Welcome if you’re new. Here are my appearances in the New England area, the definite ones:

New England Author Expo, July 27 from 4 pm-9 pm, Danvers, MA
RI Comicon, November 11, 12, and 13 from 10 am to 8 pm?, Providence, RI
RI Author Expo, December 3, from 10 am to something, Cranston, RI

I’ve also started on War Mage’s third book, tentatively titled The High Road. I did the planning like I did with Blood From a Stone, my NaNoWriMo book last year. I got together index cards and wrote out the main plot. Then I wrote out the subplots and their results. I gathered all the index cards together and put intertwined the subplots in the main plot. I only have five subplots, one not very well defined, but I’ll let the muses work on it.

I will admit, this method worked really well for Blood, because I could keep on task and each index card was vague enough that they let the muses and my mind think up the details. With Blood, I dictated it, so I really didn’t have the time to stop and rewrite like I do normally.

I think with this new one, I’m going to transcribe literally from my first draft, the composition notebook that I usually use. Composition books are portable, don’t need electricity, are easy to bring anywhere and I can sometimes hide my writing at work in it. Now, my first draft isn’t perfect. But I’ve found that I refer to a lot of things in it that aren’t in the second draft. The first draft is ingrained in my memory, which is why sometimes the second draft ends up being confused. Then I have a third draft to try and get the second draft ingrained in my memory. At least, this is what happened with War Mage. I went through six drafts before finally sending the one to the editor. And I personally feel that 1) it’s way too short and 2) it’s a hot mess because I went so far off the first draft. Although another part of me thinks that the character development in the final draft is the best.

I started listening to a couple of books that I had on Audible, (Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis, Hard Magic by Laura Anne Gilman and Butcher Bird by an author I can’t read) and noticed that almost all of them break the cardinal rule of “no info dump in the first chapter.” Also, they don’t go into the detailed description of people. Some description yes, but not the detail that my editor wants. When I listened to the audiobook version of my book, I noticed that the description dragged. It’s something I need to improve.

I dumped Hard Magic because the first chapter was the main character’s in detail discussion of how she gets ready for her day and an info dump of her backstory. I didn’t bother listening to the rest. I dumped Butcher Bird because of the bad grammar and writing. Hard Spell seems like  fun, even though the author did the info dump, it was interesting and something I need to aspire to. I noticed also that all three used the first person POV, and that Hard Magic and Butcher Bird used prologues. That’s one of my cardinal rules – no prologues. I read in a writing book somewhere something like “Prologues are scenes that don’t fit in the novel, but the author thinks are too good to get rid of.” I agree with that sentiment. In fact, in physical books, I don’t read the prologues until I finish the book, and I find that most of the time, they aren’t integral to the book.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to these days. Writing, listening to books. A book I’m reading is Blueprint Your Novel, which kind of uses my index card method but converts it into lists. I’m also reading Heretic, which is a very interesting take on the Knights Templar.