Monday Miscellany

I am one scene away from finishing the rewrite of chapter one of Strawberry Moon. This is incredibly exciting for me. My characters have clearer voices, my dialogue is much less awkward, I've eliminated most of the information dumps, and I've managed to (mostly) control my adjectives. This is definitely not the final draft, but it's getting there!

Over the weekend, I did a lot of thinking, and I have decided to take a page from Kristine Kathryn Rusch's book and use separate pennames for my young adult work and for my adult work. The problem I'm having now is coming up with a new one. I have a handful of lovely options, so I'm just trying to make a decision.

The reason that is important is because I finally have a collective working title for the erotica shorts I'm plotting. I am pretty sure I've mentioned that I had the action draft of a smut story done and that I was working on the draft of it. I've been calling the short "Galena" and intend to write one to three more shorts featuring the same female character in a series of sexual situations. A chat with a friend the other day led to some development of her character, so the series has gotten a bit more involved than I had originally planned, but I'm not unhappy with where I think it's going. Anyway, the collective working title is Cass Gets Her Kicks. Now, I just have to finish writing it.

The funny site I mentioned in this blog post is now defunct. I'm bummed about this because it was really funny, but I think we can all agree that copyrights are a pretty big deal.

Chuck Wendig is trying to push more copies of his writing advice book Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey, so he's whoring himself out to do it offering some incentives. They're pretty good incentives.

I am still reading Michelle Muto's The Book of Lost Souls, and I am still loving it to pieces. I keep catching myself wishing it was last summer and I had a ton of free time on my hands to do nothing but read. I would have finished it by now, I would know how things end with Nick and Ivy, and I could be pestering her to finish the next one already. (She said she's working on it.) Of course, the book wasn't out last summer, so those wishes don't really do me any good.

And with that, I'm going to end this blog entry.