I’ve written 22,500 words on JUMPER’s early draft in the last ten days. I’m trying to finish it completely by next Monday when I leave for Sultry In The City in Houston. I’m going to Galveston for a few days before the event and Austin after. I won’t have much time to write while I’m gone, if any. I will then have three weeks to do my 2nd draft before I leave for Books At The Beach.
In the meantime here is a typo for you. You make up your mind… was it a hot tub or a hot tube?
I am the Queen of two things: Sleep and Procrastination.
That said, I had most of this post planned on Tuesday and actually said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t have to worry about tomorrow yet’ when I was reminded about it. I then went on to do some recovery on Wednesday, and I did not get this post done. I guess I need to apologize to Miss Bri because I did indeed need to worry about Wednesday then… I couldn’t have guessed that I would be feeling badly and sleep all day.
Alas, the book. JUMPER. I am behind on it. It’s looking like the release for it will be pushed back again, with me having signings this month and next, there is just so little time for me to produce. Not to mention that my body has been in failure for weeks now. Between the anemia and COVID and now the iron infusion treatments. This is what turning 50 feels like? I would like to object on the BS involved with the last year. 49 has been a ton of nonsense.
All that said. Here is my typo of the week. I don’t know what I was trying to say… it’s all up to interpretation by the aliens.
I’ve been ‘working’ on JUMPER. I say ‘working’ because I’ve had a little hiatus while I have a holiday, a family emergency, and a flare-up of chronic anemia. Anemia sucks; when you have chronic anemia, it’s more than just fatigue. You get dizzy, weak, and you can get winded for no reason at all and heal incredibly slowly. I have an appointment with my oncologist to see what happens next, and for once I am hoping for iron infusions because they make me feel better, as overdone as they sound.
This BS has made working on the book incredibly difficult. I have built an incredibly detailed outline for the book, so when I get the energy up, I can zip through it.
Today I leave you with the genital WIP. It’s, unfortunately, balls.
Hello, and welcome to my WIP update. It Feels Like Home is going up on Amazon for paperback purchases in the next few days, and it will be up for preorder for e-books until the 4th. It comes out on the 5th of July. You can get it right now if you are an ARC reader through BookSprout or my YA & TEEN ARC Team.
My current project is JUMPER. I’m 13 chapters and 19000 words in. The first few chapters are letters, so there are many chapters at the start. That said, JUMPER is a deep and dark story. I already have TW for sexual torture, sexual sadism, SA, child SA, reference to miscarriage, PTSD by both a primary and side character, and the threat of forced breeding.
So yeah, this is a light, feel-good book you will want to share with the whole family!
Continue ReadingI’m so close to being done with It Feels Like Home I can taste blood, sweat, and tears–mainly sweat and tears, but still, the book is nearly done.
Right now, the beta readers are pouring through it and finding all the weak parts that need bolstering and the witty pieces that I win at. I have had to up my deadline to meet the formatter’s availability. So, the day the betas finish, Bri and I need to tandem our comments and wrap it up because it needs to be off to Author Tree early the following day.
So what sort of errors do we find in my final pass? Well Bri found this where I closed the door and let myself in… I fail the door mechanics boss.
Oh, look, I missed WIP Wednesday again. If I’m on time, I got there because I didn’t know what day it was. I will still apologize for being late because I’ll be assuming it’s the wrong day. Alas, today is genuinely Thursday, and I missed yesterday doing proofreading, so here is yesterday’s WIP.
I had plans of focusing only on JUMPER when May 1 hit. I had every intention of putting It Feels Like Home aside and working on only one thing, but I can’t seem to do that. I have plugged both projects into my Pacemaker Planner. The idea is to finish JUMPER by the end of this month and IFLH by the end of July. I’m a little off-kilter, though, because I’m at 5% of JUMPER and 21% of IFLH. That’s backward.
Continue ReadingI am still sick with the Las Vegas plague. What do they say about having too much fun? I don’t know, but what happened in Vegas came home with me and won’t let go. I can’t shake it, and I feel like crumbs from the litter box kind. I’m sure we all agree, nothing good comes from the litter box.
Because of the Las Vegas plague, I had to push RENLEY back two weeks and the release date which was originally April 11th is now the 25th. I’m sad about this, but at least I hadn’t put it up for pre-order yet. One good thing, I guess.
Let’s move on though to the WIP typo of the week. This typo goes with yesterday’s Teaser Tuesday. You clearly saw, if you read it, what it should be… now look at what I accidentally wrote, and you can imagine Bri’s response when she read it and came at me with, “Ali, what the fuck? Ewww!” To which I need to say in light of my mistake, a double ewww, considering she was eight at the time of the alleged event.
I’m sick again! Woot!
It seems once a book I catch the plague and screw up my deadline. Like, for instance, the deadline for this draft is Friday, and I’ve been sick 10 days and the book is 19% done on beta. Oh yeah, we are clearly screwed there.
So, let’s talk about the book. It’s a little done. I am fattening it up like the feted calf. I always love the be characters more than my main characters and nothing is different in this book. Jazzie is so fun to write. I am about to rearrange my calendar, so my writing goal isn’t an unreachable 7500 words a day, while I’m ill.
And about this teaser… Shelby must have an unusual relationship with his coffee… or I made it uncomfortable the way I wrote it. And it was supposed to be SIPS.
So much has happened in only a week.
I am irritated, frustated and some other –tateds. I’ve been having some trouble with my dominant hand for a while. Swelling, numbness and other bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Friday, I woke up and it was swollen and felt like I had fire ants under my skin. I went to urgent care and was like… ‘I think I have shitty arthritis.’ They came back to me and were like, ‘No, you are wrong.’ They couldn’t tell me more than that but put a rush appointment in for me with my GP, who saw me first thing Monday morning.
I was like… ‘You sure this ain’t arthritis?’ And she was like, ‘No, you have De Quervain tenosynovitis and carpal tunnel.’ At which time I looked her in the eye and said, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ She laughed and laughed and gave me steroids, wrist braces and a follow-up appointment for 6 weeks. Because this bullshit, bullshit, bullshit has all the time in the world for me.
Continue ReadingI’m almost done with RENLEY–well, the first draft. I still have to do the hard work and the rework of it and do it in a tight deadline because I’m going to Las Vegas with my bestie for a few days on a girls’ weekend. I’ll be starting the rewrite on Saturday, watching the Superbowl on Sunday… so any writing I get done that day will be done EARLY… very early, since I get up at 0400-0500. It shouldn’t be a problem. Yes, I use twenty-four hour time. Hey, my husband used to do international travel for work, and it was the easiest way for us to sync up since most countries in Europe use it too. We never stopped using it. I also tend to write dates in European standard and use Celsius.
I suck like that, and Bri is generally correcting my date usage, and ignoring my Celsius claims.
So, here is my typo of the week. It would seem there is a sneaky camera in their gardening equipment. My characters are bizarre and do weird things. Why wouldn’t they put surveillance equipment in a hoe?
