Monthly Archives: November 2014

NaNoWriMo Day 25: Big News!

So if you have been following my progress this month on my Facebook page, then you know that I inserted writing a short story with Nevi into my NaNoWriMo noveling efforts.  Well, that story was a Marketplace fan fiction that we submitted to Laura Antoniou’s newest anthology No Safewords II, which is the follow up collection to No Safewords that she released early in 2013.

After several days of nerve wrecking waiting, we got news about the story.  And we were accepted into the anthology!

This is a really big deal for me, personally, because Laura Antoniou is one of my personal heroes.  Her book The Slave changed my life.  I got my hands on it somehow when I was a young, burgeoning writer and it just blew my mind.  The characters, the concepts, the raw power of her writing has been in the back of my mind ever since.  I can safely say that she is my leather godmother!  I would not be the writer I am today without the Marketplace books.

Being included in her anthology for the Marketplace universe is still very surreal, which is why I haven’t announced it yet.  I’ve been digesting the news privately for the last three days.

And as for NaNo, I am still chugging away with only 14K words left to go.  I know for a fact that the project I’m working on will be much, much more than the 50K of NaNo.  But having that much of it done at the end of the month will make a huge dent in the work of creating the original story out of what was once a fan fiction.

Is it Still November? NaNoWriMo: Day 14

Working on a complete rewrite of the final scene of the Parliament of Twilight: Ep 2. It was pitifully short and left out WAY too much information that is relevant to the plot. It’s a scene most everyone has seen before, being one from Ghost House, but that’s what makes the rewriting it so important. It’s the vital cliffhanger moment at the end of the Episode. It can’t be weak. It just can’t.

In NaNo news, I haven’t touched In a Different Light in 3 days now. I’m pitifully behind, but once I’ve finished this POT: EP2 scene, I’m going to have loads more time on my hands to catch up and finish by the end of the month.

Other than being an insane person about how much writing I’m getting done on a daily basis, life is finally quieting down.  But I think that’s because it’s winter now and the whole world seems to slow down when it gets cold.  I know I always seem to.  But this winter, I won’t be hibernating with a pile of books and gallons of cocoa.  I’m going to be keeping up the schedule I’ve set for myself during NaNo.  Three hours minimum daily for writing tasks.  At least one hour a day for reading (because if I don’t take in words, how on earth am I going to churn them out?)  And the usual couple hours of watching anime or TV with Nevi and cooking foods for my Crew.

Still NaNo-ing, Day 8

It’s 8 days into NaNoWriMo, also known as November, the month between Halloween and Christmas, and (my personal favorite) “what the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I doing this to myself AGAIN?”

But eight days in and I haven’t quit.  I’ve got a bit on the NaNo Rebel side, and added a short story of approximately 4K words to my count, but it was completely written within the last 3 days, so it counts as new words.  Today, I’m caught up to my word count goal for NaNo, but a hair behind what I wanted my personal goal to be.  But that’s OK.  I have several days this week where I know for a fact I’ll have 6 to 8 hours of work time.  And more where it’ll be around 4 hours.  That’s the advantage of being a full time writer, I suppose.

How is everyone else doing on their NaNo?  I have a few friends who are doing it for the first time this year, and they are rocking it out!  I’m eager to share our projects at the end of the month.  That is, if they’re not too shy!

In other news, in addition to working on NaNo and our secret short story project, I’ve also been maintaining edits on the Parliament of Twilight: Episode 2.  It’s looking to be done before the end of the month.  Then it’s just sending it on the rounds of beta reading, editing, re-betaing, editing one more time, and the final read-through before it gets formatted and published.  Fingers crossed that it will be out for Christmas, but at least the pre-order will be up by then with the Episode itself being out just after the first of the year.

Soon, we will be doing a cover reveal.  Not sure of the date, but watch our Facebook page for details!

NaNoWriMo Day 4

Well, Day 3 left me with nothing to report, but a frustratingly long night of dealing with crappy customer service.  But that was yesterday and this is today.

I’ve kept up my NaNo numbers.  Not much ahead of the game at the moment, but I’m hoping that I can fix that in the next couple of days.  We have a long block planned for tomorrow that we’re calling our “NaNo PartyTime!”  There will be 4 to 6 hours of crazy writing and everyone’s going to get fucked up on fresh brewed tea and Asian chicken with rice!  It’ll be a wild time.

And, just to keep the crazy turned up to 11, Nevi and I decided that we needed to write a short story in the middle of NaNo!  It’s nearly done now. We’re on the last few paragraphs of the rough draft and then tomorrow, during our crazy party time, I’m going to do the first typing and rough edits.

We’ll see what comes of that.  Stay tuned for details!

NaNo Day 2

After ending day 1 with a pretty solid start and a plan that I think that I like for the rest of the month, I’m feeling pretty confident about this NaNo.  I’m proud to report that I’ve drafted two of my real life friends to the NaNo cult!  And one of them beat me out with our day one word count!  I’m feeling a bit competitive now and am going to have to end day 2 with a higher count than her. (You know who you are!)

But seriously, this is actually really cool.  I’ve been enjoying NaNo for a while and I hope that they have fun too.  And I might FINALLY get those stories out of them that they’ve been hiding for years now!

Other than NaNo, not much else to report.  Oh, we’ve been filling up our Etsy store and the Storenvy shop isn’t far behind.  We have copies of our illustrated Paperback edition of the Parliament of Twilight: Episode 1, and loads of art prints by Nevi in poster size (13 x 19), regular size (8 x 11) and postcards (4 x 6).  There are original characters from the POT series and some stunning fanarts, like these awesome Halloween pics of Ciel and Sebastian from Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji).

cielkittycolor02smaller   sebharvestkingcolor02smaller

Happy NaNoWriMo Day 1

After much thought and many, many hours of telling myself I wasn’t going to do it, I decided to do NaNoWriMo.  What I will be working on with my writing partner Nevi, is a rewrite of a fanfic we wrote back in 2005.  The story veered WAY off the canon of the series and we’ve been talking about making it into an original story for several years now.  Now that we have a nice rhythm for our Parliament of Twilight stories, we thought that working on something else in the in-betweens would be fun.  And would definitely be a good way to keep us from getting lazy.

So if you want to keep track of our progress or if you’re doing NaNo and want to add us to your writing buddies, our username is hermienevi.  My username for when I go it alone is just hermie, though I don’t think I’ll be doing this year (unless I get an undeniable urge to torture myself with two concurrent NaNo novels AND still working on the POT stuff.)

In other news, while we were in Pennsylvania at Nijicon, we were interviewed by the Podcast Capes and Scowls.  You can find that audio here.  We’re a few entries down under “Parliament of Twilight.”  Leander, the super nice fellow doing the interviews, was amazing and we’re really grateful he gave us this opportunity.  There are a few other interviews from Nijicon, so if you’re looking for other M/M, Yaoi, Slash, or boy porn creators, give them a listen too.

For those of you who have already picked up a copy of POT: Ep 1, you can join in our fun new game of casting the actors we’d like to see play our characters in a movie or TV series.  If you haven’t picked it up yet and want to be bombarded with smoking hot reasons to do so, come on over and look at what people have been suggesting.  In order to make, like, or comment on the suggestions, you need to sign up to the site, but the process is free, easy, and you can just use your Facebook if you like.  There are some really great suggestions and you can see the comments made by myself and Nevi.  They really give you little nuggets of insight into our writing process and inspirations.

EDIT: the nice fellow from Capes & Scowls is Leander, not Lysander.  He is not the adorable elf from that book I loved when I was younger.  But he totally reminded me of him, so I got confused.  I’m sorry.