The current chapter has gone slower than the previous few, but it also was written out of order and about...7? years ago—and hasn't been touched since being written.  It was originally going to be, get this, chapter 10.  I should finish it by the end of this upcoming week.

Regardless, it's been a wonderfully productive weekend so far.  Tomorrow (erm, later today), I'll work on notes for the notes draft and probably chapter 4 of NPB.  I need 13k/week to make my word count goal for the year.  With a little pushing, I think I can actually make it this week.  We'll see about next week.

Between personal stress at home, work, weather, and a few other things, not much work has been done on my own writing recently (note previous entry).  However, I have finally reached the current halfway mark in Assassin's Choice in terms of chapter numbers.  I may be past that in actual word count because there's a huge chunk towards the end of the book that may get cut.  Phoenix Rising also got a nice, healthy word count addition this week--I now have a Friday buddy that I meet with to work on "alternate" projects.  Hopefully meeting with her every week will help keep me on track with it.

In publication news, two of my short stories are now available on AnthologyBuilder.com: "In the Blood" and "Intended".  One of them even received positive comments from the site editor.  I need to update the site to reflect that, I suppose.  ;)

There's little else to post about really.  I'm ruminating a new Meta and considering writing a new article on critiquing (yea, like we all ne4ed another one--but this one comes from something I realized about the crits I receive and how I react to them).  I'm still working on a short, and, yes, it's very odd for me to plod my way through a first draft of a short like this.  I just finished a S. L. Veihl book and have one other novel and an omnibus lined up for me to read.  For work, one manuscript has been returned to the author for round 2 edits, and the second manuscript is about done with round 1.

I did start trying out a new hard copy method for tracking my submissions.  It's going to take a bit to get all the old stuff in the columnar book...and I may end up having to do it all over again because I'm not so sure I like it.  I like the idea of a book and the information I'm trying to keep (in general), but the book is a bit...big.  I'm thinking of making my own template then having it copied and bound at Staples.  We'll see.

And...that's about it.  Told you it's been quiet.

It's been quite a month, with computer meltdowns and other issues cropping up, plus working on an editing project, so time hasn't been what I had hoped.  Fortunately, I managed to save all my writing in the computer mess, though I did lose quite a few other things.  Not as much as I feared, but something important always manages to get lost or mucked up.  In this case, I can't find the codes I need for a bit of software (non-writing related) and can't seem to get a response from the company at all.  I even tried to repurchase.  I'll wait until tomorrow to attempt to contact the company one more time.  If that doesn't work, I'll need to hunt up some replacement software that still works on Win 98 and contact the place that I purchased the software through to see if I can get my money back.  Most my other stuff is saved, but, for some unknown reason, my comp won't access the CDs.  I suspect my CD burner is toast.

A.C. is up to ch5 in revisions.  I showed the earlier chapters to an editor friend of mine and she gave me the thumbs up.  So, the revisions are on track even if they're a bit on the slow side.  They should speed up a little once I get past ch10, which is the last chapter with anything to salvage from my previous attempt at v4 and v5 revisions.  My only concern is making sure the chapters after ch10 have the same tone and polish.  There will be a 6th revision to make some very specific changes and to check for technical errors, then it will go out to beta readers.  Once it's off to them, I'll look at Quest for Ehlarayn and rework it from either the outline or the narrative draft up.

Phoenix Rising is in the outline stage.  I've sorted out 2 of the plot lines, beginning to end.  The people in my writing group who are actually paying attention like the story so far.  I've also reposted Stolen Priest to the group.  The only thing really getting ignored is my short stories.  I have a few new pieces that I need to work on, and a couple of older ones I really should revise, but I seem to go through these phases where I'm so focused on the novel work that anything else is just too much of an interference.

It really is rather surprising how much I have managed to finish all things considered.  I had to reformat, our phone line was torched by lightning, I've been down at least one or two days a week with migraines, storms have kept me off-line for several days, the husband was in an accident -- he's fine but the car is not.  And that's just the major stuff.  Hopefully things will settle down now.  I have more editing projects coming up, and I'm slowly working out a schedule that allows me time for my own writing.  In a month, it will be easier since the kids will be in school (though the daughter and granddaughter will be here).  Not sure when the weather will stop kicking me off-line as well, but hopefully that won;t be too much after the kids are out of the house.

A.C. is still in revisions, but it's all posted with my crit group and I'm pulling chapters and getting it done.  I'm trying to keep a fairly steady pace, not always easy even when I'm really focused on it -- which I have been.  During May, I ended up subbing for most of the month, and that really derailed me (work always does).  Then my second daughter moved back in, bringing chaos with her  -- less than when she lived here before, but it was still quite a disruption.  And now the kids are out and I'm trying to find something other than teaching as a job.  A steady pace now days is when I manage to work on revisions 2 days in a row.

I've started Phoenix Rising, the first in a series of 5 related books with different main characters.  In fact, they're also at different times in Kree (the nation in which they take place) history.  So they kind of stand alone, but they do chronicle the rise and fall of one major house in Kree.  The Thalionrhoes become a part of the first council when the last Life Guardian of Alden dies.  They resist the pressure from the human members to change the consistency of the council.  Later, they create an underground railroad of sorts, this one helping the lyanthry, declared traitors by the council, flee to Serayn.  Finally, the council turns on them completely and attacks their manor, razing the land, killing any surviving members they can find.

That's the whole series.  Yes, I've had it in my head for some time (like most my Alden novels).  Phoenix 1 is the rise of the family to power.  The main character is chosen by the last Life Guardian herself to become a council member.  And it is she who is by the Guardian's side when she prophecies and dies.  This is the main story, and now i have to build the rest -- the conflict from those who would rather the Guardian choose 3 people to take the places the Guardians once held, the conflict with the MC's own house and the spirit guardian that watches over them.  Unlike A.C., I don't have this one all thought out yet, so it's going to take me some time to pull just the plotting form together.

I'm considering looking at books 2 and 3 in the Heroes trilogy again too.  Neither were long enough rough drafts, so I need to go back a step or two with them and see what I need to do to build them up.  I'm thinking I may have to start back at the outline or plotting form and see if I need to develop anything more than I did, then rebuild.

Even if these 3 books never get published, they are certainly teaching me a lot!  I'm hoping A.C. will be ready for whole book readers by the end of the year, and ready for me to query agents by next summer, maybe earlier.  I keep letting myself get hung up on things that I don't really need to be hung up on.  I really have to stop doing that.