Blog

Good gravy, but it’s been a crazy few months!

For those of you who missed the nine thousand posts that made up [YANS] (Yet Another New Story), I did indeed win NaNo again last year. I even managed to end up with a proper story (of sorts) although it’s much more of a novella than a novel. Still, it’s got promise and the worldbuilding isn’t too convoluted so I may pick it up again in 2018, but first things first.

…And that’s cleaning up all of the currently open writing projects that I owe to other people, which is currently more than none!

The To Do List

Beta Read & Review

The first (and largest) is finishing a beta review of someone else’s novel that I’ve spent most of last year working on. The project has taught me that I would make a lousy book reviewer! I started with a rough set of feedback notes written in the margins and then went back and am working on polishing them up so they’d be helpful to the writer. Only it’s been a year and I still haven’t finished polishing them. *sighs*

So right now the work on that is to get all of the rough feedback uploaded so she can see them and then go back to working on the polished copies. Current status: chapters 1-40 good feedback done, 41-49 rough feedback posted, 76 chapters total. So 50-76 need to be uploaded with rough and I can get back to polishing.

Custom Prompt Books

Second are two open books of Saturday Story Prompts. One for High Fantasy with a theme of traveling and one just open Romance. Both of these are the open collections type, so I figured it would be a piece of cake to hunt down 62 of each… not so much.

Since these have taken me much longer than anticipated and I’m going to be throwing some free copies of the yearly collections into the pile when I send them over. Thankfully the buyer has been forgiving of my writer’s block, but of all the topics to get stuck on, they weren’t ones I was expecting!

Which brings me back around to what I’m doing after all the owed-to-other-folks work is done.

I need to revamp the prompt books!

New Book, Who Dis?

The general gist of the custom prompt ebooks is that I will gather a collection of prompts around a topic for the buyer. One option is made of new prompts no one has seen before and that won’t be released to the public for at least a year. The second is gathered from new and existing prompts and can be posted immediately.

So I was keeping two spreadsheets, one with the restricted prompts and one with what was going on the blog. Which was silly, because the two lists were the same thing, just operating in different time periods.

Thus I sat down and spent some time combining the two lists. I took all of the custom created prompts and started slotting them into the blog schedule at the point where they would be free to use. I was trying to only use two of the new prompts per post… but I’m up to the end of 2020 and I still have a bunch of things to scheudle! *facepalm*

So hmm.

I suppose it wouldn’t be terrible to change it to a 3/5 mix instead of a 2/5, since only a small handful of people have seen the prompts before. Still, I want to make sure the weekly prompts have enough variety in the topics so there’s still tweaking to be done after the randomization.

The good part is once I have things all combined it will be a lot easier for me to create smaller themed books. Right now I’m constantly shuffling between things, but this way it will be easy to tell what prompts are available for use.

Now back to work! *rolls up sleeves and wades into the custom orders*