My wrists can break for all I care; I'll type with my toes.

Writing is coming along well. I know this because my wrists are absolutely killing me. But I am so incredibly proud of the progress that I have made, I am going to pop a Tylenol, soak my wrists in warm water, and keep plugging away.

It's this kind of stubbornness that usually gets my body so stressed that it quits on me.

Oops.

I've got a couple of more updates regarding The Opening over on that blog. (I seriously need to figure out a better system for streamlining all of this stuff. Hum.) You can find the link here, feel free to drop me a line!

Author Promotion!

I would like to make a post to help promote my fellow writer and very dear friend, Rosemary Oliver.

Rosemary is a talented and bright YA fiction writer currently working on a novel by the name of Spellbinder. She posts chapters as she finishes them on her LiveJournal, and I really urge all of you to take a peek at this project. It's fresh, and the story is unlike a lot of YA novels that can be currently found on the market.

If you would like the author's self-written synopsis, you can find that here.

All other posts with tags relating to Spellbinder, including the novel itself can be found here on her LiveJournal. You can also find the link for her LiveJournal on the sidebar of any of my blogs.

Definitely check her out, and make sure to leave a comment if you do!

Thanks,

J.C.

Update: The Opening, among other things.

"Do unto your characters the most deranged things possible."

I managed to salvage a few more pieces of writing from the old computer, and lo and behold, last year's NaNoWriMo remains intact, grammatical errors, typos, and fucked-up-ness and all.

Late last night, I began the rewrite for The Opening, finally, after months of procrastination and half-assed planning. It felt great to pound out that 2k+ in such a short time, but my brain was definitely turning to jelly by the time I finally crawled into bed, sometime after seven in the morning. The beginning is definitely very rough, but I've got hope that the bulk of the novel itself won't be so...shabby.

Sometime soon, I'll post a synopsis for you all to read.

Also: If for whatever reason I see that my characters, my plot, or anything having to do with my novel has been stolen, I can promise that I will hunt ye downe and rain destruction upon your house. Upon both your houses.

I'm also on the hunt for a new title for this novel, but I'm sure that will show itself in due time.

July 1st is the deadline for receiving the proof copy from CreateSpace, and I'm trying as hard as I can to get this novel finished before then. At the very least, I have a backup plan and will submit another piece, but I would really like to get this first novel in hard copy form as a hopeful inspiration to finish the damned series. Unlikely, but hey. I'm a writer, I make things up for a living.

Okay, I don't really make a living off of this (yet!), but shut up.

In other news, the weather completely sucks today. It is cold and windy. Enough with the whining, and now back to the writing.

I'm always breaking stuff.

A couple of months back, the Macbook that was housing a couple of week's worth of writing crashed (quite literally crashed, but that's another story for a different day) and countless hours of work was destroyed.

Last night, my flash drive mysteriously broke. My writing from years' worth of work is gone. Luckily, some of the bigger projects were backed up on email and hard drive, but it's disheartening nonetheless.

So, it may be a little bit of time before I get back to working on anything, because I'll need to re-gather as much of my old work as possible.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: back up your work in not one place, not two places, but three places. I've lost work on too many occasions to be letting this continue to happen.

Threesome.

I'm definitely having trouble sticking to one solid project, seeing as I've got so many projects going at the same time.

The Opening - series

The Opening series is the first long-term project I've ever done, and it is still ongoing. I started the first book of the series several years ago, and a hiatus-gone-wrong forced me to put it down for a while. I wrote the sequel for National Novel Writing Month 2009, which was a huge accomplish for me, and it definitely made me want to continue with the series.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of holes that need repairing, plenty of characters that need doctoring, and plenty of chunks of dialogue that need...help. While I believe there is hope for the series, it will definitely come at a cost high in coffee and low in sleep.

- - -

Undertaking - Fated Earth series

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic/oh God it's the end of the world fiction, but I've never tried my hand at it. I punched out the idea for this series over the course of a couple of days and even started a small piece of the first chapter. The idea, in my opinion, is quite promising, and as a result, I'm hesitant to start it. I think I'll set this one aside for NaNoWriMo '10, and we'll see how that goes.

- - -

Untitled - novel

I've been itching to write, and I can't wait for NaNoWriMo to roll around, so I decided to set a very easy deadline for myself, and that is to have a 50,000 word novel finished by the end of August, and this novel (which revolves around reincarnation) was the piece that I decided to mess with. So far, I'm definitely struggling, and it is absolute crap (although hallucinations are always fun to tamper with), but I'm writing again, and that is all that matters.

No. Just no.

Just.

Just no.