Leah R. Cutter's Blog, page 15

FINISHED!!!!!

I just finished the last book in the trilogy, A Sword’s Poem!!!!!

YAY! HUZZAH!!!

The three combined are over 100,000 words. They will all grow significantly as well during the “make it not broke” phase, as all three are pretty broken currently.

But still. I wrote the last chapter this morning. Am very pleased and happy with it.

For those of you following along from home, I started this novel back in 2004. In the first chapter, the main character loses her mate. The rest of the story deals with her grieving process.

Back in 2004, I’d written the first 20,000 words of the novel. Then my mother died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack.

I couldn’t write the novel anymore. I wasn’t in the right head space. My grieving process wasn’t the same as the character’s. My heart just wasn’t in it.

I finally got back to the story this year and I’m glad I did. There are parts of it that still make me cry. Some of the magic in it makes me clap my hands with glee.

Originally, it was just going to be a single, very long novel, over 120K words.

However, the world has changed since 2004. I wrote the single story as three novellas, and will publish each separately next year, three months in a row.

For now, I’m letting the whole thing rest. I have short stories to do this next week, then a workshop, then I’ll write a different novel in November. (Of Myst and Folly, the novel that was inspired by the short story, The Last Dancing Leaves.)

Come December, I’ll do the “make it not broke” draft for all three books in A Sword’s Poem and plan on sending it out to first readers come January.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Story excerpt Sunday!

Poisoned Pearls is being excerpted for Story Except Sunday, over on Book View Cafe.

Go check it out!

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

The Last Dancing Leaves now available!

The new volume of the Uncollected Anthology Series is now available!

uncollected: not collected or gathered together

oxymoron: a combination of words that have opposite or very different meanings

The Uncollected Anthology series is indeed an oxymoron. Sprung from the minds of seven fabulous authors who love fantasy, short stories, and each other’s writing, the series’ main goal is to bring you quality urban fantasy fiction.

Every three months, the authors pick a theme and write a short story for that theme. But instead of bundling the stories together, they each sell their own stories. No muss, no fuss—you can buy one story, or you can buy them all. (We’ll be honest: we hope you buy them all!)

Uncollected Anthology: When you can’t get enough of the stories you love.

———————

The incredibly fabulous authors—go check out their stories!

Annie Reed

Dayle Dermatis

Leslie Walker

Michele Lang

Phaedra Weldon

Stephanie Writt

———————

Upcoming Themes

Heartspells

Portals and Passageways

———————

My Story

The Last Dancing Leaves

The adults claim that the electro-magnetic-pulse (EMP) knocked the world offline.

But nothing came back online afterward. And so the old world died.

Something important had changed. Rifts opened. Myst pooled in the cities and other places men lived, killing everyone, everything that didn’t flee.

Dark things live there now.

Evil things. Magic things.

But the kids know that not just evil creeps out of the myst. Good creatures come too: like the cat-woman with the tattooed fangs, the eight-legged dog boy, and the witches.

Brendon watches for the witches every year, hoping the Winter Witch will bless the blue-dragon-eggs he gathered, will hatch the beings hidden within.

For he knows they need something more to fight the myst and the creatures crawling out of it. Or else humanity is doomed.

Available for $2.99 as an ebook.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Black Hearts, Ivory Bones, re-released as ebook!

Woo and hoo!

One of the very first short stories I ever sold was The Red Boots to Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow, for their anthology of retold fairy tales, Black Hearts, Ivory Bones.

That anthology has now been reissued as an ebook, along with all the other anthologies in that series!

I’m kind of excited that this story and this series is getting another shot.

All of them are available from Open Road Media as well as your favorite retailers.

So go! Enjoy!

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

More about process…

In an ideal world, I’d be able to write and publish an absolutely brilliant novel once a month, every month.

At this point, I can’t. I may never be able to.

But I have been looking at my individual processes, trying to tweak them and so speed up the entire process, and possibly gain more quality as a result.

For me, the road to publishing has many steps, including:

–Write the first draft. I can draft pretty quickly. I’ve been working on spending more time with my butt in the chair, fingers on the keyboard, writing more.

–Make the first draft not broke. Any draft I finish–be it a short story or a novel–is broken when I first finish it. I must go through the entire thing and fix stuff. For example, possibly a character changed careers mid-book (as what happened in the last novel.) Or maybe I started writing the book and thought the main character was a certain age, only to discover she wasn’t. Etc.

The “make it not broke” step takes time because I’m figuring stuff out. I spend a lot of time listening to my inner writer, to hear what she’s actually trying to say. Then making sure that gets down on the page.

–Read the story out loud. My ear always catches things my eye misses.

–I send this less broken draft to first readers. I am so lucky. I have some brilliant first readers. Then I get to incorporate their comments.

Incorporating reader comments is the step I’ve been working on most recently.

I figured out that one of the reasons I kept stopping or getting stuck while incorporating reader comments was because I was constantly moving from critical voice to creative voice, then back and forth again. This was also why I found it tiring, as well as tedious.

So I’ve made some changes. I have two laptops. One is the production machine that I use for publishing, designing covers, as well as email. The other is my writing machine. There’s no internet on the writing machine. No games. The only thing I ever use that machine to do is write.

I now keep the critical, reader-comment manuscripts on my production machine, while I keep the actual text on my writing machine. That way, I’m encouraging the creative process. When I turn away from the production machine, I know it’s time to be creative, time to write.

That split has helped a lot. Made the switching back and forth easier. It also made it much easier to step back and let the inner writer do what she needed to do.

Another thing I did while incorporating the latest set of comments was to question myself every time I stopped. Did a lot of checking in with myself.

Why was I stopping? What was it that was causing me to stop? Had I slipped out of the fun, creative voice too far? Was I afraid of something? Or did I just really need a break?

The replies were interesting. Sometimes I honestly needed a break. I needed to think, or I needed to walk away from the keyboard for a while.

Sometimes, I’d stopped because I’d lost the “fun train”, as it were. I was getting too critical. I needed to pull back, find out what I love about this, then start again.

The fear was the most interesting. I refuse to stay afraid, though. Fear is the thing that will get me to walk out of the room, then walk right back in again. I refuse to stop writing because of fear. I think it’s stupid.

Doesn’t stop me from being afraid sometimes. I just have to make sure that I’m going to keep going, regardless.

So instead of taking a week to incorporate reader comments, I managed to do it in about three days. Mind you, those were three days of solid work. Lots of hours. And lots of new words. Added 15% more to the manuscript.

When I was working full time, I didn’t feel the need to get efficient this way. Writing full time, I’m more conscious of where all my writing time goes.

And now, back to the writing…

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

That hunger

No, not the waking up at 3 AM and craving candied, cajun bacon. (I’m not the only one who does that, right?)

But that hunger, that drive to succeed.

I was really busy for a while this summer. Too busy. Busier than I would choose to be. Unsustainably busy.

And as part of that, as well as a result of leaving the day job and writing full time, I lost the plot for a while. I wasn’t dancing on that keen edge of hunger. I wasn’t pushing forward as much as I need to.

Thanks to a class I’m currently taking (more on that in a few weeks once I’ve finished it) as well as a lot of reflection and long conversations with my sweetie, I’ve regained that hunger. That drive. That need.

It isn’t always comfortable, living this hungry. I get that. However, I need this level of drive, of hunger, to succeed at writing full time. To make enough money from my fiction to support myself. I need it to make sure that I get my butt in the chair and I do the work. Beyond discipline. Beyond habit. Part excitement, part stubbornness, part I will win and nothing is going to stop me.

So…yeah. Hungry. And I will continue to remind myself about this.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Very, very, very silly video

As you may or may not recall in our continuing saga of cross-promotion, the new Fiction River subscription kickstarter has featured some of my work for its rewards, which was, let’s just say, very rewarding, indeed.

They also asked if we’d do a video.

I, uhm, may have agreed.

It may also be very, very, very silly.

You’ll find it as part of the September 16th update.

I’m also uploading a copy here.

Link to silly (very silly) video.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Second Gracie story now available!

Gracie’s Fire, the second Gracie story, is now available!

This is the story that I sold to the anthology, Clockwork Universe. It was my first steampunk story. However, I liked it so much, and I liked Gracie and her world so much, that I’ve written more stories about her.

The first, chronologically speaking, is Gracie and the Whirligig.

This is the second story available, but there are a couple of stories that I’ve already written that take place chronologically between the two. I’ll publish those later this year.

The blurb:

Mama may not have taught Gracie much.

But Mama did make sure Gracie was well-versed in the essentials: shooting, moonshining, and charming gentlemen callers.

And Gracie is gonna need all of ‘em when some strange orange folk come to the Gold Mine Saloon.

This story takes place around 1890, in Stockton, CA.

This story is available at all the usual retailers as well as for free, for the next two weeks, until the end of September.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Kobo Sale Starts Today!

This weekend, September 12-15, Kobo is having a sale.

And I’m in it!

My novels The Clockwork Fairy Kingdom and The Maker, the Teacher, and the Monster are both on sale for 30% off this weekend.

Of course, there’s a secret handshake. You knew that, right?

The code is: READ30

There are lots of books on sale, in all territories. The code will work many times as well. So go! Buy books! Support authors! Be excellent to each other! And all that other good stuff.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.

Goodreads Giveaway!

If you haven’t gotten your copy of Poisoned Pearls, here’s your chance!

I’m giving away five copies of the book as part of a Goodreads giveaway that I’m holding until September 12, which is Friday. (I believe the giveaway lasts until midnight on the 12th, but it might be midnight on the 11th.)

I know, the official announcement should have been sooner. But there’s still time!

I’m pleased with the number of people who have signed up for the giveaway, as well as the number who have now listed Poisoned Pearls on their “To Be Read” lists.

So go! Sign up!

Or just go and get your own copy from your favorite retailer.

Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.