Aldrea Alien's Blog, page 30

Character Growth – DOB Edition

Whilst I’m going through the older stuff I’ve still got kicking around for Dark One’s Bride, I’ve found myself stumbling into quite a few pieces that just didn’t mesh with Clara’s whole personality. I would like to think I knew that at the time of writing it, but I persisted for so long taking Clara down a path that ultimately put her in a position of being made weaker than she was at the end of Dark One’s Mistress. That likely led to my hatred of the story as a whole.

A fresh look tells me that, yes, there are still bits worthy of keeping. Her being somewhat on the hesitant around nobles, and even a touch uncertain of how to respond to people higher and lower than her social rank, is reasonable. She’s the daughter of a seamstress ffs, her life never would’ve had her leave Everdark had she not been kidnapped by Lucias’ men.

However, by the end of this trilogy, I need her to be in a particular place to do a particular thing, but I also need to her become the type of woman who won’t shirk at… well, doing this…

She pushed the dagger harder against the woman’s throat , eliciting a gasp from the Lady Raven . A thin line of red welled at the blade’s tip. “Wrong answer,” Clara growled. “Now, I’m feeling magnanimous, so I shall ask one more time and I’d suggest thinking very carefully about lying to me before you speak again. Where is my daughter?”

 – Clarabelle, Dark One’s Wife

 

And Lucias? He’s changed a lot, too. For some reason that I simply cannot remember to save my life, the original writing (from back before I split DOB and DOW) had him struggling to control his power, growing more erratic the longer the story went and, for the same reason, he had turned into a bit of a horndog. Not that it wasn’t still a clean romance, but the weird vibes I got from my own writing was just…

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You know what he’s like without all that dreck? To put it simply, Clara is elevated to near godly status in his eyes. Her wish, his command. And she’s got a few wishes along the way.

 

Some of the other characters have changed: Thad turned out to be a bit of an arse. His wife is far bubblier than I first envisioned, too. And Brenna (yes, from the first one)… has mellowed with marriage and pregnancy. Just a bit. Don’t upset her, she’ll still slap your face off. But none have changed as much as the two main characters.

Hoo boy… what a month.

Things have been pretty hectic here for much of October. We didn’t have a fully functioning kitchen for some time, far longer than anybody anticipated (we do now, although lacking a proper bench). Some of that time was due to the builders mucking us around, but everything after the flooring and walls was because of my partner’s absence. His mother was quite unwell, having been battling cancer for a year or so. Sadly, she went downhill quite suddenly near the end and passed away on the 14th.

 

On a different vein, I’m not currently writing To Target the Heart. I was going to try for the usual 20k, which I doubt I would’ve managed due to all of the above, but I’d an email pop up that asked one very simple question: When was the sequel to Dark One’s Mistress coming?

The thing was, I didn’t know the answer to that. Not then.

Since before I started on To Target the Heart, even whilst I was part way through In Pain and Blood and it’s novella An Unexpected Gift, Dark One’s Bride had been sitting there, half done. It was, originally, the first half of another book, and I’ve written so many scenes for it that just didn’t feel right for the story. In essence, I knew where I needed to start and where it had to end, but getting there was murky. Spits and spats cropped up whilst writing some of the later scenes for To Target the Heart, but I’d never turned my full attention to it. Until that email.

I’ve since completed four chapters and am halfway through a fifth. That leaves me with ten more chapters to either write from scratch or rewrite to match the new outline. Quite a few chapters have been scrapped or had sections repurposed in the process. I think having that break was actually good for it, it gave me time to fully consider just what sort of growth I wanted for Clara and Lucias.

Will I finish Dark One’s Bride by the end of the month? Probably not, if I’m realistic. But I’m taking November as a chance to finish whatever’s left. That means I’ll not being doing Nanowrimo. There’s just not 50k in this story and I can’t see myself adding more than a few hundred words to To Target the Heart alongside it as I’ve been doing some days (it will likely take the reins in the downtime between edits, though).

So, I’ve an answer to that question, now. Dark One’s Bride will definitely be out early 2019. I’m aiming for February, but that’ll depend on editing schedules.

It should be interesting.

I am a Powerhouse!

With the builders being here this month, I never intended to do the usual 20k this month. But I wanted to get to 150k. So I gave myself a goal of just under 17k.

I managed to plough through most of it during the weeks we waited for the builders, hitting around 14k in the weekend before they arrived. But once the the 24th hit… Well, for a bit there, I thought I certainly wasn’t able to write anything during the day with the banging and power tools going on right behind me. And a few days left me just too exhausted to write (and cold, it’s spring already, gimmie my warm days ffs).

But as you might’ve guessed by now. I DID IT!

To Target the Heart now has 150,000 words attached to it!

 

The kitchen is still just an empty room. But the floor is wonderfully flat and solid now.

No Kitchen – Day 1

The builders arrived today (hallelujah). My daughter and I had to leave super early anyhow because of the cultural festive her Kapa Haka group were participating in, so it wasn’t too bad. We were able to have breakfast in relative peace before washing up and packing everything back into the dining room.

The kitchen as it stood this morning.

 

So far, they’ve torn up a fair bit of the floor (still a piece left of the old stuff by the doorway). Found out a piece of the wall’s framework is still damp, (we’re currently tackling that with the dehumidifier). They plan to tackle the laundry next, because of the hole in the floor and the mould on the shared wall to the kitchen. Not sure what that’ll mean in there yet.

The kitchen as of midday. After this, they basically just put a floor down.

 

…Really?

For those of you in the know, I’ve been living with a water-damaged kitchen for some time now. All thanks to a cracked hot water pipe back on the third of June. Yeah… Facebook tells me it’s been four months since I uploaded the video on it. The floor is… serviceable. Kinda. It’s like a wave, especially closer to the wall where most of the damage happened.

When we contacted the insurance agency, everything moved along pretty fast to dry out the particle board flooring in the kitchen and get the carpet in the hall dry (no one thought to check the laundry, though, and that’s a mess with our new washing machine jutting into the main thoroughfare to keep it from falling through the still-sodden floor). The builders got in touch, mid-June, looked over the work, took samples and in late June informed us the vinyl has asbestos (does it not just get better?).

Then there was silence.

A lot of silence.

Then the builders told us they’d start in early September. The third… maybe “we’ll call to confirm”. That was back in July. We contacted a cattery to house the kittens as they’re indoor babies and we’d have a freaking hole in our floor. The cattery pencilled us in for sometime early September.

Sadly, that never happened and getting hold of the builders was a nightmare.

Then the builders contact us on the tenth. “We can be there tomorrow!” Wtf, says we. No contact then bam? Nothing was arranged for that sudden drop. The insurance lot agreed and the date was pushed back to… well…

Today.

We hauled out everything last night. Fridge/freezer, stove, microwaves (yes, plural), even the taps are disconnected. Took the kittens into the cattery yesterday, too.

Everyone was up bright and early today, especially myself and my daughter who would need to leave for school before the builders arrive. 7:30 am rocks around. My partner’s about to leave home, whereas I’m looking to leave twenty minutes after.

My partner’s phone rings. Not exactly shocking, but he’s been dealing with the builders.

Everyone freezes. There’s a not-happy look on my partner’s face.

“Sorry,” the builders say. “We’ve been held up on another project and can’t start until Wednesday/Thursdays.” (A fact they would’ve certainly known on Friday)

Well…

Crud.

If it wasn’t for the kittens, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the cattery only has them booked for ten days (and can do thirteen at a stretch, but is fully booked afterwards). The builders say it’ll be ten working days (but I fully expect it to be longer the way they’re going). Those number just don’t line up. So, I don’t rightly know what we’ll be doing there.

Honestly, if it wasn’t going through the insurance company, and using a builder they’d contracted, I’d give them the flip and have someone else to do it.

 

I’ve over it and it hasn’t even started.

 

Bright side? I’m just a little over 2k away from the “middle point” of my word count for To Target the Heart.

AllAuthor’s Cover of the Month Contest

I completely forgot I’d entered An Unexpected Gift: An Erotic Spellster Novella into AllAuthor’s Cover of the Month Contest.

Click to Vote!

Another Month, Another 20k

The whispers of a new kitchen are getting louder. Might be adding a laundry floor to that, too, considering where the new washing machine sits is slowly giving way. Honestly, I think the only thing stopping it from tipping back into the almighty sag going on behind it is the fact it’s actually leaning on a wall.

But my writing has been moving along at quite the clip. I hit my usual monthly goal of 20k on the 26th and pressed on for a few more thousand, even adding 600 words to a short story on my “day off”. Tonight, I hit 22k. And I think I’ll leave it there for this month. That gives me a nice overall total of 133k.

 

What happens next month? I don’t rightly know. The kitchen is supposed to be being rebuilt, so I guess we’ll see when and how well I do writing with several strangers tearing apart the room just at my back, especially when we’ve a serving hole in that wall.

Dylan of Demarn (of In Pain and Blood, by Aldrea Alien)

The Protagonist Speaks

 Dear readers, tonight with me is a spellster, eschewing the safety of the spellster tower for the freedom to roam the land.

He’s here to tell us about his life in the army, about how his first scouting mission went awry, and the mysterious and flirtatious Tracker.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

I grew up in Demarn’s spellster tower. It was my whole world for much of my life, actually. It was more of a complex, us spellsters lived in the tower in the centre, surrounded by gardens and a thick wall where the servants lived.

It was peaceful. Really quiet despite the fact there were hundreds of us. Tracker says the spellster population alone was in the thousands, I don’t know if I should believe him but there were a lot of us. We were expected to train our magic…

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In Pain and Blood – Award-winning novel

The results for the 2018 Connections eMagazine Reader’s Choice Award are in and…

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Yes! In Pain and Blood got its very first award! Silver in the Sci-fi, Paranormal & Fantasy Category to be exact. You can read what the judges said about it their eMagazine.

End of Month Wrap Up

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Well, I actually went and added another 1700 words to my 20k goal for this month’s Camp National Novel Writing Month. Probably could’ve added more, but I faffed around the weekend just gone.

Our washing machine died. Announced its end of life by piddling all over the laundry, but we’ve battled worse. It was 11 years old, so it’s not like we were surprised. Got a new one, then our dryer gave up the ghost.

And because they like to come in threes… FizzyWhip, my dear black and white cat, came up with an unexplained fever and lack of appetite. When the gannet goes off his food, it’s damn terrifying. He’s doing better now, eating everyone else’s food and his own like he always does.

 

I think I’ll end this month with this piece. It isn’t new, I think I wrote it sometime in June, but it’s one I adore…

Hamish shook his head, laughter bubbling in his chest. He flopped back onto his bed, arms spread across its length. “I think I’m in love.”

“Love?” Gordon echoed, pushing off the bedpost. “You met him four days ago.” He held up as many fingers in emphasis. “In that time you two have spent—what?—maybe the grand total of a day in each other’s presence? What you’re feeling is nae love.”