31 Tuesday Jul 2018
Posted in Grace, Self-publishing, Tassamara
The above showed up in my email this morning. I thought, “Wow, that was surprisingly efficient of someone.” Well, or something — some computer system that is much speedier than I am, anyway.
But, yeah, since some people (or maybe just me?) have already received an email, it feels like a good time to say that A Gift of Grace, the fourth book in the Tassamara series, will be released on August 14th.
And is available for pre-order right now!
20 Thursday Oct 2016
Posted in Randomness, Tassamara, Travel, WIP
For the past three months, I’ve written some… but I’ve also worried that my plan to live in a camper and write a lot was maybe not really going to work out. Because living in a camper is great, I adore it, but the temptations are endless, far more so than living in a house (where I was also not getting enough writing done!)
There’s always some new place to see, some new adventure on the horizon. And I’m not talking about big adventures — whitewater rafting or mountain-climbing — but little adventures. Taking the dogs to a new dog park, spending an hour exploring a new grocery store, finding a way to get my laundry done. And also, of course, visiting people and spending time with them instead of staring at my computer.
However, my plan to sit still for ten days and bore myself into writing has been working incredibly well. I am really happy with what I’ve accomplished with Grace. Lesson learned: I’ve now scheduled the next several weeks and they’re not going to be adventurous. Until Grace is finished, I’m going to sit in Serenity. But I’ll be living in Tassamara, at least in my imagination, and really, it’s a pretty darn fun place to be.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be back at this campground: it’s basically a parking lot and there are a lot of parking lots in the world to explore. No need to stay at the same one twice. But apart from the wonderful dog park, which we have visited every single day, I’ve really loved walking in the dark here. It’s the time of year — it takes forever to get light in the morning, so I’ve been walking Z before sunrise and it’s getting dark early, so I’ve also been walking her in evening darkness. But it’s been incredibly beautiful. The moon was fantastic the past few days, so bright, and the sky was clear enough to see stars, not by the hundreds, alas, but at least by the dozens. In the early morning walks, I cast multiple shadows on the ground, moonlight shadows and streetlight shadows and shadows from lights showing up in trailer windows.
When I write my Massachusetts stories with magic (someday, someday!), there will be at least one character who can send her shadows off to do odd jobs for her. And in a desperate moment, she will search for lights to create many shadows, and in another desperate moment, she’ll be trapped in darkness, unable to find a shadow anywhere.
Someday on this trip — maybe even before I make it to the Grand Canyon — I’m going to visit a place where I can see thousands of stars in the night sky. I want to have that moment of amazement and wonder, that hold-your-breath awe at the beauty that lurks above us all the time that we hardly ever get to see.
But today, I’m going to write some more Grace.
29 Monday Feb 2016
This weekend I decided that A Gift of Grace was abysmal, unreadable, the worst thing I’ve ever written.
ARGH!
I wound up reading the current version from beginning to end, and concluded that I’m just in a little bit of a murky middle space. I know how it ends, I know a couple more scenes before it ends, but I don’t entirely know how to get from where I am to there. So that’s going to be my goal for this week, to make it through the murky middle and onto the solid end ground. Or at the very least, map out the path through the murky middle.
My secondary goal is to stop beating myself up for not having finished yet. I wanted to finish by the end of August. Ha. And then the end of November and then the end of every month since. I can’t believe that we’re entering March and I’m still not done. But being mean to myself about that is not helping me in any way. If I could take all the time I waste telling myself how incompetent I am and turn it into time that I am writing real words, I’d be doing so much better.
Of course, that’s always easier said than done. I tell myself to be nice to me and yet I often just can’t figure out how. I used to make to-do lists when I felt overwhelmed so I could start checking items off. It gives a nice sense of accomplishment on days when the universe makes it impossible to feel complete. Item #1 on the kind of to-do list should always be “Make a to-do list” so that I have something to check off as soon as I’m done. Maybe I’ll start there today.
To-do list
#1: Make a list.
#2: Write a Monday morning blog post
#3: Answer emails and clean out in-box…
Hmm, and it’s 7:07 AM and look, I’m off to a much better start than I would ever given myself credit for, since #3 is done, #2 is almost done, and #1 will soon be done.
#4: Outline all the remaining scenes in Grace.
And that’s the stumper. But it’s a great goal and I think I’ll get started on it now. The nice thing is that having established that it’s my goal, I can be working on it while I walk the dogs, clean the kitchen, fold the laundry and maybe finish painting the bathroom. And those are all good goals, too.
End of the month check-in: I have not yet broken my streak. The words weren’t many yesterday or Saturday or even last week as a whole, but I’ve written every day of 2016. Go, me!
22 Monday Feb 2016
So I am not quite, but very close, to having written as far as I ever have in A Gift of Grace. In other words, I’ve gotten past where I left off in the first version, almost to where I left off in the second version, and past where I left off in the third version. I’m calling that good news. Except I keep thinking I should be done and then discovering that I’m nowhere close.
I suspect that the editing of this one is going to be more challenging than I want it to be, too, because after so many versions, I don’t always remember what’s still in and what’s out. I am definitely going to need good beta readers who are willing to call me out on my screw-ups. That there are screw-ups is basically guaranteed.
And that said… I told my dad on Friday that I was pretty sure Grace is the best thing I’ve ever written. Obviously, I’m not done yet, so I could still screw it up. Equally obviously, my opinion isn’t really worth all that much. I know these characters really well now. Whether a reader who hasn’t lived through all the versions will feel like she or he knows them equally well is still totally up in the air. I won’t know that for a while. I might not ever know that if it turns out to be like The Wedding Guests in terms of getting very few reviews. It might be a total mystery to me forever. But that’s okay. Sort of.
I did realize that one of my ongoing problems, apart from the truly crazy over-abundance of characters, has been time and the passing thereof. I wanted this book to be like Ghosts in terms of taking place over months and having a romance that was a slow and plausible real build. People don’t fall in love in two days. They fall in infatuation and love is what happens over the course of time. Akira and Zane have, to me, real love. They met, were attracted, flirted, started bonding, slept together, kept bonding, spent a lot of time together, enjoyed one another’s company, liked one another for their differences, faced danger together, and live happily ever after. Grace and Noah might end this book at closer to attracted, flirted, started bonding… because 45,000 words into it, Noah has spent a single night in Tassamara. In book time, he met Grace yesterday. That is not love. We might be closer to a Happy For Now ending than a Happy Ever After ending. (And that said, I suspect that this is a problem of all romantic suspense. I’ve not really started examining timelines for my favorite books, but I suspect that ten days from first meeting to together & in love is pretty typical for novels, even if it is a terrible idea for real life.)
But I’m not letting that realization bother me. This book is very definitely not what I thought it was going to be, not what I wanted it to be. It doesn’t match the outline that I wrote for it (in 2013!) at all, with the sole exception of having a hero who hears ghosts and thinks he’s crazy. I’m not even sure that the title works anymore. But all of that is okay, too. Onward!
16 Saturday Jan 2016
Last night, I was trying to sleep but actually lying awake, staring at the ceiling, wishing I hadn’t drunk coffee in the afternoon, when a scene began to scroll before my eyes. Like watching a movie or having a dream, the characters were so vivid, so real, and their conversation so charming. I sat up, turned on the light, pulled my Chromebook over, and scribbled down rough notes about the dialog I’d just imagined. And then I turned the lights off and tried to go to sleep again.
This morning, I was in the shower, washing my hair, when the same characters popped back into my head and started flirting again. I could see them at Maggie’s diner. I could hear the conversation they were having. And I knew exactly what happened next. I barely dried myself off before I was at the computer, typing madly, trying not to drip on the keyboard.
Such a fun, fun, fun feeling. And such a pity that the words and the characters and the scenes are NOT from the book I am working on. ARGH!
The good news (maybe?) is that these characters are clearly in the sequel to the book that I am writing. There’s no way I can reach their story until I make it through Grace’s story, because until Grace and Noah have their happy ending, Noah’s brother will not be visiting Tassamara. And he can not be happy-go-lucky flirting with a random girl in Maggie’s Bistro until he gets there. So back to Grace I go. But oh, inspiration is so delightful.
I don’t know when I’ll get to write this book and I don’t know what its name is and everything about it might change dramatically between now and then, but: Heather Allen is on the run, carrying with her a secret of life-shattering proportions.
Someday I will get to tell her story!
29 Friday May 2015
Tags
You are invited — to the wedding of Akira Malone and Zane Latimer, set in Tassamara, and taking place inside the pages of Magical Weddings: 15 Enchanting Romances.
Available for pre-order now at:
Amazon
Posted by wyndes | Filed under Tassamara, The Wedding Guests
17 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in Tassamara
So, I finished the first draft of A Lonely Magic last night. 49 days since I started. Whee!
Conventional writer wisdom says to put the draft away for a month or so to give yourself time to get a fresh perspective. I’m hoping to last a week. I’m already itching to dig into the revisions. There are things that I know need fixing, parts that I want to expand upon, threads that slipped away–and I haven’t even read the complete manuscript yet. But I’m going to try to give it a week.
So one of the things that I’ve been wanting to do is write a short story or a missing scene to give away to mailing list subscribers. I think that’d be a worthy way to spend a week. I know it should be set in Tassamara but I have more ideas than I know what to do with, so I thought I’d throw some options out there:
1) Dillon helping out Sylvie and Lucas.
2) Maggie’s arrival in Tassamara.
3) A wedding scene, possibly when Akira throws up on the minister at the reception.
4) A wedding scene, possibly Mitchell and Michael blaming one another for losing the ring at Natalya’s wedding.
5) The boys’ discovery that a ghost is haunting their movie theater.
Is there a character that you want to learn more about or see again? Share here or on Facebook!