Fan Art and Overdue Update

This is fan art by Ambra of two characters in The Soulstone Chronicles fantasy series.

I have two new fan art pictures to post today. Ambra, a reader from Italy, loaded fan art onto Goodreads yesterday. She’s absolutely wonderful. I love her drawings. They’re whimsical, and she has a real flare for showing feelings, like mischievous humour, suspicion, etc. This set is sad but beautiful. And the hair in the colour version! It’s nice to see the red hair I so often describe. 

Thank you so much, Ambra.

Colour version.

I love his profile. Is gorgeous. Waaah!

And now a promised update.

A reader contacted me on Livejournal and wished to know how I was doing on the next volume of The Soulstone Chronicles and also whether I intended to publish another installment of my Loved Him to Death series.

Starting with Soulstone first:

I updated Gryphon 2 and 3, as you may know from earlier posts. I started an update of the Dispositions. I have a lot of pesky -ly suffixes to weed out. I know they may not be as bad as I think, but I still have to do it. But the month of November arrived and I decided to do Nanowrimo for the first time.

I have done my equivalent of Nanowrimo without actually ever participating. That’s how all The Soulstone Chronicles arrived. The thing I never did was keep track of my daily word count.

This Nano experience was a much needed lesson for me. I now know with certainty how many words I can feasibly write per day with basic editing involved as I write them. This means going over the previous chapters more than once before continuing. It means cutting, not just gunning straight ahead for word count. It means throwing entire chapters away and still making my word count. It means I’m a fussy little boo who now knows her fussy little boo self can create a WIP schedule to get her backlog of unfinished series finished. No more fails.

Nanowrimo has been a good experience. I’m very happy to have done it. Oh, yeah! I did get my target 50k, but I’m not quite done this novel. I have maybe a chapter to go. I thought of things while I could not sleep again today (mind is on brain fry mode) and my predicted finish chapter may require a little extra chapter on the end. This story has a very strict third person POV where I do not use any cinematic flow. I needed distance between the characters, who are devious, or murderous, or just plain innocent and don’t know what’s happening.

And how does Nano apply to The Soulstone Chronicles? I shall schedule in the completion of Redemption 4 in 2013. It is a partial WIP right now.

WIP, work in progress, just in case you’re wondering.  That one threw me the first time I saw it. What the heck is a WIP? Sounds kinky.

About The Loved Him to Death series:

It is no longer available on Freya’s Bower. I pulled it in October. I now have it back in my hands and in my control and will take the next installment wherever it ends up. I have the basic plot in mind, but I’m a pantser queen. Things happen. The characters don’t evolve in expected manners. My mind is an uncompartmentalized madhouse of characters doing as they please, and oh, wait, that sounds like Omos of the Ether. Do you know how often I make fun of his name? That was a huge word! Uncompartmentalized. It’s got a big red “this is a misspelled word” squiggle under it right now… Bleh. Don’t care.

…right, so I will schedule the next installment of Loved Him to Death for 2013 as well.

The planned books to get done or re-published are Loved Him 1 and 2 back up as ePUBs and mobi with new covers, Loved Him 3 finished, Redemption 4 finished, Tristan finished and published (Tristan used to be a free WIP on Livejournal, but I pulled it).

After that, I will be scheduling the next Pearl novel and the next Beast novella. Then more Soulstone. And somewhere in there, I will shove in the WIP of the other series under the other pen name.

About the other pen name. I’m not trying to hide this work from my current fans and readers so much as separate the series from the GLBTQ genre. Rather than scare off readers uncomfortable with GLBTQ material, I decided to separate this story from the K.M. Frontain publications and use another author name. I may make an announcement about it on my Frontain blogs eventually, but I will not focus on it or answer questions about it here. I just don’t want to stop anyone who has read my other works from finding this story if they are interested. I’d just like to ask you not to mention this me if you decide to post reviews for that me. Heh heh. Yeah. Sounds really split personality, that does.

And there it is, my update, new fan art (THANK YOU, AMBRA! WAAAAH!), and I’m off to finish this Nanowrimo WIP.