Out Editing

This will be a short post. I'm in the final read through of Pathfinder's Way so I will be away from social media and the blog for a week or two. So close to the final touches that I can taste it!

Pathfinder's Way Available for Preorder on Amazon

Here's a quick post for Sunday morning.

You can now order Pathfinder's Way on Amazon.

The Trateri are about to learn a vital lesson of the Broken Lands. Deep in the remote expanse where anything can happen, it pays to be on a pathfinder’s good side.

Nobody ventures beyond their village. Nobody sane that is. Monstrous creatures and deadly mysteries wait out here. Lucky for the people she serves, Shea’s not exactly sane. As a pathfinder, it’s her job to face what others fear and find the safest route through the wilderness. It’s not an easy job, but she’s the best at what she does.

When the people she serves betray her into servitude to the Trateri, a barbarian horde sweeping through the Lowlands intent on conquest, Shea relies on her wits and skill to escape, disguising herself as a boy to hide from the Warlord, a man as dangerous as he is compelling.

After being mistaken as a Trateri scout during her escape, Shea finds herself forced to choose between the life she led and the possibilities of a new one. Her decision might mean the difference between life or death. For danger looms on the horizon and a partnership with the Warlord may be the only thing preventing the destruction of everything she holds dear.

A Not So Lazy Sunday

Ah, Sunday, a day to relax in preparation for the coming week. Maybe for some people, but not for me. I have so many things I need/want to get done today that I doubt I will sit down to relax until about two hours before bedtime. I compromised this morning, though, and took the time to get donuts with my boyfriend. Now, it's after noon and there's not a moment to lose if I want to accomplish even half of what I need to.

On the "To Do" list today:

Finish baking the cake I'm making for Valentine's Day. It's a devil's food cake with raspberry filling and a raspberry sauce on top, which is covered with chocolate ganache. Sounds delicious? Oh, it will be. It's also very time consuming to make. The cake itself isn't too difficult, but the filling and topping complicate things. You have to puree the raspberries and then strain the seeds out. Then you have to cook it with sugar in a saucepan until it thickens. Then you have to repeat the steps to make the sauce for the top, only this time it doesn't have to be as thick. It can also be quite messy, which is why my kitchen kind of looks like a murder scene right now 0_o.

Clean. Especially the kitchen. See above as to why.

Do laundry so I have something to wear next week.

Write blog.

More editing in current book. I'd like to get this draft done before the edits from Pathfinder's Way come back, and I have to switch my focus back to that.

Work on cover for Pathfinder's Way again. Lucky for me, I know a graphic designer who can help fix the rough spots.

Prep work for week's meals. This way I don't binge on fast food, and I have a semi decent chance of eating something healthy.

Edit photos for the tea tasting my friend would like to post on her blog.

Oh yeah, and celebrate Valentine's Day with my boyfriend.


0_0 Busy. Busy. Busy!

Break's over - time to work

Since getting Pathfinder's Way off to the editor and finishing the first draft of my new unnamed book, I decided to give myself a mini break from the writing. It was supposed to be two weeks where I relaxed, caught up with friends, read a couple of books and basically did all the things I haven't been doing while planted in front of a laptop for the last few months.

Turns out, I kind of suck at relaxing. In the last two weeks, I've cleaned my house top to bottom, caught up on all the laundry and had a massive cooking day where I made three different types of recipes that netted me about 20 individual meals I could store in the freezer for lunches. Because that wasn't active enough, I also ended up painting my bedroom and bathroom. I'm happy with them, but my time wasn't spent relaxing as I'd imagined. Sometimes when I am really busy for awhile, I get stuck in busy mode and can find it hard to relax.

Today, I started in on the second draft of my current project. So far, it doesn't seem as difficult an edit as the last one, and I'm hopeful the process goes a bit smoother than previous ones.

Welcome To The New Year

I can't believe it, but 2016 is here and has been for ten days.Where did the last year go? Somehow it sped past and was gone before I realized it. To be fair, last year was incredibly busy on both the personal and writing front.  I had a lot to be grateful for last year. The biggest accomplishment on the writing side is that I finished not one, but two books (I finished the second book's first draft on Christmas Day).

Right now I'm in the process of putting final touches to the first before sending to a copy editor. I forgot how much extra work is involved when readying a book for publishing. After sending to the editor, I'll need to make any changes they suggest, then either design a cover or reach out to a graphic designer to do that part for me.

The part I hate the most, though, is drafting the blurb for the book. It's one of those jobs I would love to farm out to someone because I'm never quite satisfied with what I create. What it is about coming up with two to three paragraphs that creates such frustration, I don't know. Especially when I just got finished writing a full length novel. It's the part I dread the most. At this point I've rewritten this blurb at least four times. I'm still not happy with it :-|.

Sigh, time to stop whining and take another crack at it. Hopefully, I'll finish that part today.

Christmas is near o_o

It's the week of Christmas, and I am not ready. Not at all. My house is a disaster area. My decorations aren't up yet. My Christmas shopping is only half done. Usually, I'm a little more prepared than this but this month has been hectic and the holidays have managed to creep up on me faster than expected.

For instance, last week I was in Colorado partly for work and partly for pleasure. As a result, I lost a week to the madness. I managed to get some presents while there so it wasn't a complete bust in terms of Xmas preparation. As a side note: Denver is awesome. We went to the Denver Festivus, a beer festival, in an old hangar which doubled as a museum. They had all local beers and even I, who usually doesn't care for beer, found a few I like. We also went hiking at Red Rocks which has an amphitheater built into the side of the the rocks. Pictures are below if you're interested.

Now though, Christmas with all the impending madness is around the corner and I am slightly freaking out. In addition to the usual amount of family, I have friends in town so I will be pretty busy. This is both good and bad. Good because I get to hang out with some people I rarely see anymore. Bad because I am so close to being done with this book that I can practically taste it, and I just can't physically find the time to write the ending. Grr. I just need two days of steady writing time. Two! I think I could finish if I had just that much time, but I have so many impending plans that I don't know if  I'll swing it.

Wish me luck. For now, enjoy the photos while I try to carve some writing time into my schedule.

The end is near...

Of the current book I'm writing, anyway. I'm entering the end game and gearing up for the final confrontation between my characters. It's gets my adrenaline going to be this close, but at the same time I still have several weeks of writing left.

I'm about three quarters of the way through and have officially entered the stage of just wanting to be done. My brain is so fried that I don't even care whether what I'm writing makes sense. At this point, I've promised myself that all flaws and bad sentences will be caught and polished away in the editing and re-writing phase. All I can think is 'the end is in sight. Must get there as fast as possible before my brain deflates.'

So to give my brain a break and also entertain others, here is a photo of my cat. She's found a new toy. It's called tissue paper.

Enjoy.

To my frustration, I've discovered that taking a good photo of a black cat inside is nearly impossible. Her fur makes all her features just blend together until all you can see is a blob. I refuse to give up though, hence the photo :-|