Heather Ames's Blog - Posts Tagged "new-books"
I Must Be Crazy
I started writing the opening chapters of the 4th book in the Swift/Roberts series, with a working title of Maine Issues. I'm 12 chapters into Book 2 of the Ghost Shop series. Perhaps I lost my mind.
Only once before did I try writing two books at once, and that was because I was revising a Romance and a Romantic/Suspense. Two completely different books.
Even so, I found myself favoring one over the other. I got 100 pages of the rewrite done, and was really liking the plot, the setting and the characters, all of whom had been tweaked. I had originally written a complete first draft when I was agented and submitting short contemporary Romances. But it had issues that needed to be fixed. So I was busy fixing them, until my computer suddenly went belly up. No warning. Just a completely black screen, and, I found, sadly a completely irretrievable hard drive.
I never finished that manuscript. But I did complete the other one, and it did get accepted for publication. That book is All That Glitters, and in its 1st edition, it received 8 reviews from popular review sites, and was one reviewer's top pick for the week.
I am not planning to repeat anything but the reviews process for the current wips. I learned to back up on a much more regular basis, for one thing. And the reason I started working on Maine Issues is because I already had 50 pages that needed serious tweaking after I decided it was actually Book 4, not Book 3. The new opening chapters kept bouncing around in my head, so I decided to get them out of my head and into a file.
Whether I'll keep working on it in tandem with Tread Softly, Book 2 of the Ghost Shop series, remains to be seen. But when the muse taps loudly, I do listen. I will also write the scene that has kept popping into my head since I wrote those other 50 pages. It's a really good scene, and I think it will fit really well into the new version, too.
Sometimes, random thoughts and random images need to be written down and saved for future use. Not every book is completed in a linear manner. At least, not in this writer's life.
Only once before did I try writing two books at once, and that was because I was revising a Romance and a Romantic/Suspense. Two completely different books.
Even so, I found myself favoring one over the other. I got 100 pages of the rewrite done, and was really liking the plot, the setting and the characters, all of whom had been tweaked. I had originally written a complete first draft when I was agented and submitting short contemporary Romances. But it had issues that needed to be fixed. So I was busy fixing them, until my computer suddenly went belly up. No warning. Just a completely black screen, and, I found, sadly a completely irretrievable hard drive.
I never finished that manuscript. But I did complete the other one, and it did get accepted for publication. That book is All That Glitters, and in its 1st edition, it received 8 reviews from popular review sites, and was one reviewer's top pick for the week.
I am not planning to repeat anything but the reviews process for the current wips. I learned to back up on a much more regular basis, for one thing. And the reason I started working on Maine Issues is because I already had 50 pages that needed serious tweaking after I decided it was actually Book 4, not Book 3. The new opening chapters kept bouncing around in my head, so I decided to get them out of my head and into a file.
Whether I'll keep working on it in tandem with Tread Softly, Book 2 of the Ghost Shop series, remains to be seen. But when the muse taps loudly, I do listen. I will also write the scene that has kept popping into my head since I wrote those other 50 pages. It's a really good scene, and I think it will fit really well into the new version, too.
Sometimes, random thoughts and random images need to be written down and saved for future use. Not every book is completed in a linear manner. At least, not in this writer's life.
