Sun and Moon (I’m still not fond of that title, really) is off to my crit group, and after another round of edits I will send it in to eXtasy.  I’m so. very. happy. to be done with that story.  I like it, it’s got some naughty parts and some nice parts and it is a sweet little love story for a hot afternoon.  This story taught me the value of planning.  I am NOT a pantser.  I cannot sit down and let the words flow and see what happens.  I need a plot, a beginning middle and end.  If I don’t have that at the start, my story will fizzle and die about six thousand words in.  Every time.  It’s a rule.

Knowing that, I’m trying to stave off the next crash and burn with some preliminary work.  I think the next project will be a Jason Bell story, while I still work on edits for Waking Kiara.  I’m thinking of setting it in the future, with Jen’s granddaughter finding the old manuscripts in the attic or something.  Jason Bell is a dreamy guy, after all, in any decade.

I’m about to embark on a road trip with my family, so between that and wordpress upgrades, I fear for my sanity.  Hold me.

I like seeing the way a story can change through edits, too. Being part of a critique group where I get to read and reread chapters is a neat way to see how things evolve for writers (besides myself). How a sentence that worked becomes a paragraph and an entire paragraph will get killed in favor of another. How you can alter a scene’s pacing by cutting here and adding there. It is really neat to see a good story become great.

On that note I edited (thanks to my critique buddy, vivid_cognition) and submitted my story for eXtasy’s September anthology, Cafe Nowhere. Whee! I also joined my local chapter of the RWA, and attended their monthly meeting. It was great to see people coming together. This year’s goal is “submit,” which gives me a giggle but is right in line with my goals. I hope to get Waking Kiara ready to submit to agents, start my very first round of NY rejections, by the third quarter of the year this year.

Lastly, I am sheeple and I joined twitter. You can be my twitter friend: ameliajune, or you can read my twitter feed on my sidebar over there —–>

Have I mentioned how thrilled I am to be writing again? ‘Cause I am!

Two of the three authors presenting were epubbed only, and the last, Sherill Quinn, just signed her first deal with Kensington but is otherwise epubbed.  To see epubbed authors heavily represented and singing the praises of the ebook was a great experience for me.  I often struggle with the idea of NY–do I submit there, or continue to submit to online publishers?  There are positives and negatives to each, but I’m proud of the work I have done online, and continue to do (oh yes, there will be more stories from me in the not too distant future.)

I am reinvigorated by the idea of ebook novelists being taken seriously by the book-reading and publishing community at large.  Suddenly I feel like a “real writer,” lol.