Hello everyone, Halloween is upon us! Things hiding in the dark and all that. This year is kind of a bummer for me on my near-favorite holiday. *sighs* I’m sick, again. This year has been filled with sickness, I hates it, precious! On top of that, I get to work tonight, yay… I don’t ever get scheduled to work Sundays so I was a bit bummed about it. Samantha gets to go trick-or-treating with my sister and her kiddos. I would much prefer to do that. Oh well…

I’ve been productive lately, in a not-so-bloggy kind of way. I’m sure you guys are used to my quietness by now so I’ll stop apologizing for it. Muahah. But I’ve been reading and writing a lot. The Forest Awakens has an entirely new prologue and a new chapter one has been fully fleshed out as well (the writing has just begun). You may be thinking… your percent bar doesn’t really reflect still working on the first chapter, but, alas, it does. These are the two main goals for this draft. I’ve touched up chapters here and there in no particular order, but this is the meat of what I hope is the final, final draft that brings me an agent.

Pushed to the Edge is coming to a close soon. I’ve been too sick to write this week so it’s going to get delayed a week. I tried (and actually completed) a draft of it. But I hit the magic button and it got DELETED. Trust me, it was for the best. I have about 1000 words of a newer, much better version.

To finish, here are some books I’ve read lately. We’re hyped up for Towers of Midnight coming out Tuesday!

• His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

For a number of reasons, some that I’ll mention in a moment, David and I have decided to change the format of our podcast. Instead of bringing new episodes every week we’re going to do it every other Tuesday and make each episode last a bit longer. It may not be a permanent change, but for now it’s how we’ll run things. Because of this I’m going to attempt to do more posts than just the Tuesday Night Stories. I figure one post every two weeks might be a bit too rare.

To keep up Tuesday posts, I’m going to talk a little bit about where the story is at on the days that we don’t have a podcast episode. It will be a way to get into my mind as I’m plotting and writing these. Hopefully a little insight into my process will be entertaining. It’s possible that I might have something else to share about the stories on the off weeks, but it’s too soon to talk about it just yet! For now it’s my super-secret TNS plan. *gives a drastic villain cackle*

So, some reasons why we’re moving the podcast to every other Tuesday:

• Time has become a serious factor for me lately. The point of this isn’t to let my writing suffer by pushing too hard. Longer episodes, a bit more spread out, will let me dedicate the time needed for each one.
• Some of the stories are 7-9 episodes each. Without any breaks that is more than two months per story. That seems like a long time to keep people’s attention. Longer episodes should mean that each story can be released faster.
• Since I started this my writing time for non-podcast projects has been a lot more limited than I originally planned. Having more time for each one will let me get back to work on my novels. That’s really important to me.
• Last but not least, I think each episode will contain a lot better writing by not having to rush (sometimes I’ve have to rush it a lot more than I want). This goes for David as well, giving him plenty of time to get a perfect recording.

I appreciate your understanding in this matter. I hope that it will only increase the quality of our podcast. Sometimes writing just needs a little more time to marinate!

Things are finally calming down around here. This means part 3 of Adventures Through the Window got finished up for a new podcast episode tomorrow! Huzzah! I’m happy to get back into writing. My other Summer project is to get a lot done of the rewrite of The Forest Awakens. I’m excited about this new take on the book. I’ve figured out places to add much richer descriptions, and more insight into the childrens’ reactions to the events unfolding around them. Multiple agents pointed out these changes to me, making me confident the effort will make the story that much more appealing to future agents, and the kiddos who will hopefully one day enjoy it.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow to listen to the first podcast in over a month!

Late-night post update. I’ve been sickly the last 3 days or so. It’s never fun being sick and my mind is moving very slowly. I said I wanted to give everyone a recap of where we left on in Adventures Through The Window. It’s been 3-4 weeks since we’ve had the podcast with sickness, family problems, and so on.

In part one, James suspected his substitute teacher was up to something when he saw the man fleeing from his Vice Principal! James followed him into a world like nothing he’d ever seen. Part two continued with James’ adventure in this strange new land by leading him to a mysterious floating staircase. When James finally found his way down, he’s in the clearing of a colorful, strange forest, no staircase in sight. There were three paths that James could take, and eventually he decided on one.

If you’d like to read the first 2 parts, you can do so here. The story starts again with part 3 next Tuesday, as we see where his choice of paths takes him.

Samantha made this from scratch!

Well I attempted to write this yesterday, you know, on my birthday, but things kept coming up. It was a great day! For me, birthdays are what New Years is to others. It’s a time to look at what you’ve accomplished this year, and using what you’ve learned to make the next year better. This year, it was mostly about writing for me.

I realized that I haven’t done a writing update in awhile while I was thinking about what this coming year will mean to me as a writer. I’ve gotten behind on it. First of all, The Forest Awakens jumped up to 100% on my editing goal. It’s pretty good, grammatically speaking. The rejections I’ve gotten from agents have made me look at it under a new microscope though. They all like my writing, they all like the story idea, but they all also said they didn’t connect with the main character enough.

I’ve more or less come to the inevitable question that most writers probably go through. My assassin book has been sitting at about 20% completed on the backburner while I edited TFA, and now I have to decide if I want to work on the changes to my YA novel that agents have suggested, or if I want to put it aside for now and finish my new book?

Currently I’m leaning toward another draft of The Forest Awakens. It would be a big draft, basically rewriting many parts of it, although most of the current material doesn’t need to be cut, just have more added to it. We shall see over the next couple days, while I have a podcast to finish anyway.

Happy (now late) Birthday to meeeee!

I mentioned yesterday that I thought TNS might be postponed until tomorrow. Considering the time, it’s best to assume that it has been. I can say that it is completely finished and reviewed. It is, at least, partly recorded as well.

I think this next scene demonstrates how much I’ve grown as a writer. While it did take me too long to write it, that is something I can practice and improve with time. What is impressive to me is the level of depth that comes into the story just by introducing one new character. I knew the sort of man I wanted him to be, but you can’t create truly in depth characters on a whim, and wise characters doubly so. There has be a lot of history there, a lot of things that made this person wise.

I do not want to reveal anything of course, so perhaps I will talk more about it after this story is through. I do believe it is one of the most interesting characters I’ve written so far. That is why these podcasts are so fascinating to me. Books take a long time to write, and an even longer time to edit (in my rather minor experience). But the stories for the podcast are pretty short, and they let me explore so many worlds and characters. Being able to share them with you guys is just icing on the cake.

I tend to like “what would you do?” scenarios. That concept is what inspired my latest Tuesday Night Story, Deposed. If you checked out part one, you know that Anald was overthrown by Sildon as King of the realm. What would you do in that situation? Surely a king has to plan in advance for situations like this. That is the overwhelming flaw of feudalism I imagine. You are constantly at risk of being invaded, poisoned, or executed by someone who wants your power.

If you didn’t catch part one check out Tuesday’s post. It should be the post directly under this one. Deposed will be the tale of what a king might do when he finds himself replaced. Would he stand by and give up, or would he fight back? Join me every Tuesday to find out!

In other writing news. My assassin novel is inching its way forward on the progress bar. It is up to 20% now. I’m really loving this story, but I haven’t had as much time to work on it as I would like. The Forest Awakens is also moving up slower than I wanted. I’m updating the edits as soon as I receive them, but Samantha has been rather wrapped up in her own work lately. Hopefully she’ll have some more time for it again soon. For anyone interested, she’s currently holding a giveaway on her blog. You can win a piece of jewelry from her Etsy shop for you or for someone special. Entering is very easy!

So I have a lot online friends participating in National Novel Writing Month this year. Not many people I know that live in my area are writers, so it’s fun to actually have some support from buddies this year. I’ve met quite a few on Twitter through the use of the #NaNoWriMo hashtag. Of course, a lot I’ve met via other hashtags are participating as well. Such as #wordathon or #amwriting.

What does NaNoWriMo mean to me? Probably not what it does to some other people. I’ve participated for a few years. Only the first year did I feel I needed to attempt exactly what they suggested. For anyone who doesn’t know, the idea is to write a novel in November. 50,000 words in 30 days. I did it, I proved that I could make myself write.

Since then, I’ve had other goals and objectives surrounding NaNoWriMo. I always try for 50,000 words still, but I care less about what exactly they go toward. I write every day. In November I’m already working on whatever latest novel I’m writing. This year it happens to be my assassin novel. That basically means I don’t ever want to start a new project just because it’s November. Instead, I pretend I’m a big-shot author and I try for more words every day than I would otherwise. I always try to write 750 words a day. Often times I go over that, but that’s my daily goal. NaNoWriMo just gives me the opportunity to try for more.

What are your NaNo goals? Are you one of those crazy types that scoffs at 50K words and tries to go for 100K? Or do you barely get away with the roughly 1700 words a day?