Now that I'm finished writing Dragon Dilemma the inevitable has happened. I should have known it might, considering how Dragon Detective demanded it be written before Dragon Dilemma.
To alleviate confusion before I start explaining the issue, here is the order of the series as it's currently planned:
As you can see, it's a lengthy series already and I do plan to write more than six books total. Dragon Consultant is the set up book by necessity since, as the first book, it introduces everything. After that the series diverges into two separate plot lines: finding and fighting the enemy versus a world building plot. Admittedly, a reader of the series that is unfamiliar with my various posts about the difficulties I've been having with those two plots might not notice the separation, but each book is focused on one of those lines. Unfortunately, it's not a linear progression. The plots are intertwined throughout, but one is pulled more to the fore in each book. Dragon Deception focused on the battle against the enemy, fighting to save the dragons and stop the bad guys. That plot line is supplanted in Dragon Dilemma by the world building plot. You may remember that when I finished writing Deception, the next book I worked on was Dragon Detective. I skipped Dragon Dilemma almost entirely because the battle against the enemy isn't nearly as prevalent in Dilemma. I chose to continue the fighting plot from Deception while I had momentum going and completed Dragon Detective soon after. Forcing myself to not continue with that plot and also write Dragon Soldier was difficult, but there was no way I was going to have books four and five completed while book three languished. That seemed like a really silly thing to do. I have been working on Dragon Dilemma ever since and I just completed it. I still need to go through the story for a basic edit, then I'll set aside for a month before I pick it back up for a final round of editing and formatting for submission. I'm pretty certain I'll be able to submit Dilemma to LT3 in June. The original plan when I finished Dilemma was to return to working on Dragon Soldier. I'm starting to realize that may not happen. The world building plot line from Dilemma becomes secondary in Detective and Soldier, then reasserts itself in Dragon Spy. My muses are demanding that now that Dilemma is complete I need to pick up Spy and continue the world building plot. I don't want to skip Soldier, but that may just be how it ends up working out. Is it normal to hopscotch between books in a series like this? I'm going with no. These books need to be read in order and probably should be written that way too. In June I'm going to be editing both Dilemma and Detective. I'm hoping that editing Detective will put my brain back on the fighting the enemy plot line and I'll be able to continue working on Soldier like I planned. I do have to say that I really like what I'm coming up with for Dragon Spy. I'm going to have an interesting few months of writing this series.
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Not too long ago I was working on my Supernatural Consultant series almost exclusively. I wrote the first two books very quickly, got them edited, and they've since been accepted by LT3. I expect Dragon Consultant will come out in 2015 and Dragon Deception sometime in early 2016. (Those are only estimates, so don't run and mark your calendars just yet.) After the whirlwind that was getting those books completed, I almost expected that success to keep going at such a quick rate. To the casual observer, and sometimes even to me, it's starting to feel like I'll never have book three, Dragon Dilemma, in LT3's hands.
To alleviate confusion, here's a list of the planned books in the Supernatural Consultant series in order of publication:
Despite the months that have passed since I started writing Dragon Dilemma, I have only reached 15k words. That's the halfway point and I've certainly gotten a lot written, but given the amount of time that's passed I should be much closer to finishing the story. To be perfectly honest, that lack of visible success is actually illusionary. Yes, I haven't gotten Dragon Dilemma ready for submission yet, but 15k is nothing to sneeze at and other writing projects have been interfering. I have a very large number of unfinished works in progress that I have been slowly chugging away on. Lately I've been working on a superhero story, Justified (the sequel to Magnified), and been poking at my other stories as often as I can. To see my full to-do list, visit my current projects page and commiserate with me. In addition to my Supernatural Consultant series I would really like to get a number of these onto my published list. That goal means I can't work exclusively on one series at a time and is one of the reasons I haven't finished Dragon Dilemma just yet. The other main reason is Dragon Detective, the plot of which flows directly from Deception and skips Dilemma almost entirely. When I finished writing Deception, my brain was already moving in the direction of Detective, so I let it continue. Fighting with my muses to focus on Dilemma might have instead induced a case of writers block, so I didn't want to do that. Also, with Deception heading to LT3 I wanted to make sure it worked as part of the larger series which meant I needed to get at least part of the rest of that long plot written. Dragon Detective has since been completed. I can't submit it before Dilemma, of course, but with Detective out of the way I could return to Dilemma without any problems. So, while it appears on the surface that it's been months and months since the Supernatural Consultant series has made progress, that's simply not true. Dragon Dilemma is going great at the moment. I have the entire plot mapped out, so all I need is to get it onto paper. I shouldn't need more than another month to finish writing and then I'll set it aside for a month to rest. In June I should be editing Dilemma and Detective for submission to LT3 and (if/when they accept it) that will make four books in the series on the road to getting published. The rest of the series is being held in partial stasis at the moment. In the back of my head I am working on the plot for Dragon Soldier, the direct sequel to Dragon Detective. It's part of the continual plot from Deception, but I couldn't allow myself to write books four and five without getting book three done so I haven't been working on it. When Dilemma is set aside to rest for a month I'll return to Dragon Soldier. After that the series gets a little murky. I have two more books planned, Dragon Spy and a still untitled book focused on Alloy, one of my characters, but aside from some ideas of various individual scenes that should occur I don't have anything plotted out. I'm also hoping those two books will grow into four to six books, which is what happened with the earlier books in the series. I wrote Dragon Consultant, started writing Dragon Detective, which was supposed to be book two, realized I needed to add another book's worth of plot between those two books, which spawned Dragon Deception, and subsequently also came up with the idea for Dragon Dilemma. Dragon Detective quickly moved to being book four in the series. In addition, I realized that Dragon Detective was getting to be too long and decided to split the book in two. Each book in the series is maxed at 30k words, but to tell the full plot I needed 60k so Dragon Soldier was born. I'm hoping to see something similar happen to books six and seven that will expand the series to at least ten books. What this all means is the state of the dragon state is strong! I should be seeing the edits and cover for Dragon Consultant in the next few months and Dragon Dilemma and Dragon Detective should be in LT3's hands very soon as well. There's still a lot more to write and I'm certain that other projects on my to-do list will interfere, but you should still see books from my Supernatural Consultant series for a while to come. For more information about the Supernatural Consultant series, visit the series' page and the current projects page on my website. Sticking to my goals really isn't easy. At all. The goals themselves are simple enough: I lay out exactly what I want to work on each month and do my best to fulfill that list. I've found that I generally accomplish about seventy percent of my goals for each month, which isn't too bad when I break it down. It amounts to approximately 15-30k words a month, plus any editing and formatting for other stories I'm submitting. I'm very proud of that number, yet sticking to working on the stories actually on my goals list is another matter entirely.
Take this month for example. My writing goals were to work on my Supernatural Consultant series, my Oracle series, and Kelpie Blue. The latter two I haven't touched at all while the former I've written about 4k total in two different stories. I know it's still early in the month and that I'm spending a large portion of it on vacation so that number isn't a bad one in any way, but I've also written 2k in Ge-Mi, which wasn't even a glimmer on my goals list. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to work on Ge-Mi. I don't usually write science fiction, so this story is always an exciting opportunity to stretch my wings. I also really like the characters and am looking forward to telling their story fully, but I wasn't planning on working on it at all. I have momentum going with Ge-Mi at the moment and I can absolutely see myself writing another 5-10k. If I stop working on Ge-Mi to focus solely on the stories in my goals I may lose the opportunity to work on Ge-Mi. The momentum might not return for months or longer and I really don't want that to happen, but at the same time I chose the stories on my goals list for a reason and taking the time away from those stories for another isn't ideal. Hence my conundrum. In the end I'm probably going to see how far my momentum with Ge-Mi will take the story. I'm not working on anything with a deadline so nothing else takes priority. The honest truth is, if I had gotten the momentum for Ge-Mi at the end of December I wouldn't have had any problem putting it onto my goals list for January. There's also still enough time left in the month to work on my other stories as well, so maybe I'll still accomplish my goals in addition. There have been many times when I finished writing a story and only a few short days later I sent it off to the publisher. I often wondered to myself, have I done enough editing? Is my story really as polished as I think it is? I've gotten enough rejections of stories to wonder whether my editing process needs tweaking, but I have also gotten a lot of acceptances that seem to negate that worry. This is how I edit--a method that I think works well for me--and how I'm working on tweaking the process to help my writing and my stories grow.
--- I have heard that the best way to sit down and write 50,000 words is to write continuously. Do not stop to edit or backtrack, do not reread past chapters, and do not stop to think about whether what you've written actually makes sense. You can edit everything later! On paper that sounds like good advice; I could probably get a lot written if I let myself go like that. The issue is, that's not how I write. In fact, if someone were to ask me for advice on writing, I would probably give an exact opposite answer. I am a serial editor. I try to sit and write as continuously as possible, but the second a red or green squiggly line appears underneath something I have to stop and check what's wrong. It's a compulsion that I can't ignore. Because of that, there generally aren't any obvious misspellings or grammar issues in my work. But that isn't enough for me. When I finish a section and feel like I need a break before diving into the next part, I often go back and reread what I've just written. This is actually a pretty major step in getting my stories edited for submission, as odd as that sounds. Editing when the idea of what I want put onto paper is still fresh in my mind (because I just finished putting it onto paper) is a great time for me to go back and double check that I got everything still swirling through my head down. I often add a lot of content and fix some continuity issues at this point. While I was writing I was focused on getting every bit of plot and character down. As I reread, all the little things I missed immediately jump out at me. I also find editing like this to be a great centering tool, so when I return to writing where I left off I know exactly what just happened to lead me to where I still need to go. It's a lot harder for my story to veer off on unfortunate tangents that way. I don't stop editing there. One story will take months to write, but I am also a victim of writer's block, procrastination, and distraction. Sometimes an entire month (or more) will go by without my writing a single word in a story. Maybe I was working on something else, maybe I couldn't string any viable plot together, or maybe I was just putting off the research I needed to do. Either way, individual stories tend to sit stagnant on my computer and in my brain for a long time. I have heard time and again that once I finish a story, I should let it sit for a while before editing. I agree with that idea wholeheartedly. When I finally pick an unfinished story back up, I start reading at the beginning and I start editing. This is the second most important step to my editing process. When a story isn't fresh in my mind I can see things I would have missed before. A person's mind that is too familiar with the story will gloss over issues like a missing S or E in a word, or the wrong Two or There because their brain thinks it knows what should be on the paper regardless of what their eyes are actually seeing. I have found that I generally don't suffer from that issue nearly as much a month later after my brain has had a chance to forget. In addition, plots or sentences that had made perfect sense in my head aren't always translated properly to paper. Those in particular are very hard to see when a story is too fresh. Giving my stories time to rest before editing allows for those issues to become easier to spot. Throughout the months long writing process for one story I go back to the beginning and reread many times. Once I've finished a story, I'm always super excited to get it formatted and sent off to a publisher. It actually takes me a lot of self-discipline to ensure I sit down and give the story a final edit. Only days after a story is completed, I go through it as thoroughly as I can. I used to then immediately submit it once that was finished, . I admit, at this point in the editing process I used to believe that I had done enough. Remember, I've already done most of the editing throughout the months it took to write the story. Truthfully, no one seemed upset with the editing for the stories in my Dragon's Hoard Series, which I submitted moments after finishing that final read-though. I still believe that there's only so much editing that can be done before I start feeling like I'm killing the story, but I am trying to improve! For many authors the final edit for a story is a process that can, and probably should, take weeks. They give the story some time to rest before they start combing through it. That is a process I am trying to learn because I think it should improve my overall final product. Instead of allowing myself to immediately submit a story only days after I finished writing it, I am trying to put the story aside for at least a few weeks before giving it a final edit. My first real attempts at this are Thunderbird and The Oracle's Sprite. Both stories have been sitting stagnant on my computer for weeks. They're both complete, but I have forced myself to let them sit. In December I will read through them again for a final edit before I format the documents and submit the stories. I'm sure everyone has their own personal editing method and that there are people shaking their head sadly over mine. I can't change how I write or how I edit, but I am hoping adding to the process will produce real results. I'll let you know how it worked out after Thunderbird and The Oracle's Sprite have been accepted! I have loved the characters and plot for Dragon Consultant ever since I first came up with the idea of five dragon kits and their dad lost in the forest. The story was originally supposed to be for an anthology/collection call. The call asked for unique shifters and a minimum of 50k words. I started working and quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to reach 50k by the deadline. I had too many responsibilities to my other stories; some were in edits and others also had nearing deadlines. I was forced to reluctantly abandon the call and to put Dragon Consultant aside. In the months since, I have caught up on most of the deadlines and edits and I suddenly have the time to pull out old stories, dust them off, and see whether I can get them going again. This was part of my third goal for November.
I read through Kelpie Blue, If A Butterfly Don't Fly, and Ge-Mi first, but quickly realized that all three stories were stalled on difficult scene changes that I hadn't figured out how to smooth over just yet. Instead of tormenting myself with them, I put them back into storage for the moment. Next I thought about starting Justified, but came to the conclusion that adding yet another story to my already extensive to-do list was stupid; Justified could wait. My last hope for completing goal three was Dragon Consultant. Luckily, Dragon Consultant wasn't stuck on an awkward scene change. I had put it aside mid-scene all those months ago and was able to pick up where I left off. The premise of the story is simple enough: a bunch of dragons were traveling to visit my main character to ask for his help in trying to save some other dragons that had been captured by the enemy. Cuteness ensued. However, as I was continuing to write I soon realized that there is a serious problem with the story: I rushed the original planning process trying to meet the deadline and don't have an end-game. I also realized that the original parameters for the story no longer apply. I don't have to write 50k. I could write 20k or 200k, but I don't have any idea what length the plot calls for because I don't know enough of the overall plot! This is a serious problem, one which I have to solve before Dragon Consultant can go anywhere. There are two main plot lines in the story: save the dragons and defeat the bad guy. If I stick to just that, the story will probably end up around 25k. I could also expand the bad guy's role so there are more trials and tribulations for the characters to jump through. That would probably stretch the story to at least 40k. The third option is to write the 25k story and have a sequel that will encompass option two. I'm honestly partial to option three--mostly because I love the MCs that would star in the sequel--but I until I sit down and really plan out the plot of the first book I just don't know what is possible. I will continue to work on Dragon Consultant through November and I'm really hoping it will spark enough plot to continue to star in my goals list through the New Year. If anyone wants to stay in the loop about how writing is going, please visit my Current Projects page where I'll keep my word count progress up to date. Receiving reviews for my work is actually very nerve wracking. I, like most people in the world, want validation that what I'm doing is worthwhile. I want to know that people are enjoying my work and I want to know why so I can try to replicate that success in the future. It's a difficult emotion to articulate, but one that affects me every time I look at Goodreads or Amazon to see if someone has written anything. I have noticed that there are generally four types of reviews: Good, Bad, Inconclusive, and I Didn't Read The Book And Am Reviewing Anyway. Of course there's overlap between them, but for the most part everyone writes into one of those categories.
Like I said, I read every review of my work that I can find and I post them to my bibliography. Anyone who has taken the time to purchase and read my book is greatly appreciated, even if they give a bad review, and I want to thank them for it. Please keep reviewing the stories you read and know that in some small way you are making the world of writing that much better!
8/2/14
Except for the fact that I'm not at all... Edits are cruel, cruel taskmasters and for some very strange reason I can't get the edits for Road to Home done. It's only twenty pages--if you remember I mentioned that there were so many issues the editor sent it back to me to fix before she continued on to the rest of the story--yet it's acting like it's one hundred twenty. Every time I feel like I've made progress I reach another hiccup that takes days to wade through. After which I feel excited that I've made progress, which only spins me back to the new hiccup. It's a never-ending cycle of doom and it's infuriating! I should have had Road to Home back to LT3 weeks ago and I haven't been able to come through.
I really am close this time. I think. I only have six more pages to go and I've already gone through them once. I can do it! Until the next damned hiccup appears, at least. I do have progress to report elsewhere: Lynden Leaves will have a new title in just three days! I do admit I have already picked the one I like best out of all the wonderful submissions to my contest, but there's still time for one I like even more to appear. Once I have the title I'll go through the story again for any last minute edits and have it submitted before the call closes on July 1st. It's always nice to feel like I accomplished something! I have the edits for Heartbeat, my story for LT3's Satisfaction Guaranteed anthology call. I've glanced through them quickly and I'm happy to say that there doesn't appear to be any major rewrites or plot issues. There's definitely work to be done, but nothing near the scale of Road to Home. I'm saving these edits for after Road to Home is back with an editor, but I'm definitely looking forward to edits that don't fight me every step of the way. I can't forget to mention that Paint, Guns, Money, and Love is coming out on June 4th, which is less than a week from now! The final chapter is up on LT3's serial page at the moment. What I don't understand is how the two people that negatively rated the story on Goodreads months ago had read enough of the story to downgrade it so heavily. The story hadn't even reached midway on LT3's serial release and they apparently already hated it. They weren't even kind enough to leave a review as to why! I hope everyone else has been enjoying it! Speaking of feeling accomplished, Magnified is now the longest original fiction story I have ever written! It's currently at 46k and I haven't even reached the midpoint! I suspect it will take a long time to finish, but the journey has certainly been exciting so far. I'm still diligently working on all my stories and hope to have something from The Oracle Series ready to submit next. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I should probably stop procrastinating and get back to Road to Home. I will have the edits done before June! I can do it! And, yes, the pompoms might be necessary in this case. Wings of the Stars, part of LT3's A Loose Screw anthology, is set to come out on April 2 and Heart's Tournament, part of LT3's Won't Back Down anthology, will arrive only a month later on May 14. Since I have so many anthology stories coming out this year, I thought it might be interesting to explain why I continue to write for their calls. Read on if you're interested, or go check out the pre-orders for those two books. I've posted links at the very bottom of this post.
Writing for an anthology call is how I got my start as a published author. I submitted Cinder-Elle to LT3's ongoing Fairytales Slashed call in December 2011 and Cinder-Elle eventually became my very first published story. Since then, I have published five stories in anthologies with an additional three to come out soon. Anthologies are so much fun to write and there are so many practical applications that every writer should keep in mind. Here are a few: |
Coming Soon
Gifting a Dragon's Heart
March 19, 2024 Soul Bond
January 30, 2024 Twin Elements
October 17, 2023 Witch
April 15, 2023 AuthorMell Eight is an author writing with NSP. For more information about Mell and her writing, please visit her website: http://melleightfiction. Tags
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