Where I confess to being a mess…

The problem with being a published writer is that you have to keep writing. Now, the writing part is easy…it’s the finishing part that sometimes gets hard. You all know the drill…too many ideas, not enough time to write them, yes, but also the idea that if you are not a full time writer you have less time ti write, so you lose the thread or you look back and you think, “This is all garbage.”

That’s what I did, recently, with the book I was passionately writing all last summer. Read it recently to get back into it…and I hate it.

Then I remembered that I had started a book, written in first person zombie, and thought, “I should write that before the whole Zombie craze is over…” and I did a couple of dumb things, there…originally, Minerva Corvae was not a zombie, she was a big part of the mystery that had to be solved, and I wrote it and got to the end and needed to second draft the book but was eh on it. Then I decided to write her character as a zombie, and I wrote it in this wonderfully snarky voice and fell in love with her all over again. So I started writing that and then thought I would try and use the old story and…yeah. Now I’m stuck, there, trying to decide whether to throw out the other book, or two go with these two other story ideas. Ashton and Minerva have about three books in them…

And I want to write another book in the Chocolatier’s Wife world, especially since I have lots of requests for a sequel. I have three non-sequels set there…I wanted to explore different aspects of the spell (what if the person the spell chooses for you dies/is not your social station?) and set a story in the Pandroth Empire.

I need to do some serious gardening in my head, get everything organized neatly. I had been using http://www.mywritingnook.com/write/, which I loves even though I had a heart attack awhile back where nothing was loading (I back up often, but you know…) and now I have a USB with Kingsoft Office’s word processing software. I’m trying it because it has….drum roll…my long desired tabbed word processing! It’s not perfect…what I really want is how, in Excel, you have ONE spreadsheet, and it has lots of tabs? That’s what I really want. But this is pretty close. I like Writing Nook…I can write on my iPad then sync, write at my desk during lunch hour, go home and write some more (I only have to sync the iPad, not the others) and I don’t have to worry about forgetting something. But if you are like me and your mind is an over grown garden in desperate need of weeding, then maybe it is not the best solution?

So, since I have time away…two weeks vacation, and the college break is six weeks total, I am focusing on cleaning my garden. Organizing my writing, seeing what I have. It’s nice right now, in the offices…so quiet. The campus is peaceful and very pretty (even though a Hollywood movie is shooting here…Fox Catcher, I think…) so all is kind of well with the world right now.