It's Been a While
Oops.
Hello, everyone. Sorry for another long gap between posts. I have too many irons in the fire and not enough time, energy, or health to keep up with everything.
le sigh
But this is no time for excuses. It’s time to update y’all about what I’ve been doing. So, let’s get into it.
1. Migraines
I don’t want to talk about this anymore in this Substack. It’s too depressing, and I honestly think that’s part of my aversion to posting. In short, nothing’s changed for the better. I had a disability hearing, got denied again, fired my lawyer, fell into a deep depression, and appealed again. The IV infusions aren’t doing anything for me. Unless I get the urge to bring this up again, this will be the last you’re hearing about it here.
2. Writing
I finished the third draft of The Hidden Crystal and am now entering the manuscript in awards, as well as querying agents. I have a long, long list of agents stockpiled, so I won’t run out of options for a while. If I don’t have any luck, I’m thinking I’ll postpone the sequel (again) in favor of working on the fourth draft. Not sure about that yet. I know a bunch of readers have been waiting for a long time for the sequel, and I’d hate to disappoint them. Then again, the first book needs to be solid before I can write the sequel… not that I plan on making any changes to the storyline. I switched it from a third person perspective to first person for the third draft, along with proofreading for errors and adding a bit more detail, and I think I’ll just be tightening and detailing more for the fourth draft.
But that’s all pointless speculation right now, because…
3. Writing, part 2
I finished Act 1 of A Beast’s Tale, took a break to work on my story for the Open Novella Contest on Wattpad, and now, I’m back at work on Act 2. It’s a total rewrite at this point. I think I’ll be able to salvage most of the existing material for Acts 3 and 4, but I made a major change to the storyline at the beginning of Act 2, so I’m basically writing from scratch right now.
Since this is the second draft of ABT and the sixth draft of the shared ADT/ABT storyline, that means I’m also holding myself to a very high standard of writing. It’s the first draft of the new Act 2, but it needs to match the style and complexity of the much more polished material that precedes it. Every story draft has to get better, not worse, so every chapter has to be better, too.
I used to put out two or three chapters a week, but not now. I took a break from writing in May after ONC finished and the disability denial threw me into a pit of despair, and I started writing again in June with a chapter a week. That’s my pace right now. It takes pretty much a full week to work through my ideas and produce a chapter that looks like it should belong to the sixth draft of a story. I can’t publish the chapter until it’s to that point. That’s not me consciously thinking it isn’t good enough; it’s just an intuitive and natural progression for a story that I’ve been working on for so long.
And wow, I love how it’s turning out. So does Mom, my most loyal reader and most frequent commenter. Every time she gives me feedback on a chapter, I get all the warm fuzzies and can’t stop smiling. Moms are the best.
3. What was all that about the Open Novella Contest?
I mentioned it in my last post, which we’ve established was way, way too long ago, so here’s a recap. The Open Novella Contest is an annual writing contest on Wattpad where you get two months to write a prompt-based novella, which Wattpad defines as a story between 20,000 and 40,000 words long. I’d already decided to join this year and write a parody that I’d been accumulating ideas for since everybody started pestering me about joining ONC last year, and I did indeed participate this year. My goal was to just have fun. My other three series, Tales of Feathers and Flora (ADT/ABT), A Song and a Storm (The Hidden Crystal), and Elements of Chaos (Of Ice and Snow) are serious, mentally intensive works, and I thought it would be nice to just write an off-the-cuff romantic comedy.
I had a blast. And I created a new series. Cue simultaneous laughter and crying.
The Metaverse is the new series, named for the metafictional premise I ran with for Rejected by the CEO Alpha Mafia Boss. As usual, once I started writing, I got more ideas than I could fit into one story, especially with the strict word limit. I have now compiled those ideas, plus the bits and pieces I couldn’t fit into Rejected, into another file for a sequel, Accepted by the Broke Omega Police Grunt.
Does it sound wild and chaotic? Good. Because it is.
Rejected is a really high-octane read. Everything hits hard and fast and makes as much sense as I want it to. It’s pretty much edited stream-of-consciousness for me, so if you’re curious to see what it looks like inside my mind, take a peek. And be careful. It’s nuts in there.
I’ve been shocked at how well this book has been received. People love it! People who can keep up with it, anyway. I have comments from people who laughed until they cried, who almost dropped their phones after reading a ridiculous line, and who had hilarious suggestions that I just had to incorporate into the story as I wrote it. I consider it a community project because of that. It already met my one goal of taking a break and writing nonsense, so having other people like it is just the cherry on top for me.
It has also continued progressing through each round of ONC judging despite its insanity. I really thought the metafictional structure would automatically disqualify it after round one, but I guess not. It made the ONC longlist, and I am now waiting with the rest of the longlisters to see who pulled out a win from this.
Oh, and I’m entering it in the Wattys, too. They lowered the word count requirement this year from a minimum of 50,000 words to a minimum of 40,000 words, so I wrote an epilogue for Rejected to get it over the bar, and I’ve been sitting on it, waiting to post it until ONC judging is complete. Judging still isn’t complete, but the Wattys close for submission on July 23rd, so they’ve given the longlisters permission to edit their stories for the Wattys. The epilogue is now live. I’m excited to see what people think of it.
I’m not writing the sequel next year. It’s going into the shuffle of stories I need to write for the rest of my series.
4. How’s the short story publication going?
Surprisingly well. In addition to the two publication credits I listed in my last post, I now have four more:
Pet Sitting (again): The Underground Bookshelf
Winter Wonderland: The Underground Bookshelf (again)
Frosty the Danceman: Antimatter Dreams (and an audio recording of me reading the story is forthcoming on their YouTube channel)
Peking Duck: Breath & Shadow (my first paid publication!)
I’m submitting basically every chapter from Of Ice and Snow wherever I think they might fit and seeing how many I can get published. There’s a magazine for everything, after all. And I know. I’ve seen things. Magazines that only want chicken-themed stories. Magazines that only want frog-themed stories. Magazines that want poetry with no punctuation marks or capitalization.
It’s made me realize that OIaS isn’t as weird as I thought it was.
5. Let’s see…
I think that’s about it. I’m currently working on Act 2 of ABT, and when I finish that, I’ll either start the fourth draft of The Hidden Crystal or start the sequel, The Secret Door. We shall see.
Oh! One more thing!
I wanted Mom to give me feedback on the third draft of The Hidden Crystal, but it isn’t posted online, and sharing a Google Doc with her doesn’t work. She has some difficulty with that. So, I thought I’d have it printed at Staples. Then I looked at the price and thought again. Ridiculously expensive. Almost $200 for a stack of 8.5” x 11” papers. Okay, it’s 590 pages, but still…
A self-published author friend of mine recommended printing a book on Lulu. And I did! A stack of 8.5'“ x 11” papers wrapped in a pretty paperback cover was $25! I had to design the cover, which was a pain, but I love how it turned out. Lookie lookie!
If I can’t get an agent or a traditional publishing deal, I’ll go the self-publication route, and that’s the cover I’ll use. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. And also, if I get a publisher who’s interested in the manuscript and the cover I made… that would be amazing.
Anyway, that’ll do it for today. I will try to get back into posting monthly. We’ll see how that goes. At the very least—oh! Wait! Easter cat pictures! Behold, the latest in Easter-themed headware for cats, as modeled by Bentou, Haru, and Banzai!
Now that’s the way to end a post.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day. :)