I haven’t done an update post in a while, so I decided to make a short vlog about the cover reveal for Relapse, scheduled for next Tuesday, October 14!
Category: updates
It’s That Time Again
It’s that time again…time for an update, that is!
Some of you may have caught the Facebook status update a few days ago, but just in case you didn’t…I finally finished my first completish draft of Relapse! Yay! There was a time when I was seriously nervous that this book was never going to happen. Getting over writing Part One was the biggest hump because it set everything else up. It was really hard for me to start writing past that until I was happy with it. But now, suddenly, it’s all out of me. I have a list of things to go back and tweak before I give it to my beta readers. Of course, nothing’s final yet…lots of editing will happen, I’m sure. But it just feels really awesome to have it out of my brain. It’s a lot closer to what I envisioned.
It’s also quite a bit longer than Reborn, which is about 230 pages. I thought that was a decent size for a debut novel, especially since you’re just getting to know the characters. Now that you realize you LOVE my characters (lol), you get to see even more of them. Right now Relapse is about 97K (yikes), which comes out to 300+ pages. Somehow I’ve managed to write so many pages of book and zero pages of dissertation. (Which I’m planning to start writing in August. I swear.) Priorities…..
Relapse has turned out to be pretty dark. So I’m a little nervous for all of the reviewers who were all “Oh, Reborn is such a cool, fun read! Yay!” That they’re going to read Relapse and be like…erm, well, this is dark/depressing. The ending in particular. It’s not a cliffhanger…there are loose ends in the book (because, if all keeps going well, I’m going to write even MORE books!), but it ties things up somewhat at the end since the next book is most likely going to focus on a different set of characters. Now, although I envision a happier ending for the series (because, come on, who doesn’t like those?), the ending of every book isn’t going to be puppies, unicorns and rainbows. Sorry, I’m rambling. Siobhan is going to fall, perhaps more than once, before she gets her happy ending. I guess I’m just curious as to how people feel about darker endings. It’s something I like exploring, especially since most YA/NA books these days seem to have happy-for-now or neat-and-tidy endings. Also, this book is full of most of my characters being very, very naughty (yes, even the ones you probably thought were good).
Some more bad news/good news: The bad news is, someone gets off-ed in Relapse. The good news is…it probably isn’t anyone you were getting horribly attached to (we’ll hope not).
Let’s see, what else can I ramble about? Hmmmmm…I think I’ve mentioned this before in other posts, but Relapse has two major first person POVs: Siobhan and Carly (one of Siobhan’s sorority sisters). This was something else I was worried about going into writing it because it seemed a little risky, and I wasn’t sure if I would end up liking it or not. That being said…I personally think it works really well. (We’ll see what my betas think.) Carly’s story branches off because she gets trapped in the clutches of another sort of dark, mysterious, mischievous character, who’s of course not all that he seems to be (yeah, I know, I’m obsessed, what can I say?). I think it’s a cool subplot because you get to see a little more of Olympus and its culture this way…a little more strictly fantasy, rather than fantasy mixed with modern times, like it is in Siobhan’s world.
Have I confused you yet?
Anyway, I’m getting super excited about Relapse, and I hope you are, too! I’ll try to post a teaser in the upcoming weeks. I think I’m still on track for a fall release date. I did not feel that way about a month ago, haha, but I’m definitely more confident now.
I thought I’d have more to write tonight, but I guess that’s it, so toodles for now! Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments…or comment with your favorite character from Reborn! Just because I’m curious…(And, ladies, pick someone BESIDES Jasper, lol.)
WIP Wednesday: June 18, 2014
I haven’t done an update post in a while, but I’m sick and bored today, so here we go! First off, Reborn is now available on Smashwords and a few other places! Yay! If you’ve read it and would like to leave a review, you can find it on Smashwords here and Barnes and Noble here.
As you might remember, the purpose of Work-In-Progress (WIP) Wednesdays is so I can set personal writing goals. It also serves as a way to let you all know what I’m working on. I hope you’ll join me and link back to your own or share in the comments!
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
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1. What are you currently writing?
I’m still slowly but surely writing Relapse, the sequel to Reborn. Although I’ve made a lot of progress on it, I never seem to get as far with it as I think I will. I thought I’d have a complete draft done by the end of May, but that totally didn’t happen, haha. I think I keep misjudging because I’m learning as I go along, and it takes a long time to write a book. Also, this one is turning out to be longer than the first one, so there’s that.
That all being said…when I checked it out a few days ago, I realized (happily) that I had made a lot more progress on it than I thought! Right now it sits at about 61K! Which is awesome especially compared to the progress I’ve made on my dissertation! So hopefully I’ll have a complete draft for betas to look at soon, because I’m definitely getting to that point where I’m just like…I need someone besides me to read this…
2. Inspirations:
I discovered a new/old(?) group! And I really like this song, although it’s really sinister sounding (but I think that’s why I like it). Also, another warning, the video is kind of creepy…
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
I don’t really have a concrete plan except to just continue chugging along. I do have some book reviews I need to get caught up. I recently re-read The Forbidden Game by L.J. Smith and wanted to write a little bit about that, but I also have some books I need to read/review for fellow authors that I just haven’t gotten around to yet. đŚ So, sorry for being slow, but I’ll get caught up with that!
Update Time!
Below is the video update I posted to my Facebook page last night! It’s my first vlog, so don’t judge. đ I used my phone (in retrospect, I should have turned it the other way, horizontally, lol)…so it’s REALLY upclose and personal, ha! But give it a watch for some exciting news and updates about my WIP!
[One correction: Towards the beginning I say it’s Reborn’s half-month birthday…I meant half-birthday.]
WIP Wednesday
The purpose of WIP (Work-In-Progress) Wednesdays is so I can set personal writing goals. It also serves as a way to let you all know what Iâm working on. I hope youâll join me and link back to your own or share in the comments!
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
*****
1. What are you currently writing?
I finished it! Part One of the Reborn sequel, that is. Teehee. đ Part One sits at about 37K, and I’m excited to keep going–I’m on sort of a roll right now (my muse has crappy timing). The sequel will have plenty of twists and turns, juicy college drama and epic romance (or maybe lust is a better word for it…). Some people have asked me about a release date–and I still don’t want to commit to an exact date yet–but it will (hopefully) be in late fall 2014. But I’m excited you’re excited. đ I’ll choose an excerpt to post on here sometime soon.
2. Inspirations:
I really love describing clothes in my stories, especially fancy clothes, and I’m gearing up to write a dance scene. I want my main character Siobhan, who’s normally a pink-loving blonde, to wear a sophisticated, black cocktail dress, so I’ve been looking at dresses on Google Images. A change in her taste in fashion throughout the book is going to mirror her transformation in the book as she gives in more and more to her dark side. (I know, I’m so deep.) I was inspired by this scene in Legend (I also posted this video to the Facebook page last weekend) in which Princess Lily is dancing with this black dress, transforming from a fresh-faced innocent to a gothic princess in three minutes. By the way, 80s fantasy movies are the BEST.
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
Well, this might take me longer than a week, but at some point I really need to get Reborn up on Smashwords so it reaches more distributors. I’ll call it one of my April goals. That, and just to keep on writing…
Here are some possible dresses for Siobhan:
WIP Wednesday
So much for my weekly check in…my last WIP Wednesday post was…hmmmm, let’s see…a little over a month ago! And my last post (that was not a reblog) was on Valentine’s Day. Woopsies. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been trying to concentrate on making the presentation for my PhD comprehensive exam coming up the first week of April (yes, that IS as much fun as it sounds!). Ok, what I’ve actually been doing is binge watching Veronica Mars before the movie comes out. But I’m making up for the lack of activity this week with this post, plus an author interview this Friday! (By the way, if you ever want to be featured on my blog, as a fellow blogger or author, let me know! I love having people on here. Just let me know on here, Facebook or email urge2write@gmail.com.) Now, on with this post.
The purpose of WIP (Work-In-Progress) Wednesdays is so I can set personal writing goals. It also serves as a way to let you all know what Iâm working on. I hope youâll join me and link back to your own or share in the comments! (A few of you have in the past–it’s awesome hearing from you, so thanks!)
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
*****
1. What are you currently writing?
Despite my impending comprehensive exam and Veronica Mars obsession, I have done some work on Relapse. I have no idea how many words I’ve added to it because really what I’ve done is gutted/reordered what I’ve written so far, haha. Deleted some stuff that I was just like…”Nope!” I don’t know if any fellow authors reading this have ever done this, but I took chunks from here and there and stuck them together into what I think will be a better order in the long run…after I fix the flow, of course. It was weirdly fun. Relapse sits at a little over 26,000 words right now, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a long book…or at least longer than Reborn. But it’s going to be EPIC. (If you need a fix in the meantime and missed it, I posted a special excerpt for Valentine’s Day. Check it out here.)
2. Inspirations:
You know I’m not shy about venting my obsessions on here. Like I said, Veronica Mars is my current one. (Seriously, if you haven’t watched this show, do so, immediately. There are only/sadly three seasons. Tell them Shaina sent you?) This might sound strange, but I’ve also found this show to be very inspirational because I love the writing and the character development. This show leaves me with a lot of feels…feels I hope my readers have after reading Reborn, lol. If you don’t know anything about it, Veronica Mars was a show about a teen detective on the WB and later the CW in the early-ish 2000s. It has a “case of the week” kind of format with an overarching mystery to be solved throughout the season, as well as lots of juicy teen drama, complicated characters and steamy romance. I don’t know why, but I love writing about high school, and this show makes me want to go back to that for a while.
And yes, Neptune High has its very own brooding, complicated rich bad boy, Logan Echolls. Logan and Veronica are now one of my all-time favorite couples. (Also, the actor who plays Logan, Jason Dohring, has grown up nicely! He’s on the right in the second picture below. Although “young” Jason was 21 when he was on the show. I had to look it up, just to make sure…)
Speaking of bad boys, I’m pretty sure the following is the new theme song for Reborn:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
Watch more Veronica Mars. And then watch the movie. Hey, it’s my spring “break.”
WIP Wednesday
Itâs update time!
The purpose of WIP (Work-In-Progress) Wednesdays is so I can set personal writing goals. It also serves as a way to let you all know what Iâm working on. I hope youâll join me and link back to your own or share in the comments!
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
*****
1. What are you currently writing?
So I’m realizing I tend not to jump from project to project…I stick with one at a time. Which means I am of course still working on Relapse. (I’m liking the title…I don’t think that will change…) I’ve written 3890 words this week, surpassing my goal of 1500! I feel like I should work on it tonight, but I’m feeling pretty lazy. I also did get around to writing Part 2 of my Reborn dream movie cast, so check that out if you haven’t!
2. Inspirations:
I sort of hate even posting this because I don’t like Katy Perry that much, but someone is writing perfectly catchy, likeable songs for her. Anyway, this song reminds me of one of my characters/couples.
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
I’ll up my game and aim for 3000 words since I seem to be able to write at least that much in a week anyway. I hope to have Part 1 written by the end of February, if not earlier. Then I may have to force myself to put it away while I get ready for my comprehensive exam at the beginning of April…..
WIP Wednesday
Itâs update time!
And it’s about time, too! My plan was to write one of these every Wednesday, but I think it’s been a little over a month since my last one. Although it’s not like it was ever an official New Year’s resolution or anything, so I don’t feel that guilty…
Anywho, the purpose of WIP (Work-In-Progress) Wednesdays is so I can set personal writing goals. It also serves as a way to let you all know what Iâm working on. I hope youâll join me and link back to your own.
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
*****
1. What are you currently writing?
I’ve mentioned this in other blog posts, but I am still working on Relapse (the sequel to Reborn). I mean, it’s definitely a work in progress. I didn’t really touch it at all over my holiday break, and then I had a pretty annoying case of writer’s block for about a month. I had written the first few chapters, but I didn’t like much of it. I knew where the story was going but was stuck transitioning from the very beginning to those other things. Sometimes I jump ahead and write whatever comes to me, even if it belongs later in the story, but in this case I really felt like the beginning had to be ironed out more before I could go on. (How do you write? Do you go in a particular order, or write whatever comes to you and piece it all together later? Or some other way?)
The good news is, I’m on a bit of a roll now. I fixed the part I hated, and I’m really excited about it again. In the past week or so I’ve written 3200 words. My word count goal for the whole book is 70K, so we’ll see how that goes.
2. Inspirations:
Those of you who have followed The Urge to Write may have noticed my small tendency to obsess over things. One of my obsessions is the 80s, particularly 80s music and fantasy/sci-fi films. There’s just something magical about the combination of 80s fashion, hair and music with fantastical elements like vampires (think The Lost Boys) and, er, goblin kings. So as tokens of my current obsessions, I leave you with a picture of young Billy Idol and the music video of Gary Numan’s Cars. (I love this song. Gary has about as much charisma as a sea bass, but that actually kind of seems to work for him here.)
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
To write at least 1500 more words of Relapse. I also have some fun blog posts in mind. The first is Part 2 of my Reborn dream cast. The other is a post dedicated to one of my other ongoing obsessions: misunderstood fictional characters.
Monday Night Babbling
Here is yet another post about how I’m working on the sequel to Reborn. I need people to bounce ideas off of (person reading this: that means you), and, whether you’ve read Reborn or not, you may be able to help me with some of these. If anything, I think that merely getting these ideas down will help me reorganize my thoughts. Because, you see, I’m a bit stuck. Thankfully, it’s not for a lack of ideas. I have a lot of ideas (yay!), but I’m not sure how I want to go about organizing them into a series. The Reborn series was supposed to be a trilogy, but it has possibly exploded into four or five books.Points-of-View
One of the issues I’m struggling with is that I chose to write Reborn in first person (from Siobhan’s perspective), which I don’t really regret, because I like getting inside my characters’ heads. But Siobhan and Jasper’s story (the primary conflict in Reborn) isn’t the only one I want to tell. For instance, I thought of a great idea for a book from her friend Anna’s POV. I think Anna would get her own novel, and she’s a much more perceptive person than Siobhan, so her voice would be more poetic. (Siobhan and Anna are from the same small town, so their voices wouldn’t be drastically different, but I definitely want to incorporate some distinctions.) The only problem I’m facing with this is that it would be kind of a parallel novel to Reborn, or at least the first part of it would be. It would end up being book 1.5 in the Reborn series or something. Okay, I’d round it up to book 2. My other concern is that I wouldn’t want to release Anna’s book next at all because Reborn ended in a cliffhanger, and it’s likely if readers care at all, they want to know what’s going to happen to Siobhan and Jasper.
Also related to POV: The other sequel I have envisioned would be from two first person POVs. I think I can make this work, but I’m a little worried it might be too ambitious for a second book. One of my favorite authors, Karen Marie Moning, has pulled this off well, but she waited at least three or four books into her Fever series to experiment with voices. (Side note: Admittedly, I used to have really weird pet peeves when it came to what I felt were “jarring” changes in POV, but I’m slowly getting over this, ha! Now I can see why authors do this. We think of other stories we want to tell along the way.) Maybe I should take a step back. Right now I have three main couples whose relationships I want to explore. Like I said, Siobhan and Jasper were the main focus in Reborn. Carly is a secondary character in Reborn, but I’ve known what happens to her character for quite some time: I’d like to introduce that in the sequel and write it partially from her POV. Finally, like I said earlier, I think Anna and her man (lol) might get a book by themselves. The problem is the events in these two books would probably overlap. I know this sounds confusing. I’m starting to confuse myself…I may just need to revisit my outlines…
I guess I could write both books and release them around the same time with a suggested reading order, but that sounds hard. In fact, writing is kinda hard. Why am I doing this again? Oh, right, because I love it! Even when my brain doesn’t want to work…
Book Titles
Okay, this is less of a confusing mess. I’m just curious to hear your opinion on the matter of book titles. Originally, every title in this series was going to be a word with an “re” prefix (Reborn, Relapse, etc). Then I thought maybe it would be better for the word “Reborn” to appear in every title so readers could associate it with the same series (Reborn, Darkness Reborn–maybe not that exactly, but you get the idea). I’ve seen both (Think Divergent, Insurgent, etc. versus Darkfever, Bloodfever, and on). To be honest, I might stick with the title Relapse anyway since it goes so well with the theme I have in my head, but I’m still curious what other writers and readers think.
*****
P. S. I made a tumblr, so follow me and I’ll try to follow back! I only say “try” because sometimes I still get confused on how to do things on tumblr. 
Warning: I mostly reblog all things Rumbelle, Captain Swan, Delena, and Hiddles/Loki…..
WIP Wednesday
It’s update time! I’ve started WIP (Work-In Progress) Wednesdays to set personal writing goals and as a way to let you all know what I’m doing (besides checking social media)! I hope youâll join me and link back to your own.
To play, just fill in the following:
1. What are you currently writing?
2. Inspirations:
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
*****
1. What are you currently writing?
I finally finished the outline for Reborn‘s sequel! I like to know where a story is headed when I’m writing, so I’m relieved I got it done. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long book, but we’ll see. đ Also, I just realized I totally surpassed my goal from last week and wrote 2400 words! I also wrote 960 words of my fanfic idea.
2. Inspirations:
This week, I’m finding inspiration from the Lady and her latest album Artpop. I guess I just really like her songwriting and how she plays with word meanings. (Although I find the album cover to be kinda awkward, lol.)
Lady Gaga G. U. Y.
3. Plan for the upcoming week:
Keep on plugging away at that sequel. Also, I found some snippets of an old WIP I had written in a notebook awhile back and got really excited about it again, so I may take a look at that old manuscript and see if I can revamp it.
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What have you written this week? Tell us about it and link back to your post in the comments!
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