Author: Aya DeAniege

Crop

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

I missed last week’s update because I was doing a read edit of Seed. This week happens to be the day before the first day of the month so I’m combining the two.

After a great deal of thought, I’ve decided to close The Ethereal. This means His Halo is being removed from the schedule and I will not be pursuing more books in the world. This doesn’t mean that I will never complete the trilogy, just that there are no plans to work on it.

I’m not enjoying writing or editing the books. Readers don’t get excited over them like they do with others so it’s time to call it.

I liked the covers though.

So it’s the last day of January, and His Wings is halfway through a description edit and sitting just shy of 80k words. It’s launching April 8th so I’m determined to get this done.

Seed has gone through the first read edit and I think I like it better than At Death’s Door but that could just be me liking a newer story better than an old one. Once I have the description edit of His Wings done, I will input the edits for Seed and get it off to the betas.

Fragments is almost halfway through a read edit. Once that’s done and Seed is off to the betas, I will input it’s edits and get it up for preorder.

Depending on betas, I might have three books launch across a month.

I’m also working on a side project that started bothering me called The Others which is a blog story? I’m not entirely certain. It is an experiment for sure. It’s just written as the whim takes me and in between things.

Which finally brings me to February. It’s project is Crop which has gone back on the rotation instead of being a floater. With about ten chapters left to write, Crop will likely take most of the month because of how it is written. Its word count is unknown, probably somewhere between 35k and 45k at the moment. I believe I had just started chapter ten.

I can only write Crop on my phone, which leaves the mornings, nights, and work breaks open. Hence where I’m getting all the other edits done. If I finish Crop early, I will launch into writing Harvest almost immediately.

Depending on other edits, I will also start the description edit of Crop right away. If Seed launches May 1st, I want Crop to launch no later than August 1st, and Harvest on October 1st.

No word on March’s project yet. I have to get Harvest written by April 12th. Hmm, 13th, let’s say. That’s when my long commutes end and I want to keep that… that kind of pace.

I’ll miss those focused times for writing on my phone. I’ll have to get a longer pair of headphones so I can plug into my computer once I move and blast music loud enough to drown my own thoughts until I can focus. Maybe that’ll work.

His Wings Week 3

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Yeah, unless something turns around in the next six months, I’m going to close The Ethereal. It’s just dragging on and on.

The first draft is about 3/4 done, is only about 44k words and is mainly dialogue. I will get this done.

I thought I was just having problems because of the stress of moving. It does all kinds of weird stuff to my head, like swapping… homonyms? The words that sound the same but are spelled differently.

I contacted the moving company and three times used higher instead of hire in reference to hiring movers. I know higher shouldn’t be used, but it still happens.

I’ve reached a point where Michael pulls out his flaming sword (But on the physical plane it’s not exactly flaming without his grace) and all of a sudden tv replaced sword four times!

Stress, man. Whoever said stress is just an emotion and to get over it needs to be stressed out, shaken really hard and then thrown into their biggest fear.

Over the last two weeks or so, I have created an escapism world. Called The Others, I’ve been sinking into it at every available moment. While at work, on the bus, as I’m trying to sleep.

Long story short on that, I have a blog up for it and wrote about 3000 words of setup and just over 2000 words for the first entry.

So it’s the world, not necessarily my head.

I’ve decided to take a break from The Ethereal next month. I still want to finish the trilogy in the next eight months, but I need something that gets a little excitement in the writing department. Something I’m stoked to write.

Debating between The Awakened (there is no plan…) Prototype (a rewrite. A massive rewrite) or The Visitors (lots of plot, no ending) for February.

The Others has no clear ending so it’s going to be an experimental project and is on no list.

About 83 days to the move. I just want to get it on and going. I haven’t started packing, don’t have movers packed (waiting to hear about that question) and I need to start purging some stuff I don’t want to take with me.

Broken furniture, my ex’s stuff… the old computer tower I was like “I can totally save this!”

Anyhow, I’m on Chapter Fifteen, and I am desperately hoping to have the first draft of His Wings done by Monday.

His Wings Week Two

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Let’s see if I can do this…

Turns out my issue with this story may be that I had a migraine coming on. Migraines are caused (for me) by a special kind of stress. They aren’t tension headaches and haven’t been diagnosed so the fact that I am vertical may mean they’re a different kind of brain malfunction.

Diagnosing brain malfunctions has always been difficult and I’ve watched others go through the steps only to be told by doctors there’s nothing wrong with them.

Even though they have multiple grand mal seizures in front of witnesses, pass out on a weekly basis, or have a different sort of episode where they go blank, their personality changes, witnesses say there was something ‘not right’ about how they moved and so on.

But no, there was nothing medically wrong with them. Even though six months to two years later like magic they are diagnosed with something that explains all of their symptoms because it was finally caught on a machine.

… I’d really like to get fixed, but it’s actually less stressful and seems more productive to figure out the triggers and then just avoid them.

I’ve trained myself to write down symptoms when I get like this, to try to help things out. And because before I started that each time it came over me I was completely surprised. Now I’ve got a little awareness and I know before there are holes in my vision and half my face goes numb.

I’ve been the only one looking after me so long that I can keep working through the symptoms but over the past couple years have stopped. No one is going to thank me for working through this agony and it just draws it out.

So now each time it happens I make a choice based on what’s going on. I should have called into my day job today but I’m going in anyhow.

Partly because my pills are in my locker. Mainly because with 87 days to my last day, I’m trying to train people to do my job.

Is it train or trane? Oh poop, there’s no autocorrect or spell check.

The drop off of word count ahould have been my first clue. Struggling to find my words while talking shouls have been the second.

A friend has a theory that I have temporal lobe epilepsy effecting my brocas area that results in my hypergraphia. Basically my word/language centre gets electrocute every once in a while.

The fact that I kept getting distracted by other work would have been the third clue. If I didn’t want to write the story a game or the internet ahould have distracted me. Not marketing and cover design such and so forth.

So… I’m a broken bunny. His Wings goes live April 8th and is currently just shy of 20k words.

The long and the short of this is that my move being three months off (The stress of living through those months and realizing just how unhappy I’ve been by myself, not the act of the move) caused an episode of some sort.

Its hard to tell through text, and what with the inability to express emotion given how exhausted I am, but I’m super pissed this is happening. I’d much rather be writing. Just getting to the good part!

His Wings Week 1

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

This is going about as I expected… it is only day three, but I also only have 300 words on His Wings. Yeah, I decided to start over so I technically went into the negative. There’s been something like 6000 words on Crop though. So I guess I have that going for me.

I had removed Crop and Harvest from my plan, they were just going to be spare books, but if I finished Crop in January I’m certainly not going to count this month as failed.

I also have a three-day weekend coming up and I plan to hit His Wings hard. I can write over half a book in three days, if I set goals and keep focused.

So… that’s not happening, but I’m still going to give it my best shot!

His Wings

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

As this is an obligation piece, it’s no surprise that His Wings is my January project. It’s an obligation because I have a trilogy planned, but His Grace is actually my worst selling book.

Yeah.

But, I have the trilogy planned out and I’m going to finish the damned thing. It could be that, because I have the trilogy planned, people are waiting for all the books to come out.

I have this one all plotted out, but came to hesitating at a m/m/f threesome for some bloody reason. Mind you, I don’t usually do threesomes. I think this would be the third I’ve ever written and the book requires two or three threesome scenes.

This may be my most challenging project because my heart isn’t quite in it. I want to see the trilogy through but I don’t feel like anyone cares about the book so I’m not as interested.

His Grace ends in a happy-for-right-now way too, so I could have walked away for a year like I did with Masked Intentions but I don’t want to drag it out like that.

D.o.t.A. may end up being my August book forever more. Which is fine, I don’t have a plan for that series really. Most of the books are stand alone.

Anyhow, going into this month, His Wings has a word count of about 9,000. Three chapters are complete, seventeen more to go which will total a minimum of 51k more words.

I have January 1st off, then work until Thursday and gave three days off in a row. I was supposed to have the 1st and 2nd off but the schedule was messed up. I had to fix it myself because everyone at work was perfectly okay with paying me an extra day.

Yeah… I get paid for stats.

But I had planned that day to get a handle on His Wings and if they wanted me to work an extra day they should have checked with me first.

So, I’ve got four days off in the first six of the year. I’m hoping to have His Wings complete by next Sunday because I need to dive into two more edits and one read through for Beth.

Not to mention the cover work I’ve been ignoring.

Lots of work to do again, not enough hours to do it in.

Contract Sealed Week 4

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Here it is week four of the second month and only yesterday did I get back to other work.

Editing Seed.

I also did a rough draft for my plans in 2018 for publishing. It’s a lot to do but my cats believe in me.

No, they don’t, actually. They don’t even believe I can keep the apartment warm.

Here I am at a bus stop in -26 looking like a crazy person, typing on my phone with bare hands. I’m in a sheltered area though so only my feet and legs are cold.

Okay, I have to stop filling an update with random stuff and get back to writing Crop because that’s all I can think about suddenly.

Rough Publishing Schedule 2018

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

It’s that time of the year again.
Yup, I’m sitting here wrapped in a shawl and cursing my landlord’s strange choice of providing radiator heat but removing only my ability to control the temperature but also refusing to turn up the heat until I lodge four complaints and talk someone else in the building into doing the same. They have control over their heat from inside their apartments, however.

It’s also the time of the year that I need to consider what I’ll be doing in 2018. The writing side of things has been kind of settled until next November. My 12-in-12 is going well so far, and I’ve already chosen my books for the next two months, but more on that later.

So… what are we looking at for publishing?

Fragments is planned for the first couple of months of 2018. I’m going to start another edit in January and buckle down for the cover of it. Seed, Crop, and Harvest are going to be published during a six month period, so I need it all done and ready to go. No, that’s not true. I need the first two books edited and written. The rest will follow.

I’m going to re-re-name the second trilogy of Coffee and Blood to The Reaping. It was originally that, but during some formatting I had a brain melt and it turned into The Harvest. I like The Reaping better.

For The Reaping, I’m actually considering publishing them in April, June, and August, like I did with Wraith’s Rebellion. I might adjust them just slightly, to May, July, and September. That’s just a hope and a prayer.

The second trilogy of Contracted will be out either the end of the year, or early 2019 and Contract Claimed would follow a few months after that.

Then, of course, are His Wings and His Halo, which I’m calling obligation pieces. I’m obligated to complete the trilogy. These will be published as soon as they are written and edited, so it could be published in March and April.

So… I’m panning on publishing between six and nine books in 2018.

Here’s the weird catch/kicker?

Come April, I’m moving two provinces over and, near as I can tell, I will be working part-time until I can find a full-time job at another company. Somehow I don’t feel like the place I’m going to will have a full-time position open up. Besides in big city areas like the one I’m currently in, once someone gets full-time it’s like tenure. They stay there for years and years.

Anyhow, that’s a catch/kicker because… I will be part-time at my day job. And until I have my license, I will likely be gently applying to jobs because I don’t want to make my relatives drive me all over.

Unless that one company gets back to me… I’m sure they’d understand for that wage.

And when one is not making finding a full-time job their… well, full-time job, then they have a lot of time on their hands. For me this could end up being an issue where I’m manically all over the place, doing all the things.

The last time I went part-time, I took two weeks off… sort of. Actually, they didn’t schedule me for two weeks  and I sat home playing video games until I basically lost my mind and took on six or so projects. Cleaning, scavenging, setting up furniture. Now I’ve got things to focus on, projects and writing and the like.

I’d really like, like really, really like, to use that time to complete some projects and get other things sorted out. Yeah, that totally made sense.

January and February, I’m writing His Wings and His Halo. March I suppose I should do Contract Delivered to wrap that all up and start edits for late 2018 publishing. April I’m hoping to have Seed published, which means … oh, but Crop and Harvest have to be done before April because that’s when I stop commuting and I can’t change that method of writing mid-trilogy. They are my cheat books and off schedule.

I guess that means April is open. There’s The Visitors, or Prototype. Whatever I can get written in April and possibly May could also be published in 2018 given a conservative projection of finding a full-time job.

Which, I suppose, means April and May are those up in the air stories. Dear readers, what would you like completed? I’ve been promising a lot of projects and after Contract Delivered is completed, I’d like to get back to m/f for a while. Browse the worlds, look through the little snippets tossed out here and there, and let me know what you’d like to see.

The goal is then to take the books written in April and May and publish them in 2018. Which will, hopefully, raise my published books from 6-9 up to 8-11. I could double my books in the next year, that’d be awesome.

Then in 2019 I’ll have 6-9 books already written and ready to edit and be published.

Contract Sealed Week 3

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Going through Contract Sealed, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. The book was written over a year or so and meanders all over.

This coming from an author whose books have sometimes been described as “pretty clean for someone without an editor.”

Ugh.

Anyhow, it’s on my list and at least it’s complete.

I changed my schedule today. Normally I work late but that late shift combined with tomorrow’s early shift would have resulted in about 2hrs of sleep… if my upstairs neighbour shut up long enough for me to call asleep. So I changed it.

But now I’m all sorts of confused. Regular schedules help me distinguish days of the week and this is not the shift for me.

What have I been doing with my time?

Playing games, cleaning, and doing puzzles. I feel like the laziest bum in the world doing it, but I know pushing through for the writing wouldn’t help me any in the long run. I need to take my time and accept my limitations.

January is still set to be His Wings. This is an obligated book and cannot be moved no matter how many times my muses toss up The Visitors world and try to distract me.

That and February set for His Halo. Get that trilogy done and dealt with. No one seems interested in it. Angels aren’t popular? Maybe.

Maybe I just suck.

Definitely need sleep and rest still. Maybe if I did some editing I’d feel a little better.

Or maybe if looking at anything to do with my writing didn’t make me want to cry…

Monday was the first day that wasn’t overwhelming since the beginning of November. I almost felt good leaving work. Yesterday I might have gotten something writing related done if it wasn’t for one of my winter traditions.

Cleaning and organizing my home. Thanks to a slip Monday afternoon, my legs hurt from pulled muscles and I had to take my time. Which meant it took all day but I feel better for having cleaned. Maybe this weekend I’ll feel good enough to do some editing or some such.

Haven’t heard back from my betas about Fragments yet which isn’t helping my “woe is me” attitude. I’m really sick of being this low, but kicking my own ass into gear doesn’t work when all my energy is going toward getting out of bed in the morning.

Anyhow. Come January if I’ve not heard from my betas I’ll do another read edit or two and go forward with that.

Still haven’t helped Beth with her rebranding. Well, now I really feel like a bum.

Contract Sealed Week 2

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

The past week has been a bit of a struggle to get myself to work on something. This weekend I almost took two days off. On Sunday I set up free days for His Grace and I found out that Contract Taken didn’t even make the list of books for the year. Basically had a fifty-fifty chance and still failed.

I did not feel good about myself or my writing. For about six hours I felt like there was no point in even continuing.

Then I remembered it was December.

I chose such a short project for this month because I know I end up in a fragile state. I certainly wasn’t going to do anything rash. The only risky thing I do in December is buy scratch tickets.

I don’t even drink in December, it’s too dangerous with the wringer that work puts me through and the whole being alone thing. I know the holidays are hard and I won’t take that risk.

Monday when I got home from work there was a package waiting for me. A reader had sent me four care packages. That definitely cheered me right up.

I suck, but at least some people love me. This was the first thing I’ve received. Well, and private messages. Those are the new fanmail, right?

Okay, so it didn’t just cheer me right up. I was absolutely elated and told everyone I know. I only ever have bad news.

Bit by bat, ghosted by long term boyfriend, dead computer three times, no water for three weeks, leaking ceiling, mold the landlord won’t fix, raccoons, three noisy neighbours, bedbugs, and now ants.

In the last year.

It’s been a run of bad luck and situational that I haven’t been able to fix given my income. Couldn’t even afford hot chocolate.

And then I found it in the box…

Actually, my first order of business was making apple cider. I was a little disappointed when I discovered I can’t afford to buy more in Canada. Hopefully the prices will go down. Or they’ll go on sale or I’ll find it in a grocery store somewhere.

As I mentioned before, this past week has been… difficult. But not in a usual way.

I’m physically in quite a bit of pain. A cluster of events have left me with an all over ache. But mentally it’s… It’s weird

I can feel that manic energy starting and I can’t recall the last time I felt like this. I don’t know if it’s the events, or adding vitamin D to my diet. Or maybe it’s just because the iron is finally going back to where I need it to be.

Oh yeah, over the last week I’ve been given a bottle of my favourite wine and hooked up with a console for a great price. And then the package showed up on my doorstop.

The survivor of psychological abuse in me is really certain something is going to go horribly wrong. It always does when things go well. That’s the way my life has worked for three decades.

Gifted a computer, the pipes break for almost a month.

Come to think of it, things have been off kilter since I accepted a plane ticket back in September and not necessarily in a bad way.

Well, not in a bad way for all things but writing. It’s been a tough couple of months for sales. Which was part of why I felt like such trash on Sunday when I didn’t even make the list.

Beth says she felt like this too. She ended up walking away/ignoring all things about her books and it worked itself out. When she tried to do something about it, nothing would happen and she got frustrated.

I’m going to do something similar, but I will still be writing. I will edit and publish as I can. But otherwise, I’m going to just stop.

Stop looking at the reports that keep upsetting me. Stop trying to market all over, because it’s not helping. Stop looking for reviews or reviewers. Just stop.

I’ll gather my ego back up and once I feel better and more able, I will jump back in the middle of marketing and all the rest. Until then, I will focus on me and what I like to do.

Writing, editing, and cover making.

Contract Sealed Week 1

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Done. Thank goodness. I know, I know. It’s only six days in and it was five or six chapters. At my rate of course it’s done.

You just haven’t been inside my head around December before, especially when I’m having problems at work.

I had a tension headache until Sunday. Might have had one of my episodes, but it wasn’t as bad as usual. Normally I check out mentally and I’m basically just this hull of a person.

If that sounds familiar to you, don’t worry, I’m aware of what it could mean. But try to get a doctor to check it. They won’t unless you go while in an episode and even then they won’t get the equipment in time to check and they act like you’re lying or something.

To which I’d end up staring mutely at them because my words fail me.

Why is that important? Well, if I was about to have an episode it explains my weird writing experiences just before. I was forgetting words and bumbling all kinds of stuff. I’d think “I’ve” and spell ‘ivory’ and there were a couple times where I thought one thing and something else entirely came out.

It’s possible that I wrote what I heard on the television instead of what I wanted to write. For me, writing is rarely about the images anymore. It’s a narration inside my own head, like I’m taking down the words of someone else. So writing what I hear on my shows instead of what I want wouldn’t be overly surprising.

The first couple of days was a struggle. One chapter over three days, this too is expected of an episode.

I think I wrote a total of six chapters. Approximately 20,000 words. Most of those were yesterday.

Normally after an episode, the words will die for a few days to a week. It can be so bad that speaking hurts in an all over way like I’m holding in the written word. Once that passes I see a sudden surge where I spend a day writing something like 23k words. I’ll stay with a manic word count for a bit then level right off.

But it’s December. Work will leave me hollowed out, emotionally and mentally exhausted. My workload has more than quadrupled but I have the same amount of time to do it. They say there’s a balance to those hours but… come on.

I’m hoping to get Boxing Day off. I’m also hoping to finish Contract Given this month. It’s a project that is outside of the others. I know I’m not supposed to be writing, but it’s a novella and I’m not going to use that for a project month. It’d be cheating.

December is the only month that I thought I might need a break. But when you go from 50k to 20k words in six days, yeah, you need that break.

I’m taking this weekend off writing and have no idea what I’m going to do with myself. Besides do the cleansing of the apartment that I always do in December. This time I’m going to wash walls and ceiling too, to get rid of the mold and hopefully the ants and to assess whether the ceiling is actually going to come down or if it’s just plaster cracking.

Five more months and I am moving…

Anyhow, officially done.

2 of 12 complete

Word count approximately 107,000 or about 53,500 per project.

Total writing days: 16

Or about 6,688 words a day.