Another day of writing FD under my belt and with a total of 18 pages.  Oh yeah, baby!  And more importantly, it was completed before 11 AM and I won’t be sitting in front of this monitor all day long.

I’m seeing the holes in my book.  Nothing too big, but details that need to be added, and I need more interaction early on between my heroine and the other women in the house.  That will have to be added during revisions.  I’m on page 260, want to get to 360 and only have four chapters to go, which means I may be about 50 pages shy come Thursday or Friday when I finish.  That will also have to be added during revisions. lol

Next on my agenda today, other than brunch, is outlining some of Raven’s Mind, my NaNoWirMo project.  I had some thoughts last night but was too tired to begin anything, so hopefully I’ll remember it today. :P  I’m off to do that now.  I’m realizing I need to add A LOT more external conflict to my stories.  Gonna work on that today.

Writing wise at least.

I went to bed later than planned last night, had a little trouble sleeping and woke up later than I’d like.  I just assumed it would be a long day for Fast Drafting.  As it turned out, I am now finished with the next chapter.

A whooping 13 pages for today!!!

Yes, a pleasant surprise.

Last night I managed to get down most of the plot points for Raven’s Mind, so I’m pretty stoked about that too.  Now if only I did housework with the same enthusiasm and dedication as writing.

It’s been a great morning!

So far, it’s 9:45, I got up at 7 and worked out and just finished 12 pages of writing.  I want this chapter to be longer, but maybe I can find places to layer on the editing round.  I am just so thrilled with the amount of pages and how fast I got done.  See, self, it is doable.

Giada’s at a sad place right now.  Another contestant has gone home, and it’s down to the final three.  She should be excited, right?  Well, the next chapter (tomorrow) she’s going to still be in a weird sort and then the following chapter has her pretty freaky.  LOL, can’t wait for that one.

Last night, I spent a few hours brainstorming Raven’s Mind (changed the working title from Raven’s Echo).  I’m at a good spot in that too and can’t wait to get back at it.  Of course there are some housely chores I’ve been neglecting that need to get done pronto, but with the kids, cooking and whatnot, I should be back to Raven by this afternoon.

Since NaNo allows space for a mock book cover, I went ahead and created one.  It’s not professional, but I’m soooo pleased with it.  For one, I snapped it together in like 15 minutes.  No sweating and pulling hair like when I created headers.  And, it’s cool.  I used two photo samples that I downloaded for the story–you know, like as a collage to look at while writing.  One is the house and the second is Raven, so it fits real well.  I wanted to include the “boogeyman” but it didn’t look right so I nixed it.

Here it is:

What do you think?  Pretty cool, huh?  :-D  I’m happy.

I really, reeeeaaallllly love brainstorming.

There’s something about creating a new group of people, conflict, mystery and romance that gets me so excited.  It makes me giddy and alive.

Today, I worked on the first idea I had for a psychological thriller.  I changed some of it–made it a paranormal (at least for now although it’s not strong) and changed who my villain was.  The original way was simply NOT working.  I tried twice.  This way is better.

I went back and forth between making the heroine a 19 year old, the summer after her freshman year of college or a 17 year old, the summer before senior year.  I ended up choosing the hs student.  There’s more of a vulnerability about someone who isn’t legal yet, still considered a kid, rather than a young adult.  At least in my eyes.

I finished  my character list, and tomorrow I’ll be working on character bios.  I have to say that is my most dreaded part.  I just hate it, but it’s so necessary. lol  Maybe I’ll look for pics too to keep me motivated.

and I hate that. I had such a strong devotion to blogging every day, but adding Jadyn to the mix has definitely taken that plan off course. I want to start working on something dark, as soon as Jadyn’s WIP is finished (hopefully the end of Sept.). I would love to reexamine and get started on the first thriller I created, but the plot is so confusing. I can’t seem to make it work, so I’ve been putting it to the side. I’ve gone back to it twice now but still no luck. Maybe I can give it a whirl a third time.

Of course, Jadyn has been writing like a fool–I am so into that story now, I’m amazed.

Now that I’ve split my writing, and Jadyn is now handling the lighter stuff, she is responsible for my current WIP.  Therefore, I have no writing to discuss on here.  Add that to the boringness of this blog and Whoo hoo!

It does allow me to focus on the darker ideas when I’m here though.

I was on the phone the other night with my aunt, and we talked about a past life reading I received last year.  I discovered when I was born and died (years only) in my latest past life.  My aunt is very curious about who I was, since “I” died only a year after she was born.  It led to an interesting conversation, which produced a very cool idea for a book.

So, do I work on this one after they current WIP, or do I go back to the supernatural thriller about the boogeyman?  LOL, I sometimes dislike having sooo many ideas, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

For this week anyway!

I hate the parts that are such a struggle I’d rather poke out my eyeballs.

This week, however, and maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, has been steadily ok.  I wrote one scene and finished another yesterday, then wrote another today.  I’m getting it done semi-early, so I still have the rest of the day to do home/mom stuff and work on the idea for the next book.  So Yay!!!

As for the next book…  This is the third and a half idea I’ve been brewing for a month or so.  The first one is still good, but it’s very typical, overdone.  It originated from a dream I had, so not the most original.  Plotting some of it allowed me to start thinking outside the box though.

Then one night, I got the itch to write a horror.  I won’t label my current work as such until I’m certain I can pull it off, but that idea ended up going the way of psychological thriller anyway.  This one, which I titled Smoke and Mirrors (love that), was going GREAT!  Then while writing my fingers off, I got the idea to change the villain and make it the hero.  But I can’t make my hero the villain, so then I needed to decide if I was writing a suspense with romantic elements or just a suspense.

I’m not opposed to having it labeled as just suspense; it’s mostly what I read, but I don’t know if I’m ready as a writer to make that a part of my “reputation”.  Make sense?  I’m not even published yet.  So instead, I decided to tweak the plot and add another character to either be the hero or to be the villain.  I worked on this for about a week before I finally had to throw in the towel and say “enough is enough”.  One day I may get back to the idea, and hopefully at that point I’ll have a stronger desire as to what I want, but until then I have to move forward.

Which is where I’m at now.  I started the new idea based off the last and with only one scene in my head.  Who are these people?  Where did they come from?  Who is after them?  It took a while to come up with answers, some of which are still hazy, but I’m working on it.  Which I’m going to get back to now.