Okay, so you know what gets in the way of being a hermit, pulling into my shell, and putting words in a row? Right, beautiful fall weather, that’s what.
What am I supposed to do, ignore this great weather? I took the dogs for ordinary walks around my house, but I also took some of the dogs to the park and then I took the other dogs to the park, and so progress was made, but not as much as if it had been 100 F or raining. Really nice weekend, and I hope you all had beautiful weather too, wherever you are!
BUT, I also did manage to get some writing done. I’ve got 25,000 words of SILVER CIRCLE and I’m fairly happy with it. I really want to re-read the entire Black Dog series from the top. I’m feeling like that would help. It’s not like SILVER CIRCLE is going badly; it’s fine; but I still feel it would help get back in that world and in everyone’s proper voice if I re-read the whole series. Do you realize it’s been three years, story time, since the beginning? The younger characters have grown up a lot, and I want to be sure that’s apparent.
You know, the only reason Natividad and Miguel and Alejandro were so young in the first book is that the publisher wanted it as YA and asked me to age them down a good bit. I can’t remember how old they were before that — I do have that draft somewhere, but I haven’t looked at it for a long time. Anyway, that’s why Natividad wound up just fifteen in BLACK DOG. It took some creative plotting to arrange story events in a way that prevented her from getting serious with Ezekiel until she was a little older. SILVER CIRCLE opens right after the last novella, the one with Keziah and Justin. By that time, Natividad’s eighteenth birthday is coming up pretty soon. To me, this is a more comfortable age for a serious relationship. Honestly, the whole story is a little easier to handle now that they’re all a little older. But they do need to seem that little bit older.
Anyway, moving ahead with that, so this is good! It’s nice to be working on something new.
HOWEVER, speaking of something new, you know how I said I’d be writing Tuyo-world folktales and stories about little incidents and whatever, dropping those in the newsletter? Well, I need to send out a newsletter sometime this month, so I have set SILVER CIRCLE aside for today and probably tomorrow. I’m writing an Ugaro folktale instead. So that’s fun, but a little bit of a tonal shift.
ALSO, yep, still proofing INVICTUS: CRISIS. I’m about halfway through this particular proofing run. I’m still (still!) doing a surprising amount of tweaking, mostly very small-scale, plus I’ve found, I don’t know, four or five actual typos.
If you’ve left a review for INVICTUS: CAPTIVE, thank you! If you’ve sent me a private note about it, thank you! I’m very happy to see that first reactions are quite positive, plus people aren’t screaming about the cliffhanger. Or not in a bad way! All I can say is, I hope everyone is also happy with the second half of the story! If you read an early draft and commented, thank you SO MUCH because you are definitely responsible for the final version smoothing out.
Coming up this week: Finish this proofing run-through for CRISIS, finish the Ugaro folktale and put together the newsletter, start reading BLACK DOG, make progress on SILVER CIRCLE. Also, take dogs to the park, because the weather is still very nice! Going to be a busy week!
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