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.

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 43

Hope everyone’s week is going well 🙂 We got some lovely Liason scenes today on GH, and then Elizabeth got to drag Lucky back and forth all over the bar. It was glorious, to be honest. And if you’re an old-school Robert and Holly fan, they got a happy ending exit which is nice for them. Not sure how I feel about the Sasha storyline — I don’t hate that Sasha’s their kid, I just feel like it was a bit ham-fisted and out of nowhere. But maybe in a few months we’ll be happy with it, you never know.

Also, Sam’s dead! Brings me so much happiness just to repeat that!

I’ll see you guys on Thursday!

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 42

Well, some good news since my last update 🙂 I finally figured out how to end this story (and how long it’ll take!) After tonight, there are three updates left! I’ll be updating tonight, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Then the following week, Tuesday and Thursday, I’ll finish it up.

Once Chain Reaction is completed, Flash Fiction will stay on Tuesdays/Thursdays. I may miss them once in a while, but for the most part, those are the days that work best for my schedule. I’ll probably be writing posting at 7 or 8, but not later. By 8, my brain is usually mush.

I’ll update Masquerade this week just so we don’t go much longer without an update.

Update: Chain Reaction – Part 41

Uh, so, hello.

It’s been…well, it’s been a week, hasn’t it? Beyond the real world, which is something I’m still struggling to wrap my head around, I had the end of the marking period on Wednesday, and I graded around 300 assignments. I wish I were making that up, but I’m not. I’ve got 109 students, and I was grading at least 2 assignments in each class, including a test which actually had to be read. Not to mention reverifying grades, letting kids finish late work (wait, that math makes it closer to 400–this is why you don’t do math it is never your friend).

I did all of that by 3PM, but I did it on basically two hours of sleep. So I was basically useless yesterday. Just completely burnt out and needing to disassociate. I played The Sims 4 (my legacy family is going THROUGH it right now), watched some television, caught up on GH, and went to bed early.

I feel better today — well, more energy. Got some work done, but I can’t believe I’m already halfway through my four-day break.

I promise we’ll get into a routine here with Flash Fiction. I really am trying very hard. It’s just…been a really rough start to the year, professionally and personally, and I’m really just putting one foot in front of the other, like a lot of us are right now.

I’m still on Twitter for now, but I’ve moved most of my GH related posting to Blue Sky — a lot of us in the Liason community did. You can find me there with the @crimsonglass handle. I’ll probably be adjusting the Twitter feed on the sidebar soon.

I don’t know the next time I’m posting, so following me there or on Twitter or subscribing to the feed here on CG (link in sidebar) is your best bet. I will do everything possible to make sure I’m posting weekly.

See you when I see you.

Update Link: Masquerade – Part 7

Happy Saturday! This is my favorite night of the year — the night I get the hour of sleep the universe stole back in the spring. I’m hoping it’s going to help me get my weekend sleep schedule back on track, and I’ll be back to waking up at 7 AM, not 8.

Busy week coming up! I have three days of work, Tuesday will be a professional development day and then I have a meeting that night. My grades are due on Wednesday, and then it’s a four day weekend (in which I have the electric & gas company to replace my meter) and work prep to be ready for the rest of the fall semester.

Oh, and NanoWriMo started?

I’m not doing the official site this year — they’re adopting AI as a legit form of writing and it boggles the mind (like can you imagine going into Chat GPT and telling it to write me a GH fanfic? How is THAT real writing???) so I’m not comfortable putting my work through their word verification anymore. I don’t want to be training AI with my content.

I’ll be doing livestream writing sprints every night between 7-9PM over on Patreon. They’ll be free for all members (including the free tier) so check that out if you’re interested.

Update Link: Chain Reaction – Part 40

It feels surreal to actually be posting this but Sam McCall is dead. Dead dead. Like DEAD DEAD DEAD. They literally had Alexis holding her dead body, Jason sitting at the corpse’s side. Like Emily dead back in the day.

*happy sigh*

PLUS Elizabeth got to be part of it. In the room, there when Jason learned the news, talked him through what happened, how to talk to the kids. Just so damn good. Steve was just amazing today. Really great acting choices. And Nancy Lee Grahn hit it out of the park. And no one does dead corpose like KM.

*cackles*

ANYWAY I’ll be back tomorrow with another update and more news. I’m running a bit late to set up Flash tonight 🙂