Peeking Out of the Editing Cave

This month is going to be crazy busy with edits on two books happening as well as finishing the draft of another. Did I mention revising and subbing another one? Yeah. It's kind of crazy up in here. So unless I have something brilliant to say, I'm going to share music from some of those projects' playlists instead.

Right now I'm working on edits for Gaming for Keeps which comes out in September from Entangled Publishing. (WOOT!) Took me a while to figure out which song best fit this one, but considering it's for the Geek Collection and it's a romance...and... Well, this one just spoke to me.

Hope you enjoy it!

Breathing...

Sorry for no post last week. As my Twitter followers know, I was on the extended-family summer-trip-thing (aka visiting the Carolinas). It is now July 31, and I am happy to report that I made the submission deadline... with a couple hours to spare. *dies* I really need a more sanity-inducing summer schedule one of these years.

In forty-five minutes (from the point of me writing this), it will be August, which means it is the month of editing madness. Multiple projects need to be edited, which is awesome in that it means I have multiple projects going but bad in that it means I am not writing... sort of.

You see, I can't do another adult story right now because too many "similar" characters will cause my brain to implode, setting off a chain reaction that will result in a giant black hole taking the place of earth (and by default killing everyone).

I can, however, do something totally different. That means the wacky middle grade idea The Boy and I have been toying with is started. It's slow-going since he wants to take part in every stage of the writing, but it is being written. For those of you who don't know, I've written YA and really enjoy it. Middle Grade... is a foreign thing for me. It's a voice I'm not really confident with, but thankfully I have a middle-grader to help me on my way. It may never get finished. It may never be sent anywhere, but Operation: Wishes is the only thing I plan on writing in August. Just for giggles, I may keep you posted on how it's going.

Coming August 28!!!

In addition to editing-madness and Middle-Grade-madness, I also have OMG-NEW-RELEASE-(Kiss of Death, in case you didn't know)-madness this month. ("We're all a little mad around here.") I'm in the process of firming up dates for a blog tour--my first--and hopefully will have a calendar up next week. If you're a book blogger and you want to be included, let me know (selestedelaney[at]gmail[dot]com)!

For now though, I'm still just trying to keep my head above water. The kids have camp next week (YAY!) so hopefully that means copious amounts of work-time for me.

Drowning in Deadlines

Thus far, this summer has been one of writing madness. New contracts. New projects. Edits on other projects. Did I mention I have a release next month? (I do. The first Blood Kissed novel, Kiss of Death, is out August 28. Feel free to add it to your Goodreads shelf because, you know, that would make me smile.)

What that means is I've had to be really diligent about deadlines. Which is really good for teaching me discipline, but really bad for my sanity. I'm finding that I'm hitting book-burnout really quickly this summer. Whether it's because I'm juggling so many very different stories or because I'm constantly in go-mode, I'm not sure.

But, it's one of the key reasons I've been a bit scarce on-line. I would have continued to assume no one had noticed, but since I've had a few people seek me out asking if I was alive and everything was okay... I'm stating for the record that I'm good. I'm not dead or dying or even dealing with sickness-of-doom. Asthma and allergies have been a little twitchy. Depression is hovering, waiting for a sign of weakness to grab hold of, as it always does. But really, I'm just tired. I love having my kids home, but it totally alters my ability to get shit done.

And vacations do that too. Every time I leave the house for more than a few hours, I get twitchy because I know all-the-things-will-cease-progressing. But so far, I've managed to bounce back from those periods of panicky quiet. It just means I'm more busy, less chatty when I get home.
So, right now I have a July 31 deadline I'm striving to finish & polish something for. And I have edits coming. And more edits. Then I get August for edits, more edits and the Kiss of Death release (I'm working on a blog tour now).

So, I'm not dead, just buried so I can work in relative peace. (At least if you discount the screaming... mine and the kids'.) I promise that once things even out in the fall, I'll be back, but as I keep reminding myself--busy is good. So, I'm good. And it looks like 2013 won't be nearly as dry for releases from me as 2012 was. (I am also working on planning better LOL).

From the Editing Cave: Clockwork Mafia

Hi all! *wipes sweat from brow* First round edits for Clockwork Mafia have arrived and I'm trying to bust my butt on these changes so I can get them turned in before I take off to visit my friend Dani in Canada <3

To that end, I don't have a blog post of brilliance today. (Please refrain from pointing out all the non-brilliant posts to date. Thanks.) I will let you know that I'm going to be at Steamed! on Friday, and I did a review of Queen of Swords by my crit partner, Katee Robert. You should all rush out to get that. Like now. Here's an Amazon link. Oh, and one for Barnes & Noble. I'm also doing a rant at Writings of a Wicked Book Addict TOMORROW! (There's my post of brilliance, or at least ranty-goodness.)

So for here, since I'm knee-deep in the mind of Henrietta Mason, I'm just going to give you a little video of a song that always reminds me of her. I know the point behind the song is supposed to be one of strength, but for some reason, when I hear it, all I hear is pain--and that fits where Henri's at.

Video from Youtube, all rights belong to Miranda Lambert and Sony

(Also, if you like her music, get the album here.)

Drinking and Thinking...about Books

Last night we went out to dinner and I actually ordered a drink. Now, as much as I enjoy my adult beverages, I don't often order drinks when we're out for dinner. They tend to be over-priced...blah blah blah. But I'd finished a project yesterday and wanted to get something to celebrate. In the spirit of celebration, I perused the menu for something a little different and ordered a mojito--a drink that I enjoy but don't have very often.

For me, picking something like that is sort of like going into a bookstore and grabbing a book from a genre that I don't normally read but I've liked before. It makes the stories I do read there more special somehow. For instance, I read a lot of YA, but very little contemporary YA. The exception to that is Hannah Moskowitz. Love her work. I don't read much homosexual erotica either (yes, jumping from YA to erotica...it's what I do), but I decided to give it a chance and found that in certain ways I like it better than a lot of straight erotica (but odds are it'll still be a less common purchase). My mainstays in reading are what I normally write--speculative. Give me some weres and vamps or spaceships or clockworks or even elves and gnomes and I'm a happy girl (as long as it's well-written and a fun story). But in those other genres... I'm a lot more picky.

A friend once told me there's nothing like a really good mojito. He's right, but there's also nothing like a really bad one. And this went beyond bad. It was horrible. It tasted like really syrupy peppermint schnapps on the rocks--a big old glass of it. Nothing against peppermint schnapps, I mean, it's tasty in hot chocolate, but it's definitely not a mojito. I sent the drink back, but the peppermint taste was so strong that not even my cajun shrimp could cover it.

So, imagine buying a not-my-genre book and sitting down to read it and ending up with a similar experience. Since it's not a standard read for me, the book that leaves the horrid taste in my mouth that no amount of Kelley Armstrong and Richelle Mead with a Mark Henry chaser will kill, risks ruining the entire genre for me. That shit will make me pick my ass up and desert an entire section of the bookstore.

Now, one good thing is I've had a decent mojito. Hell, I've had a damn good mojito. I know they're out there, so other than making sure I never order one at that particular restaurant again, I'm not going to avoid mojitos at all cost, after all, I know they can be yummy. To be fair though, odds are I won't risk ordering one blindly. It'll take having had one at the place before (mmmm....Pickle Barrel...) or having a friend tell me the place makes good ones. Otherwise, I'm going to stick to what I normally drink.

The same is true with books. If I pick up a YA contemporary that turns my stomach (or melts my brain), I'm still going to buy the next Hannah Moskowitz book. A gay erotic romance with no character development or discernable plot? Meh. I know there are good ones out there, but I'll base that reading on recommendations from now on. This is, from my discussions with others, a pretty standard way of thinking. Beyond judging a book by its cover, readers often judge a genre based on the first book they read in that genre.

So every writer--traditional, digital, indie, I-don't-care-what-the-newest-label-is--needs to keep that in mind. That means the editing, plot, characterizations need to be the best you can make them. Your book could be the first one a reader picks up in that genre. It will be the book by which all others are judged. What kind of taste do you want to leave in the reader's mouth?

Have there been any books that you've read that would have turned you off to a genre if you didn't already know there were better books out there?

Seeing Red...and Blue...and Green...

While I was away at the beach, edits came in on a recent story. It's a short, so I figured it was no big deal and I'd be able to tackle them pretty quickly. Now, to give you some perspective, when I'm really on, I can edit a short in a day or two. Then I opened the file.

Holy highlights, Batman!

There was...a lot. And I knew without a doubt I needed more than a couple days of sneaking away from family time to get it done. Most editors who have worked with me (and talked to me while I was editing) know that I can tackle big issues pretty handily. Editor points out a problem, I slap my hand against my forehead, wonder how I could have been so stupid as to not see the problem, and I get to work on fixing it. It's the little things that give me fits. (I'm sure Gina remembers well when I was working on edits in Italy and had one sentence that I couldn't get right. She told me to skip it. I refused, and the answer came to me while trying to sleep on the flight home.) And almost everything I needed to fix in this story was a little thing.

My intense love for edits (yes, I'm weird) quickly turned into a lot of loud groaning about not wanting to do it. You see, I had this illusion that the more stories I had published, the easier edits would get because I'd have been learning to fix all those stupid things I did wrong. The fact is I appear to replace one stupid thing with something new. My "that" problem? Tackled. Gone. Over. (Believe me, it took a long time.) Now I have things that can't be solved with a simple "delete".

But you know what? I'm seeing the tail end of this round of edits now--I'll finish them today--and as much as I hate to say it, I think it was a good experience for me. First, it made me realize there will always be something in need of fixing. That's a really freeing thought. I'm going to screw up, so I just need to worry about writing. Second, I found that even some of the little things need to be fought for. A suggested change of wording to something that your character would never use., a turn of phrase that your betas all loved, intentional use of passive structure--all of those things can be important. The point of edits is to figure out when they're most important, because that's when you dig your heels in (which is hard to do when you haven't made a bunch of other suggested changes--makes you seem like a diva :P).

Now that I've struggled through all the itty-bitty detailed changes, I can say I still love doing edits. I'm hoping when I do my read-through before hitting send later today, I'll be able to smile and say the changes made the story stronger. Because that's the point of all the moaning, groaning, hand-wringing, cursing, and throwing of things--to make it better.

In the meantime, I'll repaint the target on my office wall for the next round of throwing thi...er edits.

Putting in the Work

So, a few weeks ago, I was getting a story ready to submit. I told my editor that she'd have it as soon as I'd finished with revisions. At that moment, it was out with my wonderful betas for a read-through so I could fix any glaring issues before I sent it in. She said (paraphrased), "You don't revise until after I edit it."


Then, at a totally separate time, I was talking to a fellow author (who shall remain unnamed) about one of her shorter works. She basically said that she didn't put as much time into it since it was just supposed to be a quickie--a break from her novels.


Needless to say, I was...confused.

You see, I have a process I go through before I send anything in for publication. I write. I revise. Maybe twice. For longer pieces, I might post part in my online writing group and wait for critiques (to revise again). I send to my betas. I wait for their comments. I revise. Then, if the revisions were big, I send it back to them to make sure it's solid. If not, I revise again. Then...sometime after that, I send it in.

I do this for my novel-length stories. I do this for my novellas. I do this for my short stories. Hell, if I'm worried about it, I do something similar for my flash fiction before I post it on the blog. I cannot imagine sending my rough drafts to my editors. Even thinking about it has me breaking out in a cold sweat right now. You see, as much as I love my editors and think they're awesome, I want as many eyes as I can reasonably get on my manuscript before it goes out. And I feel that way about all my stories; I don't differentiate by length (though, I will say that just because they are longer and therefore have more room for "issues", novel-length stories tend to go through more revisions than shorts).

Based on similar comments from both an editor and another author, however, I'm starting to think I might be in the minority with regard to these habits. I know in digital publishing, output is important. If you can't churn out stories fast enough, you can be forgotten as new authors pop up. But the idea of putting anything out there that is less than the best I can make it bothers me...a lot. This isn't to say that other people don't write crazy-good first drafts with no inconsistencies or weak spots or grammar issues because I'm sure some people do, but I'm not at the point yet where I can delude myself into thinking I'm one of them.

So, if you've been waiting on Badlands 2 or the next Blood Kissed story, consider this my apology for the delay. I want to get those stories to you. I just don't want to cut corners to do it, and for me it would be cutting corners (believe me, my betas are phenomenal and not at all afraid to tell me when I suck). Please forgive the delay, and hopefully I can work on that whole prolific thing in the meantime.

Two Days and Twenty Questions

In less than forty-eight hours, NaNoWriMo 2010 begins. I have my file for Blood Kissed #3 ready to go with most (if not all) of the major players with character pages and folders of plot points I want to hit. Thing is I want to have this puppy done by mid-December at the latest and I'm estimating it at 75-80k. So...yeah. That means I need to write a minimum of 2k a day throughout November, preferably 2.5-3k. It's going to be a tough one, but I'm determined to give it my best effort. I want this, and I've been told people want this story.

I just hope they still want it when it's done LOL.

But in the meantime, I'm doing my best not to freak out about the numbers. I'm trying not to think about all the days my kids have off school in November, or the pre-holiday shopping, or the revisions that I know will be hitting my inbox during the month. Nope. I'm just focusing on the story and the new characters I'm dying to write. I still have a little bit of "casting" to do in order to appease the visual side of my nature, and I want to flesh out some sections of the plot more. But I can't wait to tell this story. So that's where my energy is at least for now. There will be time for panic later.

In the meantime, Ellen Keener interviewed me for her blog. Twenty questions, people! Please read the post so I don't think I spent all the time answering them in vain. K? Thanks.

Manuscript, Interrupted

One of the rules I live by as a writer is when one project is done, I start another one. Especially in e-publishing, authors are expected to be prolific, so there's no time to rest on one's laurels. That means after I signed my contracts, I got back to work.

When I was in Myrtle Beach, I started a new paranormal romance. For a while it went really well. Unfortunately, I was pantsing the story, and I reached about 10k and kind of stalled. Pantsing never has really worked for me though, and I proceeded to take a day and plot the rest of the story. Got back to work and cranked out about another 10-15k.

Then, about a week before I left for Toronto (yes, it's been a busy couple months for travel), I received the first round of edits for Badlands. Obviously, I dropped the new story to take care of edits. Then I left for Toronto. So I was away from the new story for about two weeks.

Once I got home, I tried to work on it again, but the momentum I'd had disappeared. I still made progress, but it was much slower going. I finally broke the 30k mark a few days before leaving on my next trip, and then the line edits on Badlands showed up in my inbox.

I knew once I stopped working on it so I could do edits, I'd be starting all over with regard to forward momentum. Considering I have a holiday story I need to get to as well, I finally made the decision to set aside the new manuscript until I'm back from this trip. Instead, I'm taking the week to focus on the line edits, some critiquing and the holiday story.

For those who are wondering, it's a Jocelyn holiday story, and part of the reason I'm willing to sideline other things for it is that people seem to like and want more of her story. This is me doing my best to give it to them. Hopefully the Powers that Be like it.

By the next post, I should be home, and hopefully that will mean Jocelyn's new story is done and I will get back to the sidelined manuscript until it's finished. But as long as the story is working at all, I won't quit on it. I hope it finds a home and that my fans and friends will get to see another side of my writing.

So what's derailed your writing lately?

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

You're Self-published, Right?

Let me start by saying this is not a rant against self-publishing. Some very successful and well-received books have been self-published and I respect that. Like every road to publication, self-pubbing has some major hurdles to overcome. I do not think it's an easy road. Self-publishing does, however, allow for some utter crap to get released along with the good and as such has a lot of people think of it in a negative light.

Recently, it's come to my attention that even amongst other writers, there is some confusion on what different types of publication entail. Today's post is my attempt to help clear up some of the confusion.

- Traditional publication: Traditionally published books are the ones you're most likely to find in your average bookstore. Odds are these authors have acquired an agent who sold their book to a publishing house, at which point it was edited by a professional editor, received professional cover art, has a marketing team behind it in some degree, etc. For most of us, this is "the dream".

• Large houses: These are the big guns--Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, etc. These houses have a lot of money and it's likely you would probably get the widest exposure through them. However, until you hit it big and prove yourself worth the investment, you aren't going to have a huge marketing budget.


• Small houses: There are a ton of smaller houses. Some are associated with the big guys, but others are independent. Odds are you will get more one on one attention, but since they don't have the big bucks backing them, you won't either.

- E-publishing: E-publishing is being hailed as the wave of the future. Just as most people now buy their music online, more and more consumers are purchasing digital copies of books. There are a wide variety of e-publishers out there. Some, like Carina Press, have the backing of a well-known print publisher, some (Samhain for instance) have been around for a while and are respected in the industry, some (like Decadent) are new and hoping to enter the ranks of the former with time and quality products, and some are fly-by-night groups that will be gone as quick as they came.

• The more established and better run houses will have professional editors just like the traditional publishers. They'll also have some sort of art department and someone who handles promotion (such as getting your book out for reviews). These houses don't take everything that comes their way, and many of them have acceptance numbers not that far different from what print publishers sign from agents. In that way, they only differ from traditional publication in that they are digital only (or digital first).


• Some e-publishers, as mentioned aren't as well-run. An author may only have cursory editing work done, the art department may not have any artistic ability, etc. And there are those that are nothing more than Vanity Presses in disguise.

- PoD: This actually has a couple of meanings in the industry.

• Print on Demand, is a model that a lot of e-publishers (and some traditional publishers as well) utilize for print books. Rather than printing massive amounts of stock and storing them, they print as books are ordered.


• Publish on Demand is also known as vanity publishing. This is the sort of self-publishing that tends to turn out those books that give all the others a bad name...but it also results in some legitimately worthy offerings as well. At this stage, it all depends on the author.

- Self-publishing: This is when everything except the actual printing of the book is in the author's hands. It is up to them whether or not to hire an editor (and what kind of quality they get). The same can be said for cover art and promotion.  There are several ways to self-publish, and I don't know the ins and outs of them at all, so I'll leave that for someone who knows better than I to explain.

That's my breakdown as simply as I can put it. As I said, I don't write this to judge anyone's path, rather to illuminate those who may not know the difference between their options. Do you have opinions on what's out there? And did I miss anything important?