Tag Archives: Writing

Frustrations

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Life has a tendency of getting in the way.

Today was suppose to be an awesome day for writing. My daughter had a “thing” scheduled, and my son had school so I had the house all to myself today. YES! I haven’t had the entire house to myself since last June.

So I drove my daughter to the college for orientation. Then I had to get my car fixed. A water hose busted a few days before so but it only took about an hour to get that all squared away.

Back home, quiet house, and some music.
My kitchens a mess and I need to have maintenance up to fix my stove, lets clean that really quick. 20 minutes.
Couple things to clean up in the living room, but that only took five minutes.
Sit down at the computer. Oh, email. Let’s answer a couple things, and check my messages on G+. 30 min
I open up my scrivener file, and the chapter I was working on last night. Read a few lines. Hear the sound of a light saber as my cell phone goes off.

“I’m bored, can you come get me, mom?”
Sigh.

It’s now noon and she’s been there three hours. I go pick her up.
Take her to the store since we’re already out. We need cat food and kitty litter after all. Finally home. 60 min
We sit down on the couch for a few minutes and watch a little youtube. Another 40 minutes pass.
It’s now time to take her to her therapy session. Take her there, drop her off, come home. 15 min
I sit back down on the couch feeling tired, and drained. The day is more then half over and I’ve done nothing… well… the house is clean.

Another text, she’s ready to come home just 45 min later.

It’s now 4pm. Everyone is home. Say goodbye to the nice quiet house.

It took me a couple hours to finally get settled in front of the PC and actually get a few words out. But it wasn’t easy. This is why I usually write after 10pm. That’s when the kids are in bed, the TV is turned down, or off, and the boyfriend is busying himself with something else.

As I’m writing this, it’s 8pm. Dinner is over, the kids are settling into their own little things, and I finally… maybe… have a chance to go write. Maybe I need a shower first.

Failure IS an Option

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I’m a huge fan of the Mythbusters. Science. Explosions. Mechanical stuff. Interesting ways of looking at a problem. How could I not be a fan?

One of the things they often say is: Failure is an option! And failure is an option for me, too.

We live in a world that is constantly striving for success. To get a job you have to be a go getter, extrovert, hard worker that is constantly kissing your bosses ass. Right? That’s how you get ahead. You don’t show your faults, or insecurities. You don’t cry when the boss doesn’t like your ideas. You don’t sweat it, just hold your chin high and keep going.

Then you have the Mythbusters who are constantly messing up. Adam burns his eyebrow off. Tory crashes a bicycle. Kari throws up. But they keep chugging along trying to test the myths and see what makes the world tick. They fail CONSTANTLY, but they learn in their failures and try again.

With me and my writing… failure is an option. Some days I completely fail and don’t get any writing done. Other days I feel guilty for slacking and I’ll go write a thousand words off the cuff. From each failure I learn something about myself, and how I work. I learn how long I can sit at the computer, and how much I can write before my brain starts ticking away at other things. I know what I can listen to, and what I can’t before I can’t concentrate on anything except the words in my headphones.

Failure is an option, because failure is a learning opportunity. Failure is a starting point. It can spawn new ideas and lead you down new paths.

But failure is frustrating too. I keep missing deadlines I give myself, and I keep pressing forward. Eventually I’m going to finish writing this book and have something to show for nearly a year of work, but till then I keep failing, and trying to find the bright spots in it. Like discovering how the curse was broken, or understanding the motive behind a character, or working out the language on a tricky section of text.

Now… back to writing. (It’s at 89.4k words atm.)

Update

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written an update so I thought I should check in with everyone on progress.

Last week I showed the new cover I made for “The Scarab Necklace”. It came out incredibly well and I really loved it. I wrote a small section of the story and fleshed out the plot so that I could go back and finish it when I was ready.

That gave me a needed break from “Mermaid’s Curse” and I’ve since been back to finishing that. It is 88.5k words long now. I just have a couple chapters to finish up… All battle scenes; go figure. I’ve plotted them out and I’m just going through and making them read correctly now before sending it to an editor.

I’m loving this story. Don’t get me wrong, after nearly a year working on this, and stareing at it every day, I’m going to be soooooooooo happy to be done with it. But the story, the tragedy, the adventure, and the world make me so very happy. It’s the first full length novel that I can say I’m really proud of.

For NaNoWriMo this year I’ve already plotted out a new “Eternal Tapestry” book. There will be five books in that series. Hopefully I’ll finish writing two of them by the end of next year, though I’m going to shoot for three. Since they are only 30k words long it doesn’t take as long to write them. Forgotten Ones took three months, start to finish, and another month to edit. So… Let’s see if I am getting faster or not in the new year.
The next one, “Goddess Born”, is going to be number one in the series. It tells the story of the first meeting between Maylin, the new fate of the present, and Jadina, the fate of the past.

“Unicorn’s Fury” and “Gaia’s Blood”, the next two books in the series, draw on their experiences with other gods and goddesses in the modern world. I haven’t decided if there will be more in this series because I have other stories I want to get to, but it is definitely a fun series to write.

Okay, back to editing “Mermaid’s Curse”.

Meet my Character – Okira

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I had so much fun participating in the “Meet my Character Bloghop”. Maya Goode invited me, and I just couldn’t resist. It was a great opporunity to really define who Okira is.

1) What is the name of your character?
Okira is the offspring of a merman, and a witch. A magical, and very rare crossbreed.

2) When and where is the story set?
The story is set in the islands of The Sea of Tears on the world of Peyllen. It is a rich fantasy world where the inhabitants were birthed from the various elements, and their magic and make up reflect those elements. The Sea of Tears has been cut off from the rest of the world by a cult who control a kraken, and the kraken sees to it that no ship may enter or exit the Sea of Tears without the acolytes permission.

3) What should we know about him/her?
Okira is doubly cursed. Because of her heritage she can not enter the sea without the kraken feeling her magical essence and killing her. She was also cursed soon after her birth to die the moment she finds love.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?
The acolytes have hunted witches to the brink of extinction, and once they learn of Okira they seek her out to use her latent magical essence in a ritual that will change the entire Sea of Tears.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?
Okira wants to return to the sea, her mermaid blood calls out for her to do so, but she can only do so if the kraken is dead.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
Mermaid’s Curse. You can find blurbs from the book here, here, here and here.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?
I am working on the final chapters, and once finished will send it out to be edited and get a good cover. Once that is done it will be published. It should be by the end of October.

My Bio
I live in the cloudy state of Washington near Seattle with my three children, and a cat. Manager of a little store by day, writer by night, I’ve published 20+ short stories and three novellas. Mermaid’s Curse will be the first full length novel. I do all of my own cover art, but have learned that you (almost) always need a good editor. I started publishing in earnest in April of 2013.

To find me, my work, and a newsletter where you can sign up for a free book go to crissymoss.com
I can also be found here: http://about.me/crissymoss

I was Tagged by:

Maya Goode 1Maya Goode is a short story author, novelist, and poet. Raised by an amazing mercurial woman who shared neither blood nor race, she lives on the edge of identities and writes deeply honest stories about the human journey. She is an alumna of Dominican University of California and resides somewhere between mountains and the ocean. Her first novel, Remigium Rising, will be published in Spring 2015. You can visit her at www.mayagoode.com

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/quotidianlight

Google Plus https://plus.google.com/+quotidianlight
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/quotidianlight

~Meet Next Week’s Author – Scott Richards~ 

20140618_202924Scott is a California-based author where he is forced to live with all of the characters in his head. Despite what you may hear shrieked into the night air, he is a sad, crazy little man.

He is maintained by those familiar few for the rare nugget he spouts on occasion. These mad ramblings are recorded, then dictated back to old shoe-cobbling elves that have retired, but still like to “keep themselves busy” as stipulated per their Retired Original Union Group Home (R.O.U.G.H.) contract agreements.

Show your support for this noble cause.

Think of the children.

-Scott Richards
Author of the Darlicci’s Shroud series
Website: http://www.theshroudbetween.com
Newsletter: http://bit.ly/WSdktb

“What’s on your mind?”

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overflowing-closetEvery time I log into Facebook, which isn’t often, it greets me with that mantra. I very rarely answer on there because FB, for me, is less about broadcasting what’s going on in my life, or even keeping tabs on my friends, and more about communication. I will send messages to friends on there, or upload pictures sometimes, but otherwise want very little to do with it. I’d rather talk to friends about what is going on in my life then post it to facebook.

Our interaction with social media has become rather strange. Many people share pictures on Instagram, post what’s happening on Facebook, or share pictures of their food on tumblr, but have fewer actual conversations. But we call the people following us on those various platforms “friends”, and we get little boosts of serotonin every time we get hundreds of likes on a picture/post.

I admit that this is why I prefer Google plus. There are fewer personal posts. Images and information is usually about jobs, hobbies, or information on how to do something. I follow a lot of authors and geekdom so I get to see information about new blog posts, how to, news that’s going on in the world, and of course the geeky stuff I love like Firefly and Dr Who. It doesn’t call these people friends, unless you name the circle they are in “friends”, it calls them contacts. They can be business associates, fiends, people who love the same thing that you do, or any number of other things. It’s really good for networking. Not as good for posting random BS from your day to day life. Usually.

I suppose I’m terrible at social media. But I’m okay with that. Some things don’t need to be online. I mean really, do you need to know everything I eat, what I’m reading, and that I just got a root canal? Okay, maybe I could write a blog post about some of those things, and I probably will, but not every day of every moment.

“What’s on my mind?” Music, games, hopes, and dreams. Writing my books. Getting some sleep now that my tooth is healing. So many things, and many more tomorrow.

But I think I’ll only broadcast what I think others might be interested in.

Continue reading →

Abandoned books.

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The other day reddit had a thread suggesting that Goodreads should have an “abandoned” category for book lists.

This got me thinking. I’ve actually abandoned a lot of books the last couple years.  More than ever before. Not always because they were bad books. Sometimes it was time management issues, or just not quite captivating enough. Every now and then I’d get involved in other things and just forget I was reading that particular book.

The are so many wonderful books out there and not enough time to read them. If there was a heaven it might be eternity in a library with every book ever written. (As long as it comes with a Starbucks.) But this isn’t heaven, it’s just Washington. We don’t have eternity, just 80 years or so. So picking and choosing which books to read is sometimes a bit important. I’m going to spend hours or days with this book, I want to enjoy the experience.

I don’t know if an abandoned book tag is a good idea, especially since people won’t be telling you why they abandoned it, but it would be interesting. You might learn some interesting things about a book, or people’s taste, or what keeps them turning the page.

There is a man who documents his abandoned books. In the The Immerse or Die report Jefferson Smith reads until the book has three ‘fatal flaws,’  and then he tells you what they are. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the book was unreadable or that he didn’t finish it, just that it had some major issues that pulled him out of the story enough for it to be a ‘fatal flaw.’

I know some of the things that pull me out of a story are too much foreshadowing, LOTS of grammar/spelling mistakes, inconsistency, and a style or plot so convoluted that I can’t follow it. There are more reasons, but those are the ones that come to mind right off the top of my head.

Why might you abandon a book? Would you want to share that with others? Would you want to know why others abandoned your book?

That last question… I think I’m a little too chicken to put my sorry up for speculation on Immerse or Die. At least for now.

Finally Free

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I honestly forgot that Twilight Tales was going to be free this weekend, and it will only be free until midnight.

The RingBut, I also found out that “The Ring” is finally price matched as free with the Kobo version. The ring is the start of a short series of short stories. (Each about 5k words long.) The second book, “The Camera“, is also available.

The Illicit Gain’s series tells the story of several mysterious items, each with a strange power that the wielder can use to do some fantastic things. The first book, The Ring, is about the thief who stole those items, and what happens to him. The second, The Camera, is about an old Polaroid camera and a young boy who happens upon it.

Although the items look ordinary, they are far from it.

 

UPDATE:

“Mermaid’s Curse” is now nearly 83,000 words long, and I have 13 of 36 chapters left to edit and rewrite. Let’s see what I can get done in the next couple hours. I also shared another little section of the book if you’d like a sneak peak.

Burn out

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Every November I participate in NaNoWriMo. It’s a tough month filled with a lot of writing and sitting in chairs all for the chance just to say I did it, I won.

It’s no wonder that right after NaNoWriMo a lot of people take a long break. We get burnt out. That’s 50k words worth of story completed and our minds are jelly.

But that’s not the only burn out an artist can suffer from.

I’ve been working on Mermaids Curse since October. Yes, that’s nine months with one project. I’ve completed a little over 81k words on it, rewritten over half of it already, and also thrown away about half as much as I’ve kept. That’s well over 100,000 words in the same project. It makes you sick of looking at it after a while.

Burn out can happen when you’ve spent too much time on the same project. When your pushing yourself too hard or when you aren’t taking care of the rest of yourself correctly.

For me, when I am really feeling it I will take a day or two to read something. I don’t get nearly enough time to read anymore. I often will switch projects for a day or two so that I’m still writing but not over working on the same project.

I know right now I feel like there is no end in sight for my dang novel and that makes writing and editing take that much longer. It’s that feeling of defeat that always gets in the way. Oddly enough, when I published ‘Footprints’ a couple months ago that gave me a burst of speed that carried me through the edits of half the book. But I haven’t published anything since then and I know that is part of the reason I’m having issues. Unfortunately I don’t have anything to publish so that isn’t an easy fix, but I’m not giving up.

The ultimate cure for burn out is just finishing the project and moving on to the next one. I know I’ll be so excited when I’m finally finished with Mermaids Curse.

So… This was my break and now I’m off to write some more.

Freebie Weekend Aftermath

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Twilight TalesThis weekend I did a freebie giveaway using the KDP select program for Twilight Tales. It went amazing!

It is still free for a few more hours but I thought I’d give a run down of how it went.

I tried KDP a shortly after I started to publish. I had several books up at the tigraphme, but very few reviews, and only managed to get 200 downloads for the entire weekend. No reviews. No extra sales that I know of.

This time I managed to use Author Marketing Club to my advantage
and posted Twilight Tales to every freebie site I could. Well, I at least submitted it. I know at least one of them actually ran it, no idea if others did. Most of them do not tell you whether or not they run your book. I had to go snoop in order to find the one that did. I do not think anyone ran an advert for my book the first time.

This time I gave away more than 1000 books.

The results of all the give always: ranking #1 in two categories. I managed a screen capture of the two. In the third category it ranked as high as #2, but I did not manage to get a screen shot of that.

Only time will tell if this gives me any actual sales to books, or reviews. Right now all I got was a little visibility in a couple sub genre charts. The nicest one I saw was #10 on the Horror page. Very visible for anyone looking for Horror. Did it make a difference? Not sure yet, but I will definitely let you know in a few weeks.

ranking

 

 

 

Also, if you’d like to get Twilight Tales it is still free until midnight.

Around the web

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It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these, but I just had a few links I wanted to share.

The Reading Rainbow kickstarter. They are getting a match up to $1 million for everything over 4mil, so if you haven’t donated now is your chance.

Fiction Unboxed is done with, and they have finished “Dream Engine”. I’ve been listening to it, and it’s a fantastic story so far. Hopefully it will be available on Amazon soon.

US publishers sold more ebooks then print books last year. (Though they made about the same from those ebooks as they did last year.)

Authors dressing up as their favorite characters from a book.

If we talked to other professions like we talk to artists. (FANTASTIC video by Garrett Robinson. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should!)

Star Trek and Economics (It’s an interesting read, and kind of relevant to our point in history.)(Also, what Reddit had to say was interesting)

 

On a personal note:

“Mermaid’s Curse” is coming along nicely. I’ve hit the 80k mark and I’m still going on it. I’m expecting that it will be about 82k once I’m finished. Right now I’m working on edits, and the edits are about half way finished. Then off to a real editor who knows what they are doing 😉

If you would like to see some scenes from “Mermaid’s Curse” then check here, here, and here.