31 August 2008

A New Look! A New Title!

One for the blog, the other for the book!  I just thought the blog needed a bit of a facelift, so here it is.  And Charlotte has always been a horrid title for a book, so I've come up with something better (with much help from my crit group!) and here it is.  Drumroll, please.....  To Call Home.  It has some duality to the meaning, which is nice.  And really, anything is better than Charlotte. 

Speaking of the book, I've got about two weeks to go 'til my extended deadline is here!  I wish I could say I'm done two weeks early, but..... oh well.  I haven't done much in the past two weeks, but I think I can still pull it out.  If I write like mad and stop reading so much.  I recently got a card for my local library and have been reading like a madwoman instead of writing.  I'm trying to do some research for my erotica project--mainly trying to find some good erotica to study!  I haven't had too much luck so far.  First, my library doesn't exactly have a huge selection of books classified as Erotic Fiction.  Second, there's a lot of crap out there, apparently.

I also managed to pick up a book or two that I've simply been wanting to read for a while now.  And most recently, I picked up two books by John Shelby Spong, a bishop in the Episcopal church.  I'd read excerpts from both of them while in college and was intrigued, so I figured I'd read them in full.  On top of that, they're both really good research tools for my other project, Confessions of a Non-Believer.  Spong's ideas really helped me to form my own spiritual beliefs into more concrete terms, and those ideas will be a big part of Bree's story in Confessions.  Write what you know, y'know??

So anyway, I actually have tomorrow off (Labor Day) which is completely unheard of when you're a member of management in the retail world.  Hopefully I'll leave the books (and the internet!) alone long enough to get some good writing done.  Fingers crossed!

09 August 2008

Random Updates

My deadline for Charlotte, unfortunately (though not really that surprisingly, ha!), will have to be moved. I think just another month should do it. So September 15th it is. That should be enough time to finish writing and polishing, and to get a good query together. I've been doing pretty well with writing all the new pieces. Of course, I've run into a scene or two that I hadn't planned for but that seemed like they should be there. And I've been doing some bigger revisions on the first half than I'd originally bargained for. All in all, it's just taking a bit longer than expected. My procrastination has actually been minimal. :-)

I'm very much itching to get on writing new projects, but I've got to finish this one first. It's hard to write more than one at a time, especially when everything about them is so different. But I've got so many ideas! Confessions of a Non-Believer is the one I'll dive into next. While working on the query for that one (I realized it's much easier to write the query before the book is done rather than after!) I realized that I needed to shift the focus a little bit. Once I realized that, my brain was absolutely flooded with new chapter and scene ideas. After Confessions, I plan to start my big erotica project. I don't have a title, but I'll probably refer to it for now as Marisol, after the main character. I'm super excited about this one too, because I have a lot of ideas that I'm pretty sure are very fresh and novel, not quite like a lot of what's out there now. (Not to be conceited or anything, haha. But if I don't have confidence in it, who will?)

I'll try not to let the blog fall by the wayside. It's been nearly a month since my last post, but I'll try to keep it up a little better.

Last, but definitely not least, here are a couple new websites that I've been looking into recently:

GoodReads, where you can create a list of books you've read, write reviews, create lists of books you want to read, and then share all this with your friends!

Miss Snark's First Victim, where they oh-so-wonderful Authoress has fun contests, and lots of readers offer valuable feedback.

And then finally, a big thanks to Jessica over at the BookEnds blog for addressing my questions about revealing explicit content in a query letter.