Category: Update

This week I tried something new and had to spend a day recovering. I’m trying to do more of my writing through dictation. I want to reduce the amount of hours I spend typing, but also see if I can use it to speed up my writing process. It’s a thing that takes time, however, and there are a lot of variables to test. This week I went for a walk out on a local trail for about an hour. I expected to need downtime when I came back in (it was a longer walk than I normally do), but I ended up with no spoons at all the next day.

I rested and read the new Anita Blake book (excellent) which put me back on track for Thursday, but now I’ve got to figure out: was I exhausted from the distance? From walking and dictating at the same time? From being outside alone and hit with autistic overwhelm? I don’t know yet, and there’s more testing to be done!

Admin work this week mostly involved clearing out the email. It’s time to start collecting paperwork and pieces for doing taxes. I’ve also closed signups for Membership for now while I overhaul the system to work with woocommerce. It’ll be a simpler system for Members and much less confusing since it’ll use the same account and checkout process as the webstore.

Goals:

10k steps/day – my step goal is inching upward in the mid 8k’s now and while the weather is great it’s been pretty easy to hit. Took a break on wednesday, but got back on the horse thursday.

1k new words/day – This one has been harder this week. On the one hand, dictation allows me to get a bunch of words in a short amount of time, on the other hand, I really didn’t expect to take a day off on Wed after Monday was a holiday. Not feeling thrilled with this goal this week, but I am making progress, even if it’s slower.

1 new line art/week – When in doubt, draw fanart!

Friday Update 2/2/24

In an unusual move, this week I decided the big plan I had for Fated to the Wolf needed to be cut down to something more compact. It’s a story meant to go in an anthology with a collection of other shifter authors and the target length is 20k. While they would accept a 70k novel, that isn’t the goal of the project. At the same time, much of my fiction study in the last month or so has focused on the Villain Gets The Girl trope, as well as the general beats for dark romance, and I realized the main characters in Fated could be pushed into some stronger positions.

So on Monday, I re-plotted Fated to really punch up the Villain trope, the cinnamon roll trope, and the kill for you/touch him and die tropes. I also cut the plot down from 70k to less than half, now at 30k. The intent here is to leave some of the world building for future books in the series while also hitting the novella length instead of the novel.

On Tuesday I started re-drafting Fated from scratch to accommodate the character changes which leaves me in the very rare situation of having over 20k words of novel that probably won’t see the book in its final form. Little pieces of description will be pulled, like outfits or locations, but even those need tweaking for the new character voices.

Fated to the Wolf will be serialized here on the blog for members to read early and I think I will include some of the deleted scenes or chapters so people can see how dramatic the shift has been.

My main human character, Amari, is now a much stronger voice and character, and my shifter MC with a heart of gold has a clearer role in wooing him. Both of those changes made the new outline for the story pour out of me in one massive writing session, which is always a good sign.

Look forward to Fated to the Wolf later this year!

Friday Update 1/26/24

Progress was made this week! I’ve finished and submitted a Hellhounds short story to an anthology for consideration. Cross your fingers for me! I think it’s a good one.

I’ve also tackled the initial stages of publishing for the next three short stories. Preorder will be populating in all the stores over the next couple of days. Anyone interested in getting them early can find all three listed on the web store: To Heaven And Back Again (an alt history steampunk scifi), A Brand New Day (a scifi horror), and Carrot Cake (a contemporary horror).

I’ve started the AI audio, but I realize I have to make cover art, so more work will be done there next week. I’m also checking on my contemporary romance Rough Recall. I have a note in my to-do list that it didn’t end up on all stores when I went wide, so I’m following up on that. (Which, oh look, I can’t link to the webstore because it’s not there! Gotta fix that.)

Next week is also my last full week of work before Superstars conference in Colorado! I’ll be driving out on Monday the 5th and really looking forward to meeting up with old friends. It will be a week full of learning and talking and people, which will be exhausting but oh, so, fun.

Friday Update 1/19/24

A lot has happened this week and almost all of it is the kind of admin work that no one tells you is necessary when they say “hey, you’re really good at this, have you thought about publishing a book?”

First: my unnamed Hellhound short story is marching along. I’m half way through it with every expectation of finishing next week. This one will be submitted to Camden Park Press for their upcoming anthology Street Magic 2. Lyn, the editor, has purchased from me several times in the past, including for Street Magic 1, but I’m still going to ask you all to cross your fingers when the time comes. Sometimes the story is great, but it doesn’t fit the mix of others that have been submitted.

Also progressing this week is my next batch of short stories to publish. Feb, March, and April all have back cover copy and text in their formatting files. Next week I’ll polish those up and put them through my compiler, Jutoh, to create final files for publishing. Over the holiday, another formatting tool called Atticus offered a lifetime deal on their software and I grabbed that, so the next round of shorts will go through Atticus instead. I just wasn’t ready to learn a whole new program so soon.

Website and Membership progress inches forward. There is now a Perks page for members to browse the serial stories and other members-only bonuses that will start building up in the archive of the blog. It’s a bit bare right now since things are just ramping up, but that will change very shortly. I’ve started scheduling member-only content on the blog every Wednesday. The first several weeks will be short stories, then as I continue writing new work I will start posting chapter-by-chapter from the novels and novellas I have planned this year.

Short update this week, because I had one goal and one goal only: To finish this Bone Witch short story for a Valentine’s anthology coming up. I did it! I wrapped up the story on Thursday and I turned it in today to the editor after a proofread and some tweaks <3 I’m excited to have an extra, unplanned story that I can put in the publishing schedule next year.

While I only had one goal, I got a lot of other admin work done during the week. I have cover art for 10 of the 11 short stories being published this year (since January is already done).

I’ve also confirmed with the editors of various projects I’m working on that I’ll be allowed to release the stories here on the blog for my subscribers, chapter by chapter as I write them. I’ll be sure to let everyone know what story is coming up first and when so you don’t miss it.

And that’s it for this week! Next week I ramp up words on another short story in the Bone Witch world, but not featuring the bone witch herself. We’ve got a spinoff based on the short I just finished.

And don’t forget to check back on Monday for my report on goals this week.

Friday Update 12/22/23

The last Friday Update of the year because, let’s be honest, I’m not going to pay enough attention next week to realize it’s friday and there won’t be any work to update you all on!

But this week’s update is excellent because I get to report that my latest short story is complete and turned in to the editor at Boundary Shock Quarterly. This is a HORNETS story and for those of you keeping track at home that makes 5 total, which means I’m putting a collection of HORNETS stories on the to-do list.

I also have a surprise Valentine anthology I’ll be participating in! I’ve already started writing a Bone Wtich story for that and you’ll hear more about this in the new year. The whole project is happening very quickly, but it’s been put together by a group of experienced, professional writers and I have much confidence in our collective ability to execute. This is a very spontaneous project so I don’t have many details to share yet. You’ll hear about it as they are finalized.

Also polished up this week is the Membership Subscription on this website! The rollback a few months ago delayed this particular project, but I’m happy to report it’s soft launching now. The newsletter will get an official announcement in January (along with a newsletter refresh I think looks quite snazzy). Some authors open a Patreon, some are building their communities on Substack or Ream, I’ve decided to do so here, right on my website. This way I can share new chapters of books as I write them, including the sex scenes. Most platforms don’t allow that kind of content and building the community here means I don’t have to filter the books. You want early access? You want a free ebook when it’s published? You want to support my work directly? Check out the subscription: here.

And finally, I know this time of year is crazy crazy. Keep an eye out for my newsletter on the 27th for a boatload of free romance books, but otherwise you won’t hear from me until the new year. Happy Solstice and Happy New Year! <3

Friday Update 12/7/23

This week I brainstormed, outlined, and have started writing the next HORNETS short story for BSQ magazine. This is a mystery, but it’s also a Hornets, so there’s going to be power armor, specialized guns, and explosions. I’m 1300 words in and I haven’t quite figured out the personal/backstory subplot yet, but that’s a problem for future Tami. The bigger issue is what to title this thing. Hornets stories don’t really have a title convention (yet) and I’m open to renaming all of them to get one going, but until I figure that out, I’m just calling this one The Mystery.

Website backup and update happened today to keep things running smoothly. I’ve finally started working on the website subscription/membership (not quite live yet) to replace Patreon subscriptions so that I can start posting books a chapter at a time without Patreon yelling at me for the spicy scenes. I briefly investigated Substack as an alternative paid platform but the same problem remains with the spicy scenes, so self-hosting is the way to go.

Enchanted and Zero Day Exploit audio have both been published to Google and Apple, pending their processing times. Further audio on Kobo and my direct store are in progress as I write this and should be live by next week, but sometimes processing times get longer as we get closer to the holidays, so I can’t say exactly when they’ll hit stores.,

In longer term projects, my newsletter series for Round Robin book trades with other authors is being put together for next year. I’ll be bringing two new sets of romances to the newsletter: one PNR focused, the other an All Romance selection. Since I write across a lot of romance subgenres there should be something for everyone.

Until next week!

Welcome to December! This week I gave myself a day to recover from traveling and organize the bags. I did some reading and watched a few youtube videos about Captain of Industry, which is a game about production lines and efficiency. And just writing that line makes me laugh because of course I would watch a game about resource management on my day off. I’m such a nerd.

Fated to the Wolf continues to move forward. I got ahead of myself today because I didn’t check my outline and I wanted to get to the good stuff already, which means I just skipped two and a half scenes to write the meet cute. On monday I’ll have to go back and fill in the important bits of character I leapfrogged. Development of this story is still going very well and I’m extremely pleased with it. As of today, I’m 26k in and going strong. It’s a good thing I’m working on this so far ahead of the deadline b/c it’s a big book.

This week I’ve also wrapped up publishing details for December’s release. This is a wide release for Enchanted, my YA short story collection that has been tied up in KU for years. Enchanted was one of the first things I ever published, back when I was only releasing books on KU because I hadn’t figured out smashwords’ meatgrinder yet. That was the name of the automated system that took a .doc and turned it into an .epub. It had very specific requirements and took a long time to process a book. D2D came along and changed everything, but Enchanted remained in KU because I just didn’t have the time to go back and address it. On the 5th it’ll be available on all the stores and by the week after, AI audio will follow.

This weekend I have some reading to do and we’ve signed up for Disney +/Hulu after over a year, so we have some Loki to catch up on! Next week I pause work on Fated in order to knock out several short stories: two BSQ Hornet stores and a submission for Street Magic 2 that I hope the editor enjoys. I also need to get ahead of schedule on the publishing again.

Have a great weekend!

Friday Update 10/17/23

Short update is short because I have to pack for a flight to Florida!

Highlights: I’m 20k into Fated and the two main characters have finally had their meet cute. In the middle of a fight between vampires, werewolves, and a giant demon from the Void. I’m sure everyone will be fine!

I’ve put together a Black Friday deal on my webstore. All my short stories in one purchase delivered via Bookfunnel as individual ebooks for ease of sorting/shelving/tagging. This thing is on very steep discount and only for a short time. Newsletter peeps hear about it next thursday, so if you’re reading this: go check it out early.

Finally, there will not be a Friday Update next week as I’ll be with family for the Turkey Day holiday and probably playing way too much Baldur’s Gate 3.

Have a great two weeks!

Friday Update 11/3/23

NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. Write 50k in 30 days (and melt into a puddle of goo when you’re done). I’ve wanted to write novels since I was little, but NaNo is what got me into actually attempting to do so before I was picked up by a small publisher. I’ve never actually completed a true NaNo (that is: 50k in 30 days), but I’ve occasionally used the idea to give myself a jumpstart on a new project or to push through one that’s almost done.

This year, writing Fated to the Wolf happens to line up with NaNo, and I’m in a writing group that has decided to give it a shot. We all support each other and hopefully by the end there are 5 new novels in the world. The outline I have so far (about half of the novel) makes me think this is going to be a 70k book! So it won’t be done before December, but it’ll have a substantial bite taken out of it by the time we get there. As of today, I have 10k down, so just the beginnings of things.

Admin work this month is focused on re-formatting my YA fantasy collection Enchanted to prepare for wide release in December. I’m also formatting the next Maj and the Outlaws short story: The Trinorida Dragon for release in January. With any luck, both of those will be on preorder before I travel for Turkey Day mid-November.

In not-writing news, I have a massive harvest of green tomatoes. I’m dehydrating a bunch of them, but do you have a green tomato recipe you love? Share it! I’m drowning XD