but when I do, it’s usually because I just completed the plot board for one of my novels and realized—I have a long way to go! Each Post-It represents a chapter. I typically add Post-Its as I go. Now I’m really crying.
Point of Crisis: Book Three in The Perseid Collapse Series promises to be a game changer.
I realized I should explain each of my “offices” a little better. I posted this on Facebook, and one of my friends thought the tall glass was a beer. He missed the 4:30 in the morning part from an earlier post…not that I have a blanket prohibition against beer at 4:30 AM. Here it is. My version of “zero dark thirty,” except it’s no longer dark when I enter. The sun peeks above the horizon far too early in Maine.
“People, friends and family always ask the same question when they find out that I’m a writer, in addition to having a day job. When do you write? 4:30AM, pretty much every day of the year. 5:30 on weekends. It has simply become a habit. There are variations in that schedule, depending on where I am (vacation, overnight trip, visiting family). The picture shows how I start each day, with one notable exception. I’m in between books, so my desk is way neater than usual. For those that are curious. The beverages include, fresh juice (from a juicer…carrot, celery, apple, spinach, ginger, cucumber) and an espresso.”
All of the pieces are falling in place for the imminent launch of the second book in my Black Flagged series, Black Flagged Redux. The editing process is finally complete, a few extra chapters have been added at the request of my editor, ebook formatting is in progress and I just returned from an exhausting research trip to Europe. Actually, it was a family vacation, but I did get to visit a street address that is very important to Black Flagged Redux. More on that in another post, along with pictures.
One of the final pieces fell into place while I was on vacation. Despite the fact that I had written more than 120,000 words to create the novel…and likely rewrote most of them at some point…I never feel like the book is real until the cover is finished. I feel like a child waiting for a toy to arrive in the mail…but in this case, I kept checking my email. Once the file arrived…Black Flagged Redux was done!
Check out the cover Jeroen ten Berge created. It’s a brilliant continuation of the themes present in the first cover.
Give me one more week to pull it all together!
As you can see, I have a little mess brewing on my desk. About two weeks worth of sticky notes, with ideas that popped into my head while walking around the house, driving my car…or lying in bed. Most of these notes pertain to a specific scene I am writing, or have just written. Details I missed or changes I feel compelled to make. I gather these and then address each one in turn. I usually tackle a few per day, to keep the pile from growing, but you can see that this system isn’t working well. This is actually a good thing. I’ve been faithfully writing close to a thousand words early each morning, every day for the past three weeks, which is why the pile has grown. All of my time has been spent moving the story forward. Check out the word count at the top of the blog. Not bad. I’m shooting to wrap this thing up around 110K…I can hear Joe groaning.
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