This is Your Brain. And This is Your Brain on Editing.

Heh.  I'm noticing that I'm having what I am calling "Editing Brain".  It's where I have this tunnel vision where there is editing and only editing.  Things go undone, emails are left unopened, and so on.  I'm not even remembering things for World of Warcraft, which is one of my favorite if annoying games to play at the moment.

So, remember kids, while writing brain is bad, editing brain is worse.  However, unlike drugs, you really should edit.  Edit is good.  Editing leads to publishing which leads to readers which leads to fanfic that is not categorized by wattpad.  God that was a stupid article about fanfic.  Tempted to write into Huff Post about it and complain.  Probably won't, but jeez.  Use more than one source where people host their stuff.  Like AO3 for example.

Anywho.  I'm going back to the editing slag mines.  Have a good weekend and you can find my fanfic at AO3 under crescent_gaia.  Cheers!

An Update

One and a half chapters are done.  I overuse some words too much, like just, but otherwise, there's nothing too horrible.  Saturdays and Sundays are going to be the days where I put the line edits into the word documents.  Right now, it's more printing out and going line by line to find the mistakes.  Then, when that's all done, just do a quick read before sending it out to the readers.  Should take about a month, month and a half, and then... then I'm not sure what to do with myself.

Other than write book 2.  I am thinking that I might start outlining and writing it instead of the other projects I have on tap.  We'll see.  I've got the rest of the month to figure out what to do.

[WriYe Blogging Circle] Fuck the Ides, I'm Going to Fear the Entire Month

Welcome to the first Monday of the month and to the WriYe Blogging Circle prompt.  It is also March.  March is the editing month.  It is known as NaNoEdMo and I am signed up for it through the WriYe forums.  Should also go join the official forums - okay, tried and failed and tweeted them about it.  Woo, productive.  Besides, I did... three hours on a eleven page chapter today.  Oi.  There was a lot of just.  I feel horrible as a writer about the justs.  However, we get the story out and then we take the month of March to red pen it.

In that spirit, we have the question!  A single easy question and a single hard question.  I just realized there are two questions.  Here we go.

Easy Question: Why is it necessary?
Metaphor answer: It's necessary because you need hard work to turn sand into a pearl.
Simile answer: It's necessary because you want your novel to read smoothly like a river flowing through a forest.

It's necessary because, in some way shape or form, you want to publish.  Either self or traditional.  Therefore, you need to edit because no editor wants to slog through all of your errors to get to the gem.  Same goes for self publishing, even more so, because you will get one star reviews about how you've written there for their and so on.  So yes, necessary because we want people to read and like our babies.  Do you like a messy baby with a poopy diaper and syntax errors?  No?  Nobody does.  Change the baby and fix your errors through editing.  The end.

Hard Question: Do you enjoy it?
Like I enjoy a root canal.  At least I can sleep through those.  Necessary but not enjoyable.  If I could staff out of my editing without people killing me, I would.  But I can't at the moment.  So I shall soldier on.  Possibly like you did reading this blog post.

Anywho, thanks for reading and see you Wednesday!

The Silence / Finish Line / Hello Again My Old Friends

This is going to cover a lot of stuff in one post, so there isn't just one name for it.  There's several and I'm not sure which one really fits the best.  So, three titles instead of just one but a shortish post.

First: apologies for not updating in a while.  I really felt that I had nothing to say, which is why there were no posts.  I'm going to try to make sure that doesn't happen in the future, but I can't promise anything.  I'll try to give a heads up if I have nothing to say, but again, no promises.  I wish I could promise my readers that I'm going to do everything on time but I can't.  So I would rather apologize than make false promises.

Second: Mystery of the Dark is completely written.  It comes out to right under 100,000 words.  It is rough and it needs editing and that's happening in March.  So prepare for a lot of "oh my God, what did I do?" and moaning about editing.  I'm also thinking about signing up for EdMo - Editing Month - but we'll see.

Third: I'm going to try my best to go back to the Monday/Wednesday/Friday posting.  It might just be a how things are going but I have another project that I am starting on March 1st.  It's the secondary project of this month - Desiring an Umbrella - but I'm going to be writing it on my phone.  It's a silly thing, but I like to try to see how writing works on different mediums.  I've tried doing a handwritten novel, but that's extremely hard.  It's a mix of sight issues and wrist issues, so that's that.  So, we'll see if I can't get back to the schedule and work on filling this journal with different things again.

So, that's it for the moment.  Hope everyone had a great February and I'll see you in March!

The Point of No Return

At the time of writing this post, I am at chapter 27 out of 30 of my novel.  Including my current chapter, I have four more to write and then I can finally edit this bad boy.  This is great, mostly because I really wanted to shop the novel around this year and get it published for release in late 2015 / early 2016.  In order to do that, I have to edit it and get it out to readers who will tell me if it's a good story and so on.  The hard deadline to be finished writing, because I completely missed the other deadline of having it completely done by January 31st, is this Saturday.

Yep, Saturday.  By the end of the day.  This might be moved to Sunday, if only due to family reasons that I will not get into here.  That's only because it is not my news to share and I am not sure if they want those reasons spread.  However, next week Monday, I will be hard core editing and then putting the editing marks into the word files.  Also with a blank notebook because I'll need to write down if there are plot holes.

But this is the point of no return because, really, it is the end.  The end of everything.  And so on.  It's really not.  It's the end of the novel and I'm really afraid of it for no good reason.  I think it's because it's something that's new.  New is scary but it's also good.  I have to remember the end of that last sentence.  It is also good.  Repeat that after me - It Is Also Good.  Mantra time.  Huuuuummmm.

So, there's that.  Apologies for there being nothing on Monday but... it was Monday?  And I didn't know what to really talk about?  So, yeah, sorry for that.

[TGIF] Weekend Plans

So, this weekend, plain and simple is to catch up.  I've been dithering around in Mystery of the Dark and I know where I'm going next.  So, really, finishing up that chapter, working on Desiring an Umbrella, and stop the side projects.

I'll report on Monday how it went.  Until then, happy Friday and happy weekend everyone!

[Book Review] Women's Murder Club Books 1-4

In my defense, it was either this or talking about music and writing some more like I did on this week's vlog.  It's not pretty but feel free to go ahead and watch it if you want to.  So, a book review.  Oh, but not just one book, four of them!  It's a series and I gobble them up in a span of two to three days (James Patterson has a gift y'all), so why not talk about more than one?  Makes sense to me, makes sense to you, and makes sense to the rest of the world.  Or at least I hope it does by the end of you reading this post.

So the books are, in order, 1st to Die, 2nd Chance, 3rd Degree, and 4th of July.  If you notice, they all have numbers in the title and all listed by the "number in title" part of the 2015 Reading Challege.  He's up to book 13 in the series and I said that I was going to read all of them this year.  I'm praying hard that he doesn't come out with a new book in the series this year.  He could.  James Patterson is known for being the Speedy Gonzales of the writing world.  He has five active series and this year will see... Wikipedia says three books.  I say someone hasn't updated the article considering last year he came out with seven books.  For all I know he might be slowing down but I love the fact that he can do so much in writing all these different series.  It is something that I aspire to be in my writing.

Back to the books themselves, they are an insanely fast read.  I could read them faster, if I just sat and read, but I do have other things to do with my life.  It's set in San Francisco, which is a place that I would like to visit but won't cry tears over if I don't, and there's one main character, Lindsey Boxer, and the three major characters - Cindy Thomas, Claire Washburn, and Jill Bernhardt (later Yuki Castellano) that orbit around Lindsey.  This is shown in the first book, the introduction to the series, and then cemented into place in the second book.  It's more commonplace by the third and fourth book, continuing on through the rest of the series.  You get their personal issues, to feel more attached to the characters, rather than just the case that they're working on.  For example, in the first book, Lindsey has a life threatening medical issue that is the entire secondary plot line of the book.  In the second book, you get to see Cindy more in a relationship with someone who they thought was targeted by the killers they're looking for and so on.  I think it's one of the hooks that work well with the series and I do hope that it continues on.  I'll chime in later reviews if it doesn't.

So that's the nutshell of the books - there's a case and there's the personal lives of the club that revolve around the case.  It's interesting because I know, in a later book, that something happens where Lindsey's personal life and professional life collide in a not good way and she misses a promotion.  It'll be interesting to read due to, at this point, having her be nearly all about her job.  She's got a boyfriend who is in the FBI, but other than that, it's really the job.  I mean, she's got a dog, which was a nice touch instead of a cat, but her life is very one note at the beginning.  It works because these are mystery/thriller and not straight up literature or chick lit.  It's nice that there's a closeness and it blurs the line a small bit sometimes between mystery and chick lit but still stays mystery.  It's not as bloody as, say, his Alex Cross series (Along Came a Spider is the first book of that series, also a movie) but it has enough to make it a mystery series.

So, I highly recommend them, especially if you're looking for a quick read.  The chapters are small, the writing is tight and you want to know what happens next, and you'll enjoy yourself.  None of them are creepy and yes, you might find them get formulaic, but they're worth it.  My favorite type of brain candy as it's smart enough to keep me reading and yet candy enough to make me feel like I'm having a delicious literary treat.