Resurrection is gone!  It's been sent to the publisher.  Now we just wait to make sure the formatting is right.  Once I know that everything is good to go, I'll let you see the cover.  It's awesome!  I'm so very excited!

Now on to National Novel Writing Month prep...

After having to take some personal time to take care of my husband post surgery, I'm finally getting my revisions on Resurrection done.  It helped that while I was taking some time off, my cold readers finished Resurrection and had some very creative and constructive criticisms for me.

There are a few scenes that need to be added to or completely rewritten.  I saw it coming before I passed the book on to the cold readers, but to hear them reaffirm that for me was a big help.  Some of the scenes that I was thinking of revising were great according to them, so I'm going to leave them alone for now.  I'm excited for this novel to get out for everyone else to read it and the cover art is fantastic!

After I finish the revisions for Resurrection, I'm going to start the background notes for Scandal as well as prepare for this year's Nanowrimo novel.  I'm very excited about this year's book and I think I just might end up liking it so much that I'll revise it and put it out there for the public to read.  There will be more on that novel as we get closer to November.

Now it's time to get back to the revisions.  Hopefully I'll have a revised novel ready in the next week.

I finished my fourth novel at the beginning of June.  Yes it's finally done!  My cold readers have it right now (one is already done with it and apparently she loved it!), then it's time to edit, edit, edit before it's released to the masses.  I'm so happy to be done with it since the story arc started in Prophecy is done with Resurrection and I get to expand my writing skills by starting the next, much darker story arc that will finish with the end of the series.

While finishing Resurrection, I decided I would do something crazy and rewrite Prophecy for Camp Nanowrimo this month.  This has been an epic fail.

I still have half of the month left to work on it and I'm planning on jumping back on the horse next week.  There's been entirely too much personal stuff going on in this house lately to get as much done on it as I wanted to.

The other thing making it harder for me to finish this task is the post-novel wrap up hangover I always find myself in.

I finish a novel and I can't make myself write anything for weeks afterward.  It's like I've tapped out my muse and I have to wait until it regenerates.  It's not writer's block.  I can deal with writer's block.  I have music, books, and movies especially set aside to break through writer's block.  This is simply a lack of motivation.

I thought it was a lack of discipline.  It's not.  I simply sit at my computer, look at the blank page, know what I want to put there, but just can't seem to get it on the page.  I think it's partially distraction.

So next week, I've told myself that I'm going to get back on schedule and get things going.  I'm going to work on Prophecy, take notes for my August and November novels, and start the planning for Scandal (the fifth novel in the Chronicles) before I start editing Resurrection.

Hopefully I'll be able to get out of this hangover.

The plan had been that I would query Prophecy to agents in February.  I was prepared for this goal and fully intended to achieve it.  As I prepared to send the first three chapters of Prophecy to the first prospective agent, I realized I had a problem.

The book is good.  It's just not quite good enough.

When Prophecy was originally written, it was to be a stand alone novel.  I packed it full of information that wasn't really important to the actual story line, but necessary to understand the world it was taking place in.  Characters weren't developed as well as they should have been because...well they were only hanging around for one novel.  If they were two dimensional it was okay.

Then I wrote Forbidden, a much better book all the way around, and I wrote Awakening.  Suddenly that one stand alone book had become a series of books.  All the information in Prophecy that wasn't relevant to the story line suddenly didn't need to be there.  Those two dimensional characters need to be filled out so they jump off the page.

So now I have a new goal.  After Resurrection is written (because to delay the release of Resurrection would, I think, lead to someone jumping me in a parking lot somewhere :)), I'm going to rewrite Prophecy.

I'm throwing out the original book (well I'm keeping it on the computer) and starting anew.  The story line will be the same, but it will be so much better.

I'm actually looking forward to the new book.  I'm looking forward to making it better and digging into that first novel again.  After I'm done, Prophecy will be so much more of what it should be.  When it's done, I think you'll like it.

The first round of Camp Nanowrimo is set to start June 1.  I'm very excited by that because I need all the help I can get when it comes to improving my writing.  If you think you've hit the top of your game when it comes to writing and expressing yourself creatively then you're probably kidding yourself.  I know I'm not at the top of my game yet.

Script Frenzy is in April and for those of you who write screenplays, more power to you.  I tried and failed with an epic greatness all my own.  Novels I can do.  Screenplays I leave to the experts.  If you're participating in Script Frenzy, my hat is off to you.  Obviously you'll focus on that before Camp starts in June.

For me, I'm planning my next Nano novel and trying furiously to finish Resurrection on time as well as getting query letters written for Prophecy.  The Nano novel is the easy part.

I've had an idea floating around in my head dealing with Norse mythology and a teenage romance that turns deadly and it all being a game in the end.  I've been playing with it for years now.  I think I just might write it out this summer.

What ideas have you been kicking around that you haven't written yet?

It's been a VERY long time since I posted anything here at Fang Marked.  I'm sorry for the lapse in posts.

Awakening was released last summer to very good reviews.  Prophecy has been re-edited and right now is only available on the Kindle.  The new edits are going to the publisher sometime in the next few weeks so the new version of the book will be available on paperback as well.  It has a new cover too.

Resurrection is going well.  Slowly, but well.  I don't want to rush this book into publication, but at the same time I know that I need to stick to my deadline at the end of June.  Right now I'm about a fourth of the way through it.  The wait is going to be worth it.

All three novels are available on the Kindle for $.99 and as of today, there have been over two thousand copies sold when the sales for all three books are added together.  That is amazing to me!  Thank you to all the new readers who are enjoying these stories for the first time and I hope to hear back from you all!

More updates to come!