Tag Archives: Writing

Back to Writing

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After two weeks of not writing, I am now back into it. I was trying to decide whether to try and write and finish a book before the end of the year, and decided, why not.

I started writing Hope and Thor’s story, the next in my Racing Harts series. Hope is currently the middle sister, and she races Sprint cars. However, I have decided that after writing the third story, Grace (the eldest) and Hope might swop ages, and Grace will become the middle child, only because Grace, who races Rally Cars, will fit between, race and time wise, between Faith and Hope. The motorbikes race over the summer, then the rally cars over the winter, then sprint cars during the speedway season. But that’s a problem for future Karen.

And to make things more interesting, I’m doing NaNoWriMo. That stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s because November is a quiet month in the United States, where this idea came from. I’ve participated in SoCNoC which is Southern Hemisphere version when KiwiWriters was a thing.

What does NaNoWriMo actually mean? Well, it means that you write 50,000 words over the 30 days of November. Some people will cringe at that and think it must be hard. Some will wonder why I would put so much pressure on myself. I, myself am wondering why I wanted to do this, but then I look at Hope and Thor, and I know how much I enjoyed writing Faith and Cole’s story, that I wanted to continue. And if I finish before December, it means that I wrote three novels this year. Which is pretty darned cool and might mean that I have more than two novels to publish next year.

Of course, to overcommit myself further, I’ve signed up for the New Zealand Certificate in Business – a Level 4 study of setting up a small business in New Zealand. I thought that since I want to get serious with my writing, cardmaking, and proofreading, that I really should get some understanding behind me to start the business. I’m scared that I’m pushing myself too much, but if I can just get Hope and Thor’s story written before December, then I can have most of December and January off before pushing into new writing projects.

But we’ll have to see if I get NanoWriMo first.

I’m Finished. Now What?

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I finally finished Faith’s story this week. Oh, how that woman tested me. I certainly was losing Faith, but I knew how I wanted the story to end. And dammit, I ended it my way.

So now that’ I’ve finished Faith’s story (one of three sisters who are into racing, hence Racing Harts being the series name), what do I do with the story.

Well, I let it sit. For a while. Some authors jump straight into editing, but to be honest, I kind of like to let mine sit for a bit longer, normally about six months. Then I will pull it out, do a quick read through, making note on sticky notes (which I LOVE), and then I work through and start editing, changing bits here, things there, adding in a dash of spice, a touch of pepper, stir and mix. Then I send it to my critique partners. The read through it, laugh out loud then confirm that it’s a bunch of bullsh!t and I feel terribly bad. No, seriously, by the time I’ve edited it the first time, I think it’s crap. My critique partners come back with thoughts, any comments about plot holes – (what happened to this guy in your story?), and generally their opinion about the story. These are actually very helpful, and after drinking plenty of whisky, I actually allow myself to sit down and read what they’ve said.

The final part of my editing process is going through the story AGAIN, and then listening to it being read on my computer. It really picks up lots of errors and missing words that others had missed, because we sometimes all know where the story is going.

Once I’m happy with the story, I send it to my lovely editor who reads it through and then comes back to me with edits that may be required. Mostly they’re grammatical errors, because for some reason writers write, they don’t talk or do grammar. (Writers don’t math well either.)

So, there you go, that it what happens to my story from start to finish, which generally takes a year from starting writing to publishing it.

Now, I’m not doing much writing, because I am in the process of formatting Compromising Positions and getting it put up for pre-order.

I hope you had a great week. Take care out there.

Catherine

The light at the end of the tunnel

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After four weeks of illness, I think (touch wood) that I might finally be starting to feel better. I’m running on 80% at the moment, but that is way better than I was.

I have to say that I managed a walk yesterday, and while the wind was cold, and it made me cough, it was nice to get out and about. The previous week, I couldn’t wait to get home, so that’s a win for me.

I have also finished editing Compromising Positions. It just needs a final grammar / spelling check and then it is off to my editor. I’m excited about this story, but also a little nervous. I hope that I managed to get a decent romance coming through. I love the story and the dance of the three main characters and how they interact.

I’m hoping that I will get back into writing next week and I can knock out the last bit of Faith’s story in Racing Harts. I’ll also get to start on my first edit of Finding Sam Healey, which is in my Finding Yourself series.

So how was your week?

Advantages of being SICK

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Last week, Mum sent me home because she had covid, and on Monday, I tested positive for it. It was probably a coincidence that she had it, then I got it, because my son also tested positive, albeit weakly.

Monday and Tuesday I felt pretty blocked up with sinuses and felt pretty yuck, but not any different than having a cold.

By Wednesday, I was desperate to do something, because I don’t do well being confined to home. So, I cleaned. I tidied up my craft desk, my writing desk, I dusted the entire house, and I deep vacuumed the floors (like the skirtings, the corners, any cobwebs, EVERYTHING!)

And I even wrote. And instead of writing for fifteen minutes and getting 300+ words, I wrote for however long I wanted, and often finished entire chapters.

I watched series 3 of Bridgerton (Colin and Penelope, *sigh*) and watched movies, and caught up with ‘My Life is Murder’.

My mental health has taken a hit, because of the deaths I’ve experienced lately, but I’m processing. I’ve cried a lot in the last few weeks, but that’s good, it’s normal to cry and let out the sadness and move through the grieving process, and we all grieve differently. Some of us keep it all inside until we go to bed at night, then allow ourselves the opportunity to cry. Some cry and get it all out and move forward. Just know that grieving looks different for everyone.

Back to the grind this week, provided the weather plays ball.

Hope everything has gone well with you this week.

Peace and Quiet

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It was all go until 31 May, now it is quiet. And tomorrow is King’s Birthday weekend, so a long weekend to relax.

I’ve finished my assignments and handed them all in.

Second-Hand Daughter has launched.

And I have so many things I could be doing, and I really don’t feel like doing much. I’ve spent time in the garden weeding, planting and trimming, and napping.

I haven’t written much or edited. I’m just enjoying having some quiet time after a busy few months. It doesn’t mean I’ve given up on writing, or crafting, it just means that I’m having a week holiday. I will back into editing this week, with Compromised Positions being the next up, and that will be released later this year! So excited about that.

But in the meantime, I’m relaxing and taking some me-time.

Scrambled Brains

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I’ve just got back from a trip over to Wineborough to see my Mum, Stepmum and Dad. My Stepmum isn’t very well at the moment, so I took the opportunity to go over and catch up with them all.

My stepmum is very special to me, and her illness is very serious, and it’s been playing on my mind for a couple of weeks. To the point that my brain has become like scrambled eggs. I think it is a combination of stress and tiredness, but I notice it when I’m mentally stressed mostly, and that is, that words just don’t always come to me. The most common objects, I can look at it, and it will take me a while to figure out what it is. Case in point, I used the last of my floss the other day on my teeth and couldn’t remember for the life of me what it was called. Of course, the packaging didn’t help, it just called it floss, so I wrote it down on my shopping list as mouth floss. It took me 5 (FIVE) days to remember it was called Dental Floss!

And this sort of thing is a problem when you’re writing regularly. Sometimes you know a word, but it won’t come into your head when you need it, so you use other words that mean it, but it’s not what you want to use, and of course, when the time comes to edit, I will read it and think, what the hell am I talking about!

Do you have scrambled brain problems too? Hopefully you had a good week.

Take care out there.

Catherine

Finding Me Time

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It’s that time of the year, where I am meeting myself coming backwards at the moment. I work fulltime as a gardener, and then from late February / March I work in three evenings a week packing apples from 5 until 9pm. It is to help out a local orchard.

Then during the school term, I have pole classes on a Thursday. By the time I get to the weekend, I am busy catching up on household chores that I don’t get done during the week because I don’t have time.

And then, because I like to complicate things so much, I am also studying my final paper in my organic’s course – Composting. Which isn’t as easy as you think. We’ve had to look at how soil develops, from chemical and physical weathering of rocks. To say it is exciting is an extremely overcomplicated process. Basically it creates sand. That’s it. Not dirt, but sand.

In the mornings i squeeze in a few minutes of writing from the time my partner and son leave the house until I need to leave the house. Which sometimes is only ten minutes, but it’s better than nothing.

On Friday night, rather than sitting and staring at a screen, I decided to get out my Queen 1000 piece puzzle. And I remembered why I had put it away in the first place. It’s rather complicated, and I spent a good hour just trying to find pieces of one of the parts of the puzzle.

But you know what. I relaxed. I breathed deep and I spent some quality time doing something that I actually enjoy doing. Because you often need to find time to do the things that you enjoy doing, just to give yourself a break from other stuff going on inside your head.

What did you do this week that you did for yourself?

Take care out there

Catherine

Travels and Writing

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When I go away anywhere, I take my laptop with me, because I might just get some time to write. Often it’s not a lot of time, but sometimes, I might get a bit of time writing. We’ve just been travelling to watch my partner’s two children graduate, one from University and one from School of Tourism. Both have done extremely well in their educational endeavours and made their parents very proud.

I took my laptop away with us, and managed to squeeze in some writing, here and there, and then yesterday I got in a few good minutes while my partner watched his son playing Rugby. I don’t do rugby, I don’t enjoy standing on the sidelines in the freezing cold, watching a sport I don’t understand, so neither of them were upset with me staying in the car and writing.

I got to write for a whole hour in the car, without interruptions, or music, or people talking, and it’s amazing how much writing you can get done in that time. I’m now a third of the way through my Racing Harts novel, which is really exciting.

Normally I write for a few minutes in the morning before I head to work. the house is quiet, and I have time to myself, but I only get fifteen to twenty minutes of writing done in that time. But it’s good to write in short periods as well, it means that I have an idea for where I want to go the next day when I get to writing again.

At the moment, an hour of writing is about all I can handle, but I hope to build that up over time, and also being aware that I don’t need to write all in one hour, I can go away and come back to do more writing, if I want to. It’s nice to have options.

So how was your week?

Take care

Catherine

Feeling Fatigued

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What a week. I’ve worked two jobs from Monday to Wednesday, one job on Thursday and Friday, been to Pole class, working on study, cooked, cleaned and done edits and continued writing on my Racing Harts series. No wonder I am tired!

On Saturday, I slept in until 7am, because Lunar doesn’t believe in having lie in’s. I got up, fed her and crawled back into bed, and proceeded to watch a couple of Youtube videos until I fell asleep again about 7:30am, and woke up at 10am! And I still felt tired. I had an afternoon nap and finally felt like I’d caught up on sleep, so all up, on Saturday, I slept approximately 12 hours.

That’s some serious sleeping time on a day off. That’s half of Saturday that I slept! But Saturday morning, once I got up, I cooked some tomatoes for tea, made some lemon quencher and reset some heat packs, and on Saturday afternoon / evening, I finished all the edits on Second-Hand Daughter, so now I only have a couple of small tweaks to do, and then I have to format the story and have it all ready to be released on 31 May 2024. And I might also have some print books available by then too.

I only have four more weeks of apple packing to go after this week, but the extra money is handy, and I can’t wait to get my teeth sorted out and have that 100 watt smile back.

Some you Win, Some you Lose.

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Sometimes things don’t work out as you expect. I’ve been participating in a 100 day writing challenge, which has been great. I love updating my status to confirm that I have actually been doing the work required, and I’ve only had two flex days, days where I haven’t done any writing at all.

I’m happy with that. But in the last week, I noticed that I was writing less and less on my Dragon Lore story. The reason? I was pantsing the story. I was making it up as I went along, which is okay, except I’m a plotter. I like to know where my story is going how it reaches its conclusion. With Dragon Lore, I wrote myself into a corner, and I couldn’t see any way out.

So, what do I do when I get in a situation like that? I stop writing. That’s right. I stop writing, because what is the point in writing a story that doesn’t make any sense and keeps going around and around.

But I haven’t stopped writing completely. While I have stopped on Dragon’s Lore, I started on my Contemporary Romance, Racing Harts sister, Faith. I even plotted it out on a Romancing the Beat Sheet, which was an interesting experience. While most of the time I plot I have an idea of where the story is going, Romancing the Beat is about the romance and the ‘beats’ are the parts of the story that make it a romance. While I like it, it isn’t totally how I plot, but I can see how it can be added into my usual plotting methods.

And I haven’t completely given up on Dragon’s Lore. I just feel that I need to step away from it for a bit, and then come back with fresh eyes to understand where I want the story to go and how to get it back into shape.

Have you had problems you’ve had to face this week? How have you resolved them?

Take care

Catherine