me, lately

Bit scatterbrained this morning (truthfully, I’m scatterbrained all hours of the day, so, nothing new). Nearly forgot to write this blog post. Oops.

On the writing front, I jumped back on the productive train last Wednesday and have since written a net of 8700 words. I say net because yesterday I had to delete a chapter, losing 3200 words. I’m glad I did though. I’ve been having second thoughts about that chapter since I finished it, and I feel much better now that it’s gone. What pertinent information and conflict it had, I moved to an earlier chapter, so there’s that. I did manage to write 2000 new words after that deletion, so yesterday wasn’t a total loss. I’m finding that writing is coming a bit easier now, as it usually does when I near the halfway point in my planned word count (I’m up to 32,500 words, out of a planned 80,000). The same thing happened with The Clockwork Giant. First half of the book took me a while to write, and then the second half flew by in a frenzy of awesome typing productivity. Same happened with that one book I abandoned too. I guess that’s just how I write. Today, Pub(lishing) Crawl did their first Question of the Month, asking their contributors what their favorite scenes to write were. That got me thinking. My favorite scenes to write are the slower ones, the moments where the main characters discover things about themselves or each other, when nothing much is going on, and I like writing dialogue. I do enjoy writing action scenes too, but they’re really difficult for me. Not sure why, but I have the hardest time with them, especially fight scenes. I also have a hard time writing romantic scenes, probably because I’m a cheesy romantic and it’s difficult for me to keep the cheese out of romance. Ask my husband.

Anyway, The Chroniker Legacy is coming along nicely. Sales are slowing down for The Clockwork Giant, and yet I still obsessively check my sales every day. Been thinking about what I’ll work on between writing The Chroniker Legacy and the third book. Might go back to the first novel I ever worked on (I think I started it in the eighth grade, about nine years ago), one that never got past 25,000 words in any version of it. I think I have the skill to write it now. Maybe. I’ve also thought about working on that Indian-inspired fantasy that wasn’t quite good enough, but almost there. Thought about writing the Norse epic or the space colonization novel, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for those yet. The stories haven’t been stewing long enough. Which is why I think my most likely course of action is to write the first novel, a standard fantasy novel. To this day, I love the characters and the world I created. I’d like to try to write it again, now that I’m a much better writer. Now, my reasoning for working on something between books two and three of the Chroniker City books is because the second book will be in limbo for at least four months, and since I can’t work on the third book until the second book is absolutely finished, I need something else to occupy my time. Hence, fantasy novel.

In other news, it’s Spring! Finally! We’ve had spectacularly warm weather this past week, and my husband and I have been taking advantage of it. We did a lot of yard work last week. Bought a hedge trimmer, which I maniacally used to hack our hedges down to size. Also had a guy come and pull out a bunch of bushes. We’ll be calling him again this weekend. More bushes to remove! We plan on moving our garden boxes to the corner of the yard, where the plants will get more direct sunlight. Where the boxes are now, the sunlight is filtered through the trees. If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you might remember that I repainted my dining table a few months ago. Well, turns out that the seal we used turned the white paint yellow. So, I had to sand, repaint, and refinish with a different product. Well, that product didn’t work either. Made the table really rough for whatever reason. So I sanded, repainted, and am currently working on refinishing the table again. Hopefully it works this time. If it doesn’t. I’m going to explode. Our other project for this week was painting our dining chairs, which were black. We sanded, primed, and painted the first coat. I hope to finish them this weekend.

And speaking of this weekend, an old friend of ours is coming to stay for a few days. I expect the weekend will be full of grilled food (yum!), tabletop RPGs, and just a good few days of fun. Though, we’ll still be doing our projects. Husband will do more yard work, and I’ll finish off the chairs and table.

So, that’s my life lately. What have you been up to?