angel – Aya DeAniege

Awakened Week Two

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Aya DeAniege

I’ve written about ten thousand words in the last week and I hate the struggle. I came up with the loose plot four days ago and then forgot it all. It’s like hitting a wall.

My sleep patterns have changed because the noisy neighbour moved out. Today I realized it’s been a year since I slept properly. No wonder I’m now struggling.

This morning I sat down and wrote out a rough geustimate of the plot. I started at the end and worked my way back because there was this little gap I was struggling with and working backward was definitely the way to go.

I’m hoping I can get a move on again. It’s about nine more chapters or about another 35k words. I’ll get about 23k this weekend but I do believe Awakened will be my longest project to date. I think even Contract Claimed was shorter.

I found and joined a high word count group and they think I’m burnt out.

I mean… Full-time job and the move and the life changes and trying to meet a project, okay. I guess they’re right but that’s not a great thing. I’ve been doing so good! I’m halfway there. May is supposed to be when I struggle.

When I’m going to Mexico the first week, and flying out for a wedding the the third week. Second week? Something like that.

I will have to just take it as it comes. This isn’t like the struggle with His Wings, I want to finish Awakened and I’m enjoying writing it.

All told so far, between writing and editing the books I’ve wrtten, I’ve clocked about 80k words a month.

Or about 320k from November until the beginning of Marcg. That’s still pretty darn good.

Oh, in other news. I’m about to finish the read edit for His Wings. The final draft will be up sometime this weekend. That’s another project down to bed.

If I can finish Awakened, I’m going to edit Contract Gifted again and hopefully get that up. Maybe get it up the first week of April. That’d be fantastic.

Crop

Posted on January 31, 2018January 31, 2018 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 January 17, 2018January 17, 2018 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 January 10, 2018January 10, 2018 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 January 3, 2018 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 December 29, 2017 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 3

Posted on December 20, 2017December 20, 2017 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.

Claimed Week One

Posted on November 7, 2017November 15, 2017 by Aya DeAniege

I swear, work knew I was going to update Wednesdays and changed my schedule to mess with me.

Also, because someone is doing it right now: who the hell puts their feet on a bus seat? What are you, an animal?

Of course not, because animals have more sense than that.

I even commented and the feet stayed. He just gave me this smug, lazy look. If the bus gets in an accident, I’m going to sue him for kicking me in the head.

Sleep deprivation makes me crazy… I know this, but I’m still upset with this guy. It’s happening more and more and they’re so rude about it, like I’m trying to encroach on their rights.

So, I haven’t really slept right since the beginning of October and it’s seriously messing with my head. Four noise complaints and nothing is happening so I’ve taken to blasting my music during the day. Partly to keep me awake and partly because I know the upstairs neighbour can hear it because it wakes him up and he starts whining about it.

Don’t mess with my sleep and I won’t mess with yours.

Or, you know, get a job.

Ugh, now I’m focused around that. Which is probably why my word count has dropped over the last two days. I’m so frustrated that I circle around one little event and can’t get the other words out.

So. Contract Claimed. Where am I at? Well, I don’t know the exact number but it’s about 47,000 words. About the halfway point too, possibly past that.

I’ve had some early morning shifts and empty buses. On those trips, I pulled out my tablet and wrote 3-4k words on the way to work.

For comparison sake, when writing a Coffee and Blood book, I can write between 3 and 5 thousand words in a day. The 5 is really pushing it now, so I tend to get between 1000 and 1500 per trip.

The issue with doing it this way is that my early shifts end next Monday, and I can’t use the tablet if I have my bag in my lap. Meaning that I can’t use the tablet if someone is sitting beside me.

Or has their dirty feet on the seat.

I’ve been making some pretty good headway with Contract Claimed given the fact that I have had one day off the day job in the last seven. That day I wrote about 19k words.

I watch something on the television and have taken to putting Sims on my computer with a vagrant who just drifts about. That way I can’t wander the internet because the tablet is slow in doing that and having Word loaded. Keeps me a little more focused.

I’ve also been playing music in the mornings as I have coffee, rather than sit in silence. I have to, though, otherwise I have to listen to the apartment above me having sex for thirty seconds and then fighting for an hour.

The music does help me focus, though, so there’s that.

However.

I’m having trouble distinguishing words. I keep mixing up the theres, my vocabulary has dropped and there’s a lot of wincing when reading Contract Claimed over word choice and repetition. The scary part is that I know it’s wrong, but I can’t remember enough words to know how to change it.

Sleep is really important.

Which is why I filed three noise complaints in the last week and started beating on my ceiling. Got called a fucking cunt. Because I want to sleep.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this godawful, because I removed all those people from my life. Now it’s turning me into a ragefilled, petty person.

Six more months and I can move. My next ‘roommates,’ however temporary they may be, are just about the quietest people I have ever met. I will sleep for a week straight.

In the meantime, all I can (apparently) do is hope my upstairs neighbour overdoses or forgets to pay his rent again, so he gets evicted.

Or breaks up with his girlfriend.

Something, anything. I just want to be able to sleep and then think again.

I am projected to finish Contract Claimed in the next seven days, of which I have three days off. But due to the neighbours it is definitely a rough draft and will need a major overhaul before being published.

Which is fine, because it’s not being re-published until after the second trilogy is completed.

That leads me to December’s (likely) book.

December is the busiest month of the year for my day job. I’m worried about setting myself up for failure by working on His Wings as I will be mentally and emotionally exhausted (not to mention the trouble sleeping). I’ve been bouncing around the idea of completing Contract Sealed instead. It’s almost done. I might be able to finish it in a week, allowing me to do a good job at the day job while maintaining my goal.

Basically the jist of this all is: I’m ahead on my word count and well on the way to finishing book 1/12.

Waiting for a Flight

Posted on September 16, 2017 by Aya DeAniege

This week seemed to go by so slowly, but in a good way. It was nice and I was relaxed.

Though I did sleep between ten and twelve hours every night and was still tired, I think it has more to do with not sleeping in my own bed than anything else.

Then, on Wednesday, I looked into my work schedule for the next week and the stress hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m not going to talk about the what, but only going to say that the stress wasn’t because I remembered or realized that I have to go back to work at the end.

I didn’t find a magical job, so I’m not moving for eight more months. It’s fine, gives me time to save up and such and such.

On the writing front I have three read edits ahead of me on three books. One is for the proof of Death Mask which could very well be the last book Createspace carries for me.

His Grace

Posted on March 28, 2017September 10, 2017 by Aya DeAniege

Per everything I do, here is the first chapter of His Grace, unedited like most of my excerpts because plot and description sometimes changes, such on and so forth.

The Angel series takes place in a world where the most effective way to exorcise a demon is sex. And poor Grace is the victim of targeted demonic attacks, no one can figure out why.

While this series is supposed to have a lot of sex in it, it’s also supposed to explore a romantic sort of relationship. Sam doesn’t just throw Grace down and has his way with her.

Comments, complaints, or hopes for the series? Leave a note.

This does not end in a cliffhanger, it ends in a happy-for-now style.

Continue reading “His Grace” →