Update: Dear Reader – Part 1

I mentioned two months ago I had a flash fiction series that was supposed to follow Chain Reaction, but I pushed it back to see how some things would work out on screen. They ended up not going full-throated with the Liz being blamed for Sam’s death thing, so I’m going back to my OG plan.

I know about half my readers aren’t super interested in the AU stuff, and that’s totally fair, so I’ll be doing Dear Reader on Tuesdays and Masquerade on Thursday until we get to my winter break and the schedule will shift slightly.

Programming note: Dec 19, I have a winter concert at work so I’ll either be updating Wednesday or Friday depending on my energy. I’ll keep you posted.

See you Tuhrsday!

Update Link: Masquerade – Part 10

Writing this post before I start the timer at 7, and I gotta tell you, I am running on fumes today. Just pure exhaustion. The only bright spot is that tomorrow is Friday, and I do everything in my power to make Fridays low-key for me and the students — catch up days, media days, etc. I really just need to sleep, and my humidifier kicked out on me last weekend so I have to get a new one for the bedroom. I have to shop around and get a good one — the one in my office is kind of crappy but I can live with it.

I did some housekeeping — the Flash Fiction & Recent Updates page are up to date, and I also cleaned up the Flash Fic widgets.

See you next Tuesday 🙂

Update Link: Masquerade – Part 9

By the end of Tuesday, I always end up feeling like it should be Thursday. I can’t believe I have to go to work three more times with these little gremlins. Whom I love, but mostly want to yeet into the sun by this time of the year.

The other flash fiction series I was planning needs a bit more work (and for me to catch up on current GH) so Masquerade will slot in for Tues/Thurs, with some hopes to increase posting during the my winter break. Thanks to the way Christmas and December 23 falls on the calendar, I’m basically off from December 21 – Jan 5 (we come in on Dec 23 for like 4 hours and have ONE full day on Friday, Jan 3.)

These Small Hours, Book 2 is going to miss that first December 17 deadline. I had some hopes that I might still make it but that was only if I finished the beta draft by Nov 3 and the draft only needed light editing. I had to rework Act 3 and add two more chapters (which I’m happy with) so right now, I’m hoping for Dec 30.

See you on Thursday!

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 47

Hope everyone has a great holiday! I’ll be heading down to my parents this year. I’m bringing sides (look how adult I am!) and dessert — a ginger apple crisp. So I’m writing this, then hopping in the shower so I can start prepping and cooking.

I hope you’ve enjoyed Chain Reaction. It was definitely a strange and wild ride, and there are tons of things I would’ve done differently, but that’s the beauty of Flash. You write it and hope it works.

See you this weekend for a Holiday post, then next week for Masquerade!

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 46

It has been a very annoying week, lol, and it’s only Wednesday. Feels like the kids packed in five days of nonsense in 2.5 days.

Apologies for no updates the last few days — on Sunday, I fell asleep at like 5:30 and didn’t wake up until after I was supposed to have started to write. Then Monday night, I ended up only sleeping like 3 hours. By the time I got home from work, I was dragging really hard. I went to bed early and got eight hours, so I feel a lot better.

I’ll be updating tonight (obviously) and then tomorrow morning, so Chain Reaction should be wrapping up unless something goes off the rails (you never know). I’m not quite ready with the flash fiction series I was planning to launch this weekend, so for the time being, Masquerade will slot into the Tues/Thurs slot. I had a great breakthrough for the middle part of the story so I’m looking forward to updating that more (still with the option to write for 60-90 minutes).

I made huge strides in Hours, Book 2 – for most of October and November, the beta draft has felt like it’s dragged, but in the last week, I’ve managed to get it to the point where I’ll still have it out in December (though Dec 17 is, uh, pushing it). I’ll be able to make some firmer date choices after this break because my plan (dream) is to finish the draft by Sunday.

I actually have most of my next two weeks of classes prepped already — all I need to do is my slides, and I can do a little bit each day over the next four days. That’s really great for my evenings — more time for writing! And I’m caught up with grading. All good things.

See you tomorrow morning/afternoon. I plan to start writing around 11, and post at 12 PM.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Story Links: Noel & All I Want For Christmas

Hello! Quick schedule update. I forgot that I have the high school drama tonight (several of my students are involved and I’m excited to see them perform!) so I’m doing Flash Fiction tomorrow night.  BUT I was going to launch a holiday thing tomorrow so I’m just switching. 

Happy Holidays from Crimson Glass! Over the last 22 years I’ve written countless stories set in and around the holidays, but there are some that I wrote specifically for the holiday or added an epilogue/sequel after first publication. Each Sunday (Saturday this week!) I’ll post 1-2 stories, closing out the new year. I’m not planning any new additions this year, but then I also didn’t plan to write an entire Mad World novella last year, lol.

Week 1: Noel & All I Want For Christmas

Noel was a challenge response I wrote TWENTY years ago. What if Jason, who had lost his memory, was visited by the three ghosts from A Christmas Carol? It was only my second story back after a year’s hiatus, and it was a lot of fun. I’d write it differently now, of course, but it’s fun to revisit.  One of my favorite things about archiving nearly every single story I’ve written for 22 years is seeing my journey as a writer. I’ve learned so much over the last twenty years.

All I Want For Christmas was written my first year back to writing. As the OG fans might know, I wrote in bursts from 2002-04, Late 2005-08, and then disappeared between 2009-2013. I didn’t really watch GH much at this point. I’d gone back to college and was just so incredibly busy and GH was just so terrible at this point that it seemed pointless. I returned to the show in 2012, and writing in 2014.

I relaunched Crimson Glass in January 2014, wrote a few new pieces (Shadows & A Few Words Too Many) and finished the year with this alternate universe Christmas story. Hard to believe I’ve been writing consistently again for 11 years! And it’s great to see how far I’ve come in that second decade of writing. This story was also the first time I did a holiday epilogue — there’s a second epilogue added a year later.  I think if I wrote this today, it’d be longer for sure, but I still love it.

Happy Holidays from me to all of you, and I can’t wait to see where this holiday season takes us! See you tomorrow for Flash Fiction and this week for more Chain Reaction!

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 45

Happy Thursday! This week has felt like an entire year, lol. Can’t wait for Friday. I desperately need some extra sleep so as soon as I finish this update, I’m off to relax, read a little, and turn in early.

See you Saturday for Extended Flash Update on Masquerade. I had some really good ideas on that one this week, and I’m gonna try to take some time to flesh it out and do some planning. I think Chain Reaction proves I should do a bit more planning on my flash series, lol. I am awful without a plan.

Update: These Small Hours – Chapter 33

I have never been more annoyed, lol. I had a shitty day at work, but I was determined to come home and relax. I soaked in a bubble bath, read a book for an hour, and then went to make dinner before writing Flash at 7. It was all going perfectly.

And then —

I got an email that my Wayfair ordered was delivered — but it was not my house. I don’t remember if I went into this back in June, but my Wayfair card got used fraudulently for thousands of dollars. I managed to fix it, and cleaned out the account. Deleted all payments, all addresses, everything. And didn’t touch it until last week when I wanted to grab a few things and didn’t want to use Amazon. Somehow that fraudulent address got put on my account AGAIN and all my of new items were going THERE instead of the order address I asked for.

I literally spent an HOUR on the phone explaining it over and over before I finally got to a supervisor who fixed it but by the time I was done, my dinner was stone cold, my patient and energy gone.

I don’t want to promise you I’ll update Flash tomorrow, because I can’t make that promise. Tomorrow sucks for lots of reasons, lol.

SO as an apology, you get a preview chapter of These Small Hours. This is the first chapter in the second book. It hasn’t been edited for typos, and there’s no guarantee this is what the final version is gonna look like. But it’s probably not too far away.

Anyway, enjoy, and see you on Thursday.

Update Link: Masquerade – Part 8

You know the least fun part about writing flash fiction? You have a great idea for a final line and you write it, and then you post it, but now it’s too late to fix it because you accidentally created a huge problem you spend the rest of the story trying to fix. Anyway, that’s the story with Chain Reaction, lol. I got slightly addicted to cliff hangers 😛 Anyway, expect that story to get a huge overhaul when we move into edits. If I live long enough.

This is my first 90 minute Flash update, and I’m writing this post before I do it, so I really hope it works out. See you on Tuesday!

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 44

Hope everyone had a good week! Sorry about pushing this update — it was a very long day yesterday, and a real struggle to finish some content for my classes today but it was totally worth it. Ever since my curriculum supervisor observed my class back in September, she’s been bending over backwards to get me a lot of physical materials for the students. First it was TWO sets of class novels, and then she emailed me a few nights ago — I’m getting ANOTHER double of set novels AND without even asking, she renewed my textbook materials AND ordered curriculum for French 3 so I can get a head start. Just a really great week and I’m so excited to start creating! It’s amazing to have a district so eager to take the computers out of the students’ hands and do more writing.

In more relevant news, we are drawing Chain Reaction to a close. Right now, if I don’t miss any more updates, I’ll be ending it on Tuesday, November 25. There are three updates left! I’ve been thinking about what’s next and how to organize my schedule and I think I’ve got some good ideas. The Tues/Thurs mostly seems to work, and the 7PM writing hour is mostly set (we’ll move back to 6 when baseball starts, lol).

I really want to delve into Masquerade and flesh it out, and I’m finding 60 minutes to be a little restrictive. So I’m moving that to weekends — probably Fri/Sat nights, posting at 8PM depending on schedules — and I’ll write for 90 minutes. That will be a weekly update alternating with Tues/Thurs updates of a second series. I already have the plot set up for the next one — for current GH! I’ve got some ideas percolating on a Liason reunion, and I expect to post that during my Thanksgiving break.

I’ll see you guys back tomorrow with our first 90 minute Masquerade update! We’ll have to call that something other than Flash, lol.