All posts tagged writing

November Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

November is but a memory, which means that it’s time to take a few minutes to talk about what happened.

Books Read:

I only read eight books this month, but I was really busy winning NaNoWriMo.

  • Here and Now and Then – Mike Chen
  • The Cruel Prince – Holly Black
  • Crow Flight – Susan Cunningham
  • Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare
  • The Young Adult Writer’s Journey – Janet Schraeder-Post and Elizabeth Fortin-Hinds
  • Clockwork Prince – Cassandra Clare
  • Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
  • Clockwork Princess – Cassandra Clare

That’s still an average of two books per week while writing over 50k words.  Not too bad.  Right now I’m trying to finish Lady Midnight and Lord of Shadows before Queen of Air and Darkness comes out on Tuesday.  A little insane, but I might actually do it.

Blog Stats:

  • I’m at 1,764 followers on Twitter.  NaNoWriMo has been really good to me there.
  • Unfortunately, on the actual blog I haven’t had time to visit other people’s sites as much as I’d like to.  Hopefully there will be more time in December.  I don’t even have next week’s Top Ten Tuesday post written yet.

Writing:

I wrote 53,675 words on The Brightness of Shadow this month, which means I won NaNoWriMo.  Yay!  I still have 13 chapters left, however.  I hope to finish them this month, because then I’ll need to spend January editing, because I have work with my critique partner to do at the beginning of February.  I already know a few things that I’m going to change to make this better in the second draft.

Life:

So, no car accidents this month.  We got our new car to replace the one I totalled.  The last two Saturdays have been really treacherous on the roads though.

My daughter spent another week in the hospital, but she’s out now.

So that’s what happened this month.  Lots of writing.  Next month hopefully I’ll get more reading done and I’ll finish the first draft of my book.

The Young Adult Writer’s Journey Begins… Here?

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

The Young Adult Writer's Journey CoverI recently finished reading The Young Adult Writer’s Journey by Janet Schrader-Post and Elizabeth Fortin-Hinds.  It is a book written for authors who would like to write young adult books.  I thought the book was useful and well-written, although I don’t exactly think that this book contains a lot of information that you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

The newer you are to young adult literature, the more helpful I think this book will be to you.  It goes into The Hero’s Journey, what teenager’s lives are like, and general things to keep in mind when writing young adult books.  There’s also information about marketing your book (because you are going to need to market your book, whether you self-publish or go the traditional route with an agent).

There’s a lot of information here that is pretty basic, especially if you have been doing your research for a while (and I recommend that).  One of the biggest recommendations that I have if you’re going to write YA books is to read YA books.  The authors of this book don’t place a lot of emphasis on that, but it really helps you get a feel for the books that people are actually reading these days.  YA is a rapidly shifting genre, and if you read a lot of YA books and read this book, then you might think that there’s a little bit in this book that’s slightly outdated.

While The Young Adult Writer’s Journey does have some good information about story arcs, promotion, and the like, I wouldn’t stop my learning with just this book.  Get on book Twitter.  See what actual teen book readers are saying about Young Adult books.  Read actual YA books.  While this is a quick read that you might want to use for reference now and again, it is by no means complete, nor does it represent the latest in YA.

August Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

So today’s the last day of August, and it’s time for yet another monthly wrap-up post.  This is what happened in August:

Books Read:

This month I read ten books, and some of them were pretty long.  I had a lot of library books come in, and I’ve been trying to make sure that those get read first.  Normally I post an ARC/new release review at the beginning of the week on my blog, but because I’ve had so many library books to read, September 3rd’s review will be on an older book, City of Glass.  That’s just the way things worked out.

  • Crown of Midnight – Sarah J. Maas
  • My Mother.  Barack Obama.  Donald Trump.  And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. – Kevin Powell
  • Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
  • George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire – Peter Y. Choi
  • When Elephants Fly – Nancy Richardson Fischer
  • King’s Cage – Victoria Aveyard
  • Give the Dark My Love – Beth Revis
  • City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare
  • Heir of Fire – Sarah J. Maas
  • City of Glass – Cassandra Clare

Tower of Dawn was on sale for $2.99, so I picked that one up this week.  Now I don’t have to be in such a rush to read it when it becomes available at the library.  I’ve found that that is one of the biggest drawbacks to getting books from the library.  You have to be ready to drop everything and read them when they become available.  Right now, I think I really only have three books that are going to become available soon, and I’ll be able to handle that.

I have plenty of books that I’ve been getting off Amazon.com for $1.99.  Their monthly Kindle deals are just too good to pass up!  I thought about getting Warcross because it went on sale for $2.99, but I held myself back.  After all, I already have two copies.

Blog Stats:

  • I actually lost followers this month on Twitter, but there’s an explanation for that.  Twitter did some sort of purge, and I lost about 90 followers in one day.  I thought maybe it was something I had said, but it wasn’t.  So I’m at 1523 followers, but if there hadn’t been that Twitter purge I would have been over 1600.
  • I’m at about 300 monthly users on my blog.  For a while, I was higher than that, then I dropped lower.  I haven’t had as much time to visit other blogs, but 300 has been a goal of mine, so that’s good.
  • I have 12 posts written that haven’t been posted yet, which is more than last month. I’m trying to get ahead, because I’ll be really busy during NaNoWriMo.  You might find me doing a lot of graphic novel and short story reviews in December because of NaNoWriMo, LOL.

Writing:

  • I finished writing Like Normal People!  Yay!  I published my first chapter on January 7th, 2016, and published the last chapter on August 30th, 2018.  I had two long bouts of writer’s block with this one.  First, in 2016, I had to write about mountain climbing and had no clue how to do it; I was in the middle of a move, and then I just forgot about my story.  The second time was in February, where one of the chapters was completely boring me and I didn’t know how to make it interesting.  I wrote a bunch of other stuff while waiting for inspiration on that one, even though I only had three and a half chapters left.  Once I was able to write that chapter, the story was done in a week.
  • I already have over 10 pages of notes for my NaNoWriMo novel this year.  I have a good idea of what is going to happen in the story, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to have to be a duology, because towards the end it looks like a war is about to break out.  This started out in my head as a fanfic of a fanfic, but it has developed a lot so far, and although if you squint, you can see what inspired this story, it will look completely different.  I still have 2 more months to plan this before I write, too.
  • For September, my goal is to finish writing the first draft of Hero.  I’m in the wrapping-up phase of this story, so there probably won’t be too many chapters left to write, but I haven’t outlined this one, so I’m not sure how may are left.  I don’t know if I’ll get to Saving Adelinetta in October.  I want to make Hero look really good first.  I’ll probably be spending more time editing and revising my stories going forward, which will make them better, but it will also cause them to take more time.  I’m guessing that Saving Adelinetta needs at least 100 more pages to finish it, and that one is going to need a lot of revising (I literally wrote about 200 pages of that story in 10 days).

Life:

Like many people, school has started, and so things have gotten busier.  My daughter spent her first day of public school (ever) in the hospital.  She’s out now though.  It takes about 40 minutes to drive her to school.  So… now I get home from work at around midnight and get up at 6 AM to drive her to school.  My husband has agreed to drive her on Thursdays and Fridays though, so that is a big help.  The upside to that is that I can listen to audiobooks on the way.  Right now I’m listening to Everless.  That’s like free reading time.

My Spanish and German classes have restarted, and I actually have pretty good enrollment numbers.  The Duolingo people decided to change the Spanish tree on me the week before classes, and I had to rewrite the booklet I give to my students over a weekend (it’s 50 pages).  Class has been going well though.  I’m not as nervous this year, and planning is going a lot more smoothly.  I’m learning how to incorporate more speaking practice, which helps the class move forward.

So that’s it for August.  How was your month?

How’d That Happen? Finished my 7th Novel/Novella!

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

Medieval Writing DeskTwo and a half years ago, I began what I thought would be a short story of around ten pages. Today, I wrote the final sentence down in my first draft of what had become Like Normal People.

I had just finished reading the Legend trilogy for the second time, and I thought to myself “you know, I really would like a story that would tell what happened to Day and June.”  This was before Life After Legend came out.  They say that you should write the story that you want to read, and that’s exactly what I did.

I learned a lot while writing this story.  One thing I learned was to never publish part of a story when you don’t at least have the first draft finished.  At the moment, I have two novels that are about 2/3 of the way done that I haven’t started publishing on AO3 because of this.  I had written about 14 chapters of this book… it just came to me, and I was a writing fiend.  Then I had to write a chapter where Daniel (Day) and June went mountain climbing — and I don’t know a thing about mountain climbing.  After watching a few videos about mountain climbing, and about El Capitan, I still wasn’t ready to write this chapter.  Then I moved, and I forgot about this story.  I forgot about writing (although I was writing in a journal, so I was still writing something).

This February, I got a message from someone asking me to finish this story.  I had already started writing fiction again, and I was partially through writing Saving Adelinetta.  I decided to reread Legend and work on this again.  You never know what a difference your encouragement will make.

I wrote like mad for a while, and then… I got writer’s block again on this book, on chapter 22.  It took five months for me to write that chapter.  In the meantime, I wrote more on Saving Adelinetta, wrote two novellas, and wrote about 2/3 of another novel that I got the idea to write, Hero.  I’ve written a ton this year.

I was tired of not having Like Normal People finished.  So when I realized that I only had three months left until NaNoWriMo this year, I decided to set goals: finish Like Normal People in August, finish another one of my WIPs in September, and finish another one in October.  I have another partially finished novella that I’m setting aside until 2019, and it looks like I should scale down my goals and only do one of my WIPs in September/October.  So right now I hope to finish the first draft of Hero next month, and polish it in October.

In addition to not publishing until I’m done, I also learned a little bit about making stories a little bit more exciting while working on this.  When I originally envisioned this story, it was going to be a short story where everything moves quickly to the happily ever after.  I think how it actually turned out was a lot better.

I’ve learned even more this year.  Hopefully it will show when I finish my as-yet unpublished stories.

The other day I saw a Twitter post asking how many novels someone had written before they had gotten published.  This was after reading Paperfury’s post where she said that she had written 30 novels before getting published.  I thought I hadn’t written much at all, but then I realized that I had actually written more than I thought I had.  I’ve written nowhere near 30, but I have written 7 novels/novellas now, which really surprises me:

  • How I Lost _______ (I’m not going to mention the band’s name here) in 11th grade (novella)
  • Save the Best for Last – 12th grade (this one had a soundtrack with it) (novella)
  • Selfless – Divergent Fanfiction where Tris chooses Abnegation instead of Dauntless (novella)
  • Dauntless – Continuation of Selfless.  Follows the alternate history of Insurgent (short novel; I won NaNoWriMo 2014 with this)
  • Republican Phenoms – Legend fanfiction where Daniel (Day) is given the trial score that he deserves (novella)
  • My New Best Friend – Legend/Divergent fusion fanfic where Day and June live in the Divergent universe and choose Dauntless (novella)
  • Like Normal People – Legend fanfic where I continue past the Champion epilogue; not canon with Life After Legend or Life After Legend II (short novel)

I finished the last three this year.

Well, that’s enough celebrating.  Tomorrow I’ll start making the last few chapters of Like Normal People look good so I can finish publishing it.  Then I’ll continue worldbuilding my NaNoWriMo 2018 project and finish up another one of my WIPs.

The Life Choices Write Tag

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

I decided that I wanted to do the Life Choices Write Tag, where we talk about one of our works in progress.  I have several WIPs at the moment, all in various stages.  I originally was going to do this tag with the NaNoWriMo book that I’m planning, but I think I’ll just answer those questions to myself, for now, because I don’t even have all the main characters named yet!  I have a pretty good idea of where that story is going, but I’m still planning it.  Instead, I’ll be talking about Hero, which is a Legend fanfic… my first draft is at least 2/3 done, but I know exactly where the end of the story is headed.

RULES

  • Thank the person who tagged you but also link back to the original post! (I want to see all your lovely answers, people!)

I found this tag over at Drizzle and Hurricane books.

  • Provide a short description of your WIP/story!

Hero is a continuation of the Legend trilogy written by Marie Lu.  It is not canon with Life After Legend or Life After Legend 2 (oops, did I just give something away that I wasn’t supposed to ;-)?  It’s going to be one of the Wildcard pre-order gifts.  Penguin Teen talked about it in a video they put out on Friday).

Anyway, Day, now going by Daniel again, returns back to the Republic with his brother Eden.  He runs into June on his first day there, and ends up going to her 27th birthday party.  Daniel of course is interested in her right away, but there’s one small problem… she has a 10 year old boy.  The party pretty much ends when the boy, John, unwittingly announces that his dad is Day.  Everybody has to get over that little snag, but after they all get to know each other, John is kidnapped.  They have to rescue him, but after they find him, they also find someone else that needs their help…

  • This is pretty focused on main characters but don’t hesitate to use several characters for the answers if you want to! (We want to get to know as many of your characters as possible)

Just for clarification… I’m using the questions in the original form, but I never consider Day, June, Tess, Pascao, or any of the original Legend characters to be “my” characters.  I’m just borrowing them.  John (the boy), Rosie, and some of the other assorted characters in the story are mine, because I made them.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Where does your main character (MC) live? Were they born there or did they move to that place?

This story has three Point of View (POV) characters, plus Rosie, a girl that John runs into after he is kidnapped.  Daniel, June, and John were all born in Los Angeles, CA, while Rosie was born in Salina, Kansas (in the Colonies).  Daniel lives in Antarctica for the first chapter, but for the rest of the story he lives in Los Angeles, where June and John live for the entire story.  Rosie lives in Salina, Kansas, until she moves to Los Angeles.

Does your MC have a dream career? What (if anything) stops them from pursuing it?

Daniel and June are both military people.  They are pursuing their dream careers.  John and Rosie are too young to think about their dream careers… and up until now, Rosie has been too busy trying to survive to even think about a career.

Did any of your characters ever go against their parents/family’s wishes? How did that change their relationship?

Daniel and June’s parents are dead, so there’s nothing happening there.  Rosie did run away from home… but her father was a child molester that had killed her mother, so I really don’t blame her.  She no longer has or desires a relationship with her father.  She doesn’t even know if he’s alive or is in jail or anything like that.

If faced with their greatest fear – would your MC try to overcome it or run the other way?

I think they all have to try to overcome their fears out of necessity.  Their biggest instinct is survival, and, in Daniel and June’s case, the survival of their son.

Did any character have to cut a person out of their life? Why?

Rosie had to cut her father out of her life.  He was so toxic that it’s better to live on the streets than to live with him.

What is your main character’s biggest regret?

In hindsight, June probably regrets not contacting Daniel sooner.  There wasn’t much they could do to prevent the kidnapping, however; it wasn’t a random kidnapping.

Which character is most likely going to help a stranger, even if they got nothing out of it in return?

Daniel.

If your character got good/bad news, who would be the person they first tell?

At the beginning of our story, Daniel would tell his brother, Eden.  June would probably tell Tess, and John would probably tell his best friend, Tanis.  Rosie really has nobody at the beginning of the story, but later on, she’d probably tell John.

BONUS: Make an aesthetic for your MCs life if there had been no obstacles (money, geographical, etc.) and they had everything they wanted. (It is up to you if you want to explain it or not!)

I’m skipping this one.

I TAG THEE
If you want to do this, there is no obligation!

I’m not going to tag anybody, but if you want to do this one, then go ahead.  🙂

July Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

So it’s already the last day of July, and another time to do a monthly wrap-up.  Here is what happened for the month of July:

Books Read:

I finished 10 books this month, plus I also reread Like Normal People, since it’s a goal of mine to finish it in August.  When I was reading through it, I discovered a minor error that persists through the book, so I’ll probably go through the published copy on AO3 and fix them.

  • Origin – Dan Brown
  • Ever the Hunted – Erin Summerill
  • Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas
  • The House of One Thousand Eyes – Michelle Barker
  • Batman: Nightwalker – Marie Lu
  • Summer Days and Summer Nights – Various Authors
  • 1,000 Years, 1,000 People – Various Authors
  • Red Queen – Victoria Aveyard
  • Harbor Me – Jacqueline Woodson

Blog Stats

  • I gained 41 Twitter followers this month, up to 1570.  My goal was 1550; a few days ago I was three away from that goal, but I got a boost at the end of the month for some reason.
  • I have 7k monthly views per month on Pinterest.
  • I have about 250 monthly users on my blog.  Tuesdays are generally my best day (Top Ten Tuesdays).
  • I have 9 posts written that haven’t been posted yet.  I have generally been able to keep up with my scheduled posts (I have a calendar that tells me what posts I want to publish when) even though I now have to work again.

Writing

  • I won Camp NaNoWriMo this month with a challenge that I got on Facebook.  I was challenged to write a Gen Fusion fic… or a fanfict without a love relationship that combined two different fandoms.  I wrote My New Best Friend with those parameters, and I think it turned out well.
  • I realized that we only have three more months before NaNoWriMo this year, and I have four works in progress.  Not going to be able to finish them all.  So… I have decided to put Gamers on hiatus until 2019.  I’m not sure where I’m going with that anyway; I just have the characters and an inkling of what’s going to happen, but I don’t know for sure.  The other fics are all at least 2/3 complete, and I know how I want to end them all.  So I’m going to try to finish the first drafts at least.

Life

This month I had to go back to work after taking a leave of absence for a month.  Life has been pretty busy as a result, but I still was able to get a lot done.

We have decided to let my daughter go to public school this year… ugh.  She’s been homeschooled since she was 3 1/2.  I don’t know if she’ll like it, having to get up early every day like that, doing her homework, etc.  We told her that she can’t fake being sick and she has to do her homework, but this is what she wants… so… she’ll have to live with it.  We’re trying to get her either into an art-focused charter school or a school in another district, because her default school is evidently not that good.

In August, I start teaching Spanish and German again.  It will be my third year teaching these classes.  I still get nervous teaching them, even though I’ve done this twice.

So that’s all for this month.  Hopefully I’ll be able to report that I FINALLY finished writing Like Normal People in August!

June Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 12 Comments

I wasn’t planning on doing one of these, but I decided that I would do one anyway, which is why this is late.  Here is what happened in the month of June:

Books Read:

I read 15 books and wrote reviews on all of them.  They’re not all published yet though.

  • Indianapolis – Lynn Vincent
  • The Wrath and the Dawn – Renée Ahdieh
  • Smoke in the Sun – Renée Ahdieh
  • Use of Force – Brad Thor
  • Never Stop Walking – Christina Rickardsson
  • An Ember in the Ashes – Sabaa Tahir
  • A Torch Against the Night – Sabaa Tahir
  •  A Reaper at the Gates – Sabaa Tahir
  • Far Forest Scrolls Na Cearcaill – AAAAA (that was what was listed as the author)
  • Ace of Shades – Amanda Foody
  • My Real Name is Hanna – Tara Lynn Masih
  • Friction – Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg
  • The Kiss Quotient – Helen Hoang
  • Echoes – Alice Reeds
  • Strange the Dreamer – Laini Taylor

Blog Stats

  • So in June I passed 1500 Twitter followers :-).  I gained 50 followers.
  • I didn’t set up Google Analytics until halfway through the month, but I’ve seen an increase in blog traffic.
  • Pinterest monthly views rose from about 2.3k views per month to 6k views per month.
  • I finally figured out how to add my blog to Bloglovin’.

Writing

  • I finally finished the first draft for Chapter 22 to Like Normal People (a Legend fanfic)!  I’ve had writer’s block on that thing for a couple of months now.  It needs quite a bit of work, but now that I have gotten past that little hurdle, I can finally finish the book.  The fact that I started this story in early 2016 with the intention of “throwing this thing together in an evening”, and it didn’t quite turn out that way, is why I’m no longer publishing any part of my WIPs on AO3 until at least the first draft is done.  I hate to make people wait while I have writer’s block.
  • I started a new work in progress, Gamers, which is a Young Elites modern day AU.  I wrote 38 pages.  I have a glimmer of an idea of what I want to do with the story, but I don’t know everything at this point.
  • The first draft of Saving Adelinetta (a Young Elites fanfic) is at 249 pages, and is now about 2/3 of the way done.
  • The AO3 Writers group on Facebook is having a challenge for July called fandom roulette: they want me to write a gen fusion fanfic.  I wrote 21 pages on July 1st, and it’s going to be a Legend/Divergent fusion.  I’ve never written anything like this before.  I already know the end… the story is going to stay gen (no romantic relationships) until the last page, LOL.  Don’t know how long it’s going to be, but I have to finish it this month for the challenge.

Life

I took a leave of absence from work for the entire month of June, which is why I got so much done.  Unfortunately, the LOA was due to family issues which are still ongoing, but I had to go back to work.  One good thing about going back to work is that my job really only takes about half of my brainpower, so I can dream up scenes while I work.  Today I mused over the last scene in my Legend/Divergent fusion, and while I will probably tweak what was in my brain today when I finally get there, I really like how it’s going to end.

Not much else is going on… other than my car’s starter stopped wanting to start, and I have to take it in to get fixed tomorrow.