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.

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!

It only took me another year, but I finally finished Awakening!  It's ready to be proofed and I'm ordering that copy of the book tomorrow.  I can't believe it!

So what's happened since the last post?

My son was born on February 23, 2011.  Bringing a newborn home requires schedule adjustments and it took me and 2.0 a few months to get into a groove together.  Add to that a new work schedule for both my husband and myself and some...shall we say complications?  With all that, you have the perfect recipe for book delays.

But it's done now!  I can finally move on and work on Resurrection.  Now that's exciting!

Do you know how many times I've written Awakening?  Three times.  That's a lot for anyone.  I can finally move on with life and take the next step in the Chronicles Of Seven.

Fingers crossed for Resurrection by the end of the year!

Well, yesterday I finished the first round of edits on Awakening. I got it done quicker than I figured I would with my work schedule, and it's been formatted thanks to Nathan's hard work. Now I just have to go through the novel and make sure it looks right. After what happened to Prophecy, I don't want formatting errors to interfere with the actual storytelling.

I managed it. It was very hard, but I managed it. I cheated (a LOT) but I did it. I managed to only finish one book this week and that was only when I had absolutely no other option but to read or go insane.

I'm not referring to things like Earl or Duke or King or whatever else you can think of. This is about the title of your book of course!

You may not realize this, but the title is extremely important. It can be the hardest thing you have to do in your writing career (if that's the case, you haven't done any editing yet have you?) and it can be so easy you'll smack yourself on the forehead and say "I could've had a V8".

In my experience, I don't title a novel until after it's finished most of the time. If I have a cover page on the novel while I'm writing it, that's entirely too much pressure and I can't even get started. Once the book is finished though, I find it so much easier to sum up the work in one or two words. I think it's because I know the story by then and I know what the point is. When I'm starting out, I don't know what twists it's going to take. What if I gave it a title that gave away the ending?

There are exceptions of course. Awakening and Resurrection (book 4 and 5 in my series right now) are already titled obviously, but I'm still writing Awakening. The only reason these are titled early is because I know what I'm doing with these two books. The first novel in the spin off series though isn't titled and the first draft is completed. I know what series it's in, but I can't think of it as anything more than Order Of The White Rose Volume 1 right now. Obviously that won't work as a working title.

Titles don't have to be elaborate works of philosophical meaning to be awesome. Is the word Twilight enough to cause a person to have an existencial crisis? No. Neither are titles like Dead Until Dark or Bad Moon Rising or City of Bones. I know when I saw Acheron as a title I almost stopped breathing, but that's because I knew instantly what the book was going to be about and Acheron is one of my all time favorite fictional characters.

If you need help finding a title, pay a visit to your local library and/or favorite bookstore. Write down any titles that strike you. Go home and read your novel while you're editing and see if anything sticks out in your mind that would sum it up without giving anything away. Prophecy is titled that way because...the story involves a prophecy and it's big. Simple and straight to the point.

Now get back to your work and finish your three pages unless you're on a minor sabbatical like I am right now. I obtained my replacement computer today so I'm taking the day off from fiction. I'll probably take tomorrow off too while the information is being replaced. I might even take Sunday off and actually have three days where I don't do any writing at all! Let's not push it. Also, if you find yourself inspriationless on Sunday night and you have HBO, check out True Blood. It's awesome if you don't mind the sex and nudity and bloody scenes. If you do, rent something.