Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 37 | In Case You Missed It: NaNoWriMo Poll

Hope you guys are having a good week! I’m in the final countdown to the end of my summer break, and I got a sneak peek of what my school year looks like. My school district (and so do many others) uses the Remind app — and because I used to work in this district four years ago, I have the same email again. Which means Remind logged me into my classes, lol. It’s the first year of French, so I have only one French I class and one Honors French I class — the other four are a Freshman Seminar which I’m hoping isn’t just study halls, but I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks.  Next year, I should have more French I and some French II classes.

I still haven’t started writing again — I guess I’m not surprised when I think about having written like 59k over just two weeks. I pushed really hard, and the chapters were easy to write, but literally as soon as I got to the end of Act 1, I just hit a wall — hard, and I’m sort of struggling to come back out of it. I wasn’t expecting that, but we’ll just have to work it out.

I’m hoping to get back to wring some today — but I’m not sure what I’ll finish. Today is the one year anniversary of losing my best friend to cancer, and it’s already a bit of a hard day. But my friends and I are getting together to do something we haven’t done in seven years — not since the first of us moved out of state. We’re going to our old Wednesday night pub in Philly and playing pub quiz with our old host. Fado’s (the pub) and Tom had a recurring weekly role in Lauren and mine’s lives since 2011. This is the first time I’m going without Lauren. She and I went alone for almost a year before we started gathering a reliable, steady group every week. But we got older and started careers where it made it harder and harder to travel to Philly for a 9PM pub quiz start — and then Mike moved to Florida, so we just fell out of the habit like you do as you grow up.

It’ll be weird to be there tonight without the other half of the Redheads Do It Better (our team name when it was just the two of us).  We went to pub quizzes in every country we ever visited together and won a lot of money thanks to her insane music knowledge and my ability to remember the most useless of all trivia. Though one time we had a fight briefly over who was the original artist for Say Something back in 2014 — she swore it was Justin Bieber, and I was READY to die on the hill that it was Passenger. She finally agreed and we won. For college students who didn’t have a lot of money to go around, regularly winning $60 was pretty awesome. (And all ties were broken by chugging beer — your girl is UNDEFEATED. I actually beat a Marine once. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bar full of assholes cheering USA for the guy and the girl kicks hiss ass. HIGHLIGHT OF MY LIFE)

Anyway, I’ll see you on Friday. Take care of yourselves 🙂 Here’s a picture of Lauren and I enjoying some Girl Scout shots purchased with our winnings after one of our solo wins in 2011. Pretty sure this is the night the humidity in the bar fried my Blackberry keyboard (which…is a thing that can happen apparently) and I’m sunburned because I’m a ginger who explodes in the sun.

 

Link: November NaNoWriMo Project

Hey! Sorry for completely skipping yesterday’s update. I woke up feeling a big sluggish and just — I don’t know. Mentally scattered. I spent most of the day watching movies, and not doing much else. I just couldn’t get myself to concentrate well. I had tried to take a few days off after Friday morning, because FMT editing was starting to get me close to burn out, but I probably didn’t do enough to take a break, lol, because I started to put together the NaNoWriMo poll project which meant I’d write other projects instead. I needed an actual writing break which I took yesterday.

(Unless — are we counting that I finished rereading the Signs of Life beta draft to mark up one more time?)

Anyway, if all goes to plan over the next 4 months, then I’ll be reading to start a new writing project in November. I decided to pick up from last year — bringing back three of the seven projects I featured then. All three of these are completely plotted out and considered turnkey ready — I can open a file and start writing on November 1.  I had one chapter for each of these last year — so I added a second chapter.

And because it was a poll project, I decided to make it one of the “free tier” perks for this month. Check out the post above — there are three projects each with 2 chapters, then a poll to pick which one you want most. It’s free to read and vote, you might have to create a Patreon account if you haven’t already.

See you guys tomorrow!

Updated: Watch Me Burn – Part 36

Hope everyone had a great week! I finished Act 1 of Fool Me Twice, which went from around 17k to 67k in the last two weeks, so woot for that! Acts 2 & 3 reuse a lot of older material, so I’m hoping edits will start going faster. See you on Friday!

Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 35 | August Patreon Perks

Happy August! Over on Twitter (which I will call it until the day I die, bite me Elon), we’re celebrating our favorite month. August 2023 marks Becky’s 26th year on GH AND the 24th anniversary of Liason’s first scene in Jake’s. I put together a calendar of events, one for each day, so definitely check out the hashtag #Becky26 if you’re interested in participating or just enjoying.

Thanks for all the comments on the recent updates for Watch Me Burn. It’s a bit wild how the timing turned out — to be writing these scenes mourning Emily as I come up on a similar anniversary myself. I unfortunately have more experience than I ever wanted in losing an essential person in your life suddenly, without warning. Lauren’s battle with cancer was short — they found it too late to do anything. It was, I think, 12 days from diagnosis until she passed, and most of her friends didn’t learn until a little more than 24 hours before she passed. The conversation Jason and Elizabeth had in the last part about whether Emily knew how much they loved her echoes conversations that I had last year, and thoughts.

I posted the August Patreon Perk post which has plans for the free tier, and also talks about the projects I’m working on this month, so definitely check it out if you’re a member. For those who aren’t, here is the project list:

• Fool Me Twice, Book 1 – Ebook: I finished the edit for this a week ago, but then got distracted. I just need to put together the formatting. That will be up for Patreons for a month, then released publicly.
• Fool Me Twice, Book 2 – Beta Draft: Finishing up Act 1 on Thursday, which nearly on schedule. I’ll be finishing Act 2 towards the end of the month. The Adored, Obsessed, and Stalker tier are getting updates on that. Check your tier for when to expect them.
• Signs of Life – Posting Draft: As soon as I’m done setting this post up, I’m grabbing the iPad to complete my final markup. I’m hoping to finish the edit by August 11 for the August 28 posting date.
• Malice: I’m working on discovery for this project so I can add to the slate of choices for NaNoWriMo. I’m finishing up Act 3 in my Plot Sketch.
• Kismet: I was originally going to work on this for the summer, but I want to do more research and think about my plans for it. I love what I’ve written for it, and I’m still excited about this time period. I just want to be sure I know what I’m doing with it.

Update: Watch Me Burn – Part 34

Happy Monday! And happy last day of July! Three weeks left of summer vacation, hard to believe. Not much to say today (because I’m writing this at 8:48 and I wanna go blow dry my hair before I start to write). Whatever we need to catch up on, I’ll do it on Wednesday.

Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 33

Here we are for our regularly scheduled Flash Fiction 🙂 Someone asked yesterday if you were going to get a hint as to the killer’s identity, and you’re actually to learn everything you need to know next week — according to my outline, all will be revealed on Wednesday 😛 But that doesn’t mean the story is over! I have the general outline for the story done, but I’ve been working on breaking the story into individual scenes. I just passed the middle of the story, so we’re in Act 2, Part 2 which is scheduled to conclude on August 26, then we’re in Act 3. I have to finish breaking that down.

As soon as I post this, I’m moving onto finish up the beta draft of Signs of Life — I’m so excited to be crossing this off the list this week. I still have to do a final edit to clean up last minute typos and set up the posting situation, but it’s not going to be taking 1-2 hours every day. I’m making great progress on Fool Me Twice, Book 2. I’m basically rewriting Act 1 which has 16 chapters, and I’ve already written 6 of them.

See you on Monday!

Update: Watch Me Burn – Part 32

Making up for yesterday by posting this morning! I’m glad I took a day to reset and take a break. Sometimes I push myself a little bit too much, and I need to be nicer to myself, lol. I woke up, had my coffee, and dug back into Signs. I’m already almost caught up to where I wanted to be today anyway, so that’s pretty good. And the Phillies are off today, so I can write tonight.

See you tomorrow for another update!

Hey! Just dropping in real quick — I woke up with an ache in my jaw that’s making it hard to concentrate on writing for long periods of time, so I had to cut the morning writing session this morning. I’m gonna go pop some more ibuprofen and grab an ice pack, so I can work this afternoon. Honestly, I may have over done it on Monday/Tuesday, lol. I wrote around 5k on Monday for Signs of Life, and over the last two days, I’ve written 42 pages and 16k for the new beta draft of Fool Me Twice. That’s not counting the 2k or so for Monday’s flash fiction.

Anyway, lol, I’m gonna take it easy today, but you know my policy — if I miss a scheduled update, you get a prize. So here’s Chapter 10 of Signs of Life — the revised flash fiction novel I’ll be posting later this month. Chapters 1-8 are already posted, and Chapter 9 is previously released material when it was a Flash Fiction series. Chapter 10 is the first piece of brand new work, so you can get a sneak peek of the type of expansion I’m doing with the novel. Zip file opens a PDF. Let me know what you think 🙂

Signs of Life – Chapter 10

FILE FIXED SORRY!

Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 31

Happy Monday! Hope everyone had a great weekend.  Time for our usual Monday roundup! Check under the Read More tag for more notes.

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Update Links: Watch Me Burn – Part 30 | Fool Me Twice

Happy Friday! Hope everyone had a good week!

I’ve been working on three editing projects this month: Fool Me Twice, Book 2 – second draft, Signs of Life – second draft, and Fool Me Twice, Book 1 – final edit.  It’s been a bit exhausting and draining — y’all know how I feel about editing. It’s a necessary hell, lol.

I’ve been keeping a small secret from you guys — as I edited Book 1 to clean up typos and inconsistencies (as I said when I started this project, for personal reasons Book 1 never got the second, polish edit), I was updating the chapters online. So if you read here at Crimson Glass, or on Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own, you already have the edited chapters! I’ll include a list of changes and updates under the Read More tag if you want specifics, but the biggest change was Chapter 4. I had a Liason flashback scene that was driving me crazy because I had misremembered the show, and so the scene was canonically inaccurate. It was largely rewritten, so I definitely recommend checking it out.

I’m formatting the ebook which will be up on the Patreon next week and for the public on September 1 to prep for the release of Book 2 in October.

For Signs of Life, I’ve completed 32 of 40 chapters for the edit, so I should be finishing that up sometime next week.  And for Book 2, I’m almost done constructing my beta draft (restructuring and figuring out additions and changes) so I start writing it on Monday.

I got more information about the new job, and I’m actually starting back early (boo!) The entire district reports back on Aug 28 for four days of teacher prep and professional development (which is awesome because my last district was 1 day), but as a new hire, I’m actually reporting on Aug 22 and 23 at 8 AM for orientation. This just means I need to shift around one of the last Flash Fictions, no worries. We’ll work it out when we get there.

See you on Monday!

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