Archive for the ‘Revisions’ Category

A little help? Romance Dog Needs Name

Saturday, August 20th, 2016

Romance Dog Needs Name

In Surrender to Ruin, there is a dog that needs a name. At the moment, I am calling her Princess, but I’m not totally happy with that name.  What should I name this dog? Or should I keep the name Princess?

About The Dog

She is obviously progeny of Roger, the Wolfhound-ish mutt from A Notorious Ruin, but it’s equally obvious she is also part Bloodhound.  She is young (less than a year) and has been rescued from the streets. She’s a big, goofy, happy dog and not very attractive. As far as she is concerned everyone loves her.

Let me know in the comments.

FYI, I am up to Chapter 29 in my revisions prior to sending to my critique partner.

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Greetings and Writings

Saturday, August 6th, 2016

Gold Medal: Worst Blog Title Ever!

Yes, I am still working on Surrender to Ruin. I’m in the weeds with the machete. This is a normal part of my process. The middle is solid, and per usual, I haven’t written the last chapter yet. Those closing chapters will go very very quickly when I get there.

The good news is that I believe I have finally made all the tweaks/adjustments that will get me past chapter 5 without asking myself the question all writers seem to ask themselves: Why WHY did I ever think I could write? Also this one: THIS is the book that will prove I’m not a real writer.

I go through this every time. And every time, those feelings are real. I tell myself I’ve done it 35+ times before I can do it again. I will.

To everyone waiting so patiently for Surrender To Ruin, it’s actually coming along nicely. Circumstances beyond my control mean it’s going slower than I would like, but I am writing/revising every single day. It will be off to a trusted reader fairly soon.

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About A Notorious Ruin

Sunday, September 7th, 2014

Today, I uploaded the final, final files for A Notorious Ruin at all the sites where I could do a pre-order. The print file is off to the person who does my interior formatting. So, this book is done. You can start buying it Sept 23, 2014.

Now, of course, I keep hearing all these terrible stories about vendors delivering the wrong file … So. If you pre-ordered, and the change log at the very end does not say 2014.09.07: Version 1, then you didn’t get the correct file and you should let me know so I can either send you the correct file or see if the vendor can fix the issue.

I want to say thank you to everyone who has waited patiently, impatiently, and even not-waiting-anymore. All of you reminded me how much people wanted to read the sequels to Lord Ruin. This book is over a year late, and boy. I think it would have been late even if it had been traditionally published, because I spent most of 2013 so sleep deprived I could barely think straight. A worse outcome than late, though, would have been a book that was on time but not as good as it should have been — because when you’re sleep deprived, you think you’re coping OK when you’re not.

This book kicked my ass, but I think that was in part because I was sleep deprived from late 2012 through just about all of 2013. I’m the only source of income for my family. I could not afford to just quit the day job, even though I considered it and kept hoping I’d get fired. I knew if I took a job with a commute– and I was interviewing– I would have lost most of my writing time, and I would have had to give up one of my promises to myself about being home when my son was home.

I literally do not know how I would have made sure he got to and from school with his zero-hour classes if I took a different job and had to commute into the City. But things did get better enough at the job that at last I wasn’t getting up in the middle of the night most nights, ofte several times, dealing with emergencies.

I wasn’t back up to snuff sleep-wise until about March or April this year, and looking back, I can see that’s about when A Notorious Ruin finally had a spark or two. I had a couple of other writing commitments, too, so twice I had to put A Notorious Ruin mostly on hold for about 4 weeks while I wrote a novella. I wrote the other novella while ANR was in beta.

When I sent the book out to beta, I figured, well, it’s done if by done you mean, there are 80K words that seem to have a progression of sorts. When it came back, I was shocked to realize the book was in far better shape than I thought. (which isn’t saying much) I revised in my usual fugue state and filled in the couple of chapters that said “X will happen in this chapter. Probably” and also wrote the ending. Off to my editor it went.

I revised again when it came back from my editor, added about 15K in polishing up complexifying words, and by then, I said, quite literally, “Holy shit, this book is good.”

And it is. It’s really, really good.

I hope you love it as much as I do.

 

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The Fork Is Out

Saturday, May 31st, 2014
Fork against a blue sky with white clouds

The Fork

I’m officially calling it. The fork is out. A Notorious Ruin is revised. All the little bits that were sitting there doing … not much are gone or playing their proper role.

I’m sending this to my main editor now.

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Still writing plus Tattoos you could Win!

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

I have been working on Lucy and Thrale. I thought I had a solid enough chapter 1 to post, but I just changed it to a different chapter so it’ll be a bit before I post a chapter 1. The day job is….taking a lot of my evenings. I wish that were not the case but it is.

That said, I have a giveaway! I have 5 tins of 22 Jane Austen temporary tattoos. I am giving away one at my facebook author page and one here. I’ll also do a giveaway at the Risky Regencies and on twitter. Are you following me on twitter? (@cjewel) Have you liked my FB Author Page?.

Here’s a photo of the back of the tin so you can see the tattoos. I am so tempted to get an actual tattoo that says Imprudent.

Photo of back of tin of 22 temporary Jane Austen related tatoos

Temporary Tatoos

Rules

Void where prohibited. Must be 18 to enter. No purchase necessary. You are not required to follow me on twitter or like my FB page or anything. Winner chosen at random via a wordpress plug in that selects a random winner. Contest closes at midnight Pacific on Tuesday November 26th, 2013 so comment by the deadline. International OK.

How to Enter

To enter, leave a comment on this post in which you tell me your favorite flower and maybe a word or two about why. For example, one of my favorite roses is the Honey Dijon. It’s a lovely bronze rose that loves foggy weather.

Go!

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Revisions! They Are Done!

Monday, March 5th, 2012

I just emailed my editor the revision for Not Proper Enough. Yay!!!

I feel like I ought to bring out the fork, even though that’s for finishing a book…. The world conspired to make this a difficult deadline to meet, let me tell you. Job in a new location, massive issues with connectivity at new job location requiring a LOT of hours devising work arounds, just, gosh.

In other news, now I can get back to the last revisions for Future Tense and finishing Dauntless. Courtney Milan, Sherry Thomas and I have been iterating through cover versions. The experience will be worthy of a whole other post.

Anyway.  I do want to share that Not Proper Enough was unexpectedly hot and I knew I’d turned in a hot book. The hero is massively awesome.

And now I am off to do stuff I wasn’t doing while I was revising.

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The Fork is Out! Not Proper Enough is DONE!

Monday, January 2nd, 2012
Fork against a blue sky with white clouds

The Fork

YAY!!!!!!!!!

Not Proper Enough has been emailed to my editor. How did it go, you ask? Well, just in the last three days:

1. I discovered I had written TWO getting married scenes.
2. I deleted about 10,000 words and four chapters. (including the extra married scene)
3. I wrote 9,000 new words.
4. I completely rewrote the middle of the book.

Other than that, things went fine.

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A Day In The Life

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

Sorry for the radio silence lately. The day job continues to be the day-and-night job. But we are in the process of moving off the bad infrastructure and onto the new one which means there is an end in sight. Thank goodness.

During all this, I’ve also had revisions for Not Wicked Enough. I am ALMOST done.

Last night, I was awakened shortly before midnight with pages from the day-and-night job (see what I mean?) so I hauled myself out of bed, booted up the work laptop and discovered they were, from my perspective at least, false alarms. The databases were fine. Which meant I could go back to bed. But then I didn’t/couldn’t fall back to sleep right away.

Which means I slept late this morning. I had to drive to the Apple store to pick up my repaired Tiny Mac, which is what I’m now calling my old iMac now that I have Big Mac. It has the repaired new hard dive and a newly installed OS and that’s it. No files, of course. I think I don’t have any use for it. Lord knows there’s no room in my room for it. I didn’t get home from that until 12:30, but on the way back I listened to This American Life on NPR which is my favorite NPR program ever because those people know story, and I sat in the car to listen to the end of that first story which was HOLY HECK! amazing. AMAZING. It’s the one about the Brazilian NYC apartment super.

I worked on revisions after that with a break to order a DO NOT DISTURB sign for my door because there were family members who came over and well, much of my family, alas, believes the writing is hardly work at all and doesn’t take time, effort or concentration. My door was shut most of the time. Then at 4:30pm I had to get the work laptop booted up and from then until 8:00 pm I was moving databases to new servers . . .

Thank goodness the progeny can feed himself.

After the server work, I worked more on revisions and finished what I hope is the last big chapter tweak. I have a few things to look at tomorrow and then I email it to my editor.

Now it’s 9:35pm and I’m going to try to wind down before I go to bed so I can get up at a more reasonable hour tomorrow morning, because Sunday is D-Day for Revisions.

 

 

 

 

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No Rest for the Weary!

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

I just emailed revisions for My Dangerous Pleasure. Woot!!!!

Now I have to get cracking on The Next Historical. Blogging may be intermittent while I try to NaNoWriMo the book. If you’re participating, buddy me! I’m cjewel and I’m already behind. Except yesterday I wrote 1900 words in the revisions so I may just claim that.

Anyhow, how’s everyone? Whatcha working on, doing that’s interesting etc?

My son and I are going to NYC for a week on Friday. Should be interesting to make word count and do fun stuff, but then I won’t have to be at the day job.

I’m reading a mystery/thriller that I’m not sure I can finish. It’s getting harder and harder to suspend disbelief in re the characters. There’s a female character who is made of so many stereotypes and cliches that I think my brain might explode. I’m fascinated, though, by the number of cliche things she can say, do and think. It’s bad when you can predict action, dialogue and thought for any character. Alas.

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Too Much Sex?

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Reader and fellow resident of Sonoma County SonomaLass found this written in her used copy of my historical Lord Ruin:

Oh. Well. Um. OK!

If you feel the urge now to overindulge, this might be a good time to mention again that I have my rights back on this book and hope to have it available for digital download early in the new year. I’m just waiting on my cover artist to be available. Find out more about Lord Ruin here. You can also read the first chapter.

In other news revisions for My Dangerous Pleasure are going pretty well. Just about done. And speaking of, back to it!

P.S. Yay for my San Francisco Giants!

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