Writing Update: July Goals / Reborn Blog Tour Winner / My Writing Process

Happy Wednesday! I survived the Reborn blog tour, and I have your grand prize winner. Congrats! And thank you so much for making the blog tour spectacular! I think I visited well over one hundred individual bloggers during the tour, and Reborn has thirteen reviews on Amazon (eleven of them five stars!).

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A special thanks goes to my Reborn hosts: Esther Jones, Medeia Sharif, River Fairchild, E.E. Giorgi, Rachel Morgan, Untethered Realms, Decadent Kane, Graeme Ing, Catherine Stine, Karen Hooper, Jess Haight, Natalie Aguirre, Rosie Amber, Jack Balliot, Cathy Keaton, Jay Noel, Samantha May, Heather Holden, Trisha Farnan, Ellie Garratt, Patricia Lynne, Alex J. Cavanaugh, M. Pax, Brandon Ax, Aaron Galvin, Julie Flanders, Lexa Cain, Kimberly Afe, Adrienne Thompson, Aubrie Dionne, C.M. Brown, Emma Adams, M.J. Fifield, Nick Wilford, Christine Rains, and Stephen Tremp.

And if you missed any tidbits of information about Reborn, I have them all up on my website.

June has been a busy month with the blog tour, my cat being sick (bladder crystals again), and an incident I'll talk about further during next week's IWSG. It's made writing rather difficult this month, and I've been re-evaluating my writing goals.

Almost everyone who has read Reborn is looking forward to the next book, but the next story I'd been planning to write wasn't in Yssa's timeline. It got me thinking. Would my audience rather have the next part of Yssa's tale (Remarked, a novella told from Liam's POV) or a story (Repledged) within the Amoran world but taking place 800 years before Reborn? I figured they'd want to continue Yssa's story, so I am breaking off Repledged and the other prequel Reigned into their own series (The Royal Challenges), which features Deliah's story, Magna's story (Repledged), and Reza's story (Reigned). By writing the new outline for Repledged, I also learned about the stories of the other Phoenix Prophetesses, so I'd like at some point to write The Prophetess Challenges, featuring Amora's story, Gwendolith's story, and Carys's story. Of course, I'm planning to work on The God Challenges after The Fate Challenges and then I'll get to the other standalone tales within those two new series.

So that said, here are my July goals:

• Edit two short stories a week in People of Foxwick and Their Neighbors. I was supposed to work on this some in June, but I really needed a break from editing. So now my goal is to finish the final edit by the end of August, so I can start proofreading and formatting for the print proof in September.
• Write Remarked. I'm hoping to finish this novella told from Liam's point of view by the end of the month.

And I hope to take a slight breather next month too for a few days around the July 4th holiday. The blog schedule will also be going back to normal with just Wednesday posts.

2014 Stats
26,864 Words Written
1672 Pages Edited
*Stats taken from 1/1/2014-6/24/2014*

Stephanie Faris tagged me in the Four Questions on Writing blog hop.

To participate, you just answer four questions about your writing process and tag three more people. Here we go!

What am I working on/writing?

I’m finishing up my outline of Remarked, Book 1.5 of The Fate Challenges, so I hope to start writing this novella from Liam’s point of view in July.

How does my work/writing differ from others in its genre?

That’s a really good question. I tend to pull a lot from mythology for my work, and although I do my best to make my characters relatable and three dimensional, I also like to filter in as much world-building as possible without bogging the story down. For me, my worlds are just as real as the people in them.

Why do I write what I do?

I read a variety of genres from horror and mysteries to fantasy and romance. My writing often reflects what I read. I have genre-hopped a bit, although I must admit I love writing fantasy the most. In the end, I just have all these people and places and stories in my head. They need a place to exist, so I’ll write down their tales.

How does my writing process work?

I have an idea. That idea will roll around in my mind, picking up characters, scenes, and world-building. Ideas often dwell in my brain at least six months, but some are up there for years. When I’m ready to work on a project, I’ll write the outline. Once the outline is complete, I’m ready to write the first draft. I do sometimes go back over what I’d written while drafting to add details and make minor changes. Sometimes I’ll get to a point, usually at the third-way mark, where I finally understand my main character better and will go back and fix the beginning and continue to the end.

Now it’s time to tag. I’m terrible at this and don’t like to tag people who’ve already been tagged before, so if you’d like to answer the questions, go ahead!