Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 39

Sorry for the extra delay! I wanted to wait until I had at least three hours without a power outage, and we hit that at 6 PM, so I decided to start writing at 7.

It’s Monday, and we’re moving into the final weeks of my summer break, so it’s time for a round up. More information included under the Read More Tag.

August & September Posting | Writing & Editing  | Ebooks

Well, this is the last full week of M/W/F updates. I have my new hire orientation next week, then staff development the week after, and then, uh, it’s September 5, and I’m back in the classroom. Life comes at you fast!

Here’s how the schedule breaks down for the rest of August.

• Week of August 14 (this week): Flash Fiction update on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday
• Week of August 21 (next week): Flash Fiction update on Monday, Friday, Saturday
• Week of August 28: Signs of Life update on Monday & Wednesday.

And then the schedule for September

• September 1-3 (Friday – Saturday): Flash Fiction Update
• Weeks of September 4, 11, 18, 25: Signs of Life update Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Flash Fiction Update on Saturday.

Moving onto to the writing schedule for the next few months.

• August & September: Fool Me Twice – Beta Draft
• October: Fool Me Twice – Posting Draft
• November: These Small Hours – NaNoWriMo

I’m really happy with the beta draft of Fool Me Twice so far, but I am leaning towards a second round of edits before I prep the posting draft. There’s so much new material that it feels like a second run at an alpha draft. I’m still mostly okay with the November publication date, but there’s a small chance I push out to December. I want it to be a good book, and I really won’t know what kind of time and energy I can put into it until I get back to work and see how the new school is.

For November, These Small Hours won the poll by a wide margin. I had 25 votes, and 60% voted for Hours. I’m not super surprised by that — Malice has a Liason miscarriage subplot to kick off the book, and Broken Girl deals with the domestic abuse storyline. Plus, they’re both continuations of previous books. Hours is a pretty straightforward mob story, and I think we’re all looking forward to a break, lol.

This story is completely broken down by chapter and scene already. All that I have to do is create the soundtrack — but even that’s already partially done. So it’s really just ready for me to start writing on November 1, which is perfect for where I want to be. We’ll talk more as we get closer, but thanks to everyone who voted!

And finally, ebooks.

Ugh.

I’m having a lot of trouble formatting them out of Scrivener. For some reason, in order to get the styling I want (with the paragraph breaks to look like a real book), it makes internal formatting really difficult — think italics and bold. I have to go through and manually label each use of italics with a separate style, and then it doesn’t always work — it’s really frustrating and takes forever.

I have Adobe InDesign which is actually meant for this kind of project, but I don’t really know how to use it as well as I need to. So I need to teach myself to format ebooks in this program. Or find a new program. It’s annoying, but I’m hoping to resolve this by the end of August — in that I’ll decide which platform I want to use: Scrivener, InDesign, or a third option.

As soon as I know, I’ll make the FMT Book 1 release a priority so that it’s out for you guys to read before Book 2 is posted. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.