This morning, while I was tidying up my desk in preparation of getting to work on the body of my new manuscript, I opened a drawer and found two reams of printer paper, and two toner cartridges for my laser printer that sits on a shelf, languishing with disuse.
You see, in the past, from the very beginning of my writing, I would print out each draft, mark it up with a red pen, then sit back at my desk and make corrections. It was a very long process and uncomfortable. I stopped printing things out year before last. My editors, the intrepid and eagle-eyed Stephanie and Mariko, now get digital copies where they can mark things up in the file and send back to me and I quickly make changed by reading the notes and not the whole thing all over again.
By the time my book is thrown up on the shelves of e-book retailers everywhere, I've read my book about 5-6 times all the way through. I know loads of people who don't read books twice.
It made me stop and think about how greatly my process has changed across the board when it comes to writing and all of the collateral issues.
I have a file on a terabyte archive drive that holds nothing but story ideas. I back it up weekly. I am buying still another to store things like pictures, videos and such. I don't hoard files, but I do have a ton of programs cluttering up crap on my main operating drive.
Last year I put out exactly one book, and it was one I'd been working on the previous year and was more or less ready to go. It was the last of my Paladin stories for a while.
And then for a year there was nothing. I was busy being bored, playing PC games and then last fall I became ill and required surgery. Things looked really well for about two weeks and then the rug was pulled out from under me and things got worse. I got a virus and secondary bacterial infection that was not treated properly and made things ever worse.
Really worse.
One afternoon, while watching two of my grandchildren, I woke up on the floor of my kitchen with no idea how I got there. The kids, thank God, were blissfully unaware. I couldn't get up to open the garage door or the front door. I called my daughter-in-law, who works for the local constabulary, and evidently asked her to come get the kids, telling her to open to garage door with the opener in my husband's truck.
I woke up, again, on my couch with a mask over my face and people barking questions at me. My daughter-in-law thought my blood sugar had gone low. Nobody was listening to me explain. Finally, a woman EMT came in and calmly asked me questions and I told her of my problems. They tried to sit me up and again, I was passing out. Someone got my sensor reader for my glucose monitor (my cybernetic implant) and discovered, yes, her blood sugar is perfect. Let's roll!
The first thing they did, before I even got into a room was take my blood and very quickly they discovered what I'd been telling them, I'm bleeding out, you idiots. As you can probably tell, I do not have a good opinion of the medical personnel in my area. Coming from the Houston Medical Center as I do, my small town medical professionals are seen as splinters from the bottom of the barrel.
I received two units of blood, told to take iron and another medication. I had surgery scheduled for two weeks down the road, I should be fine! Wrong. My surgeon won't touch me until my blood volume is my own and richly fortified with iron bonded to my hemoglobin. I will have it in the summer when I can easily take the time to recover with no lifting children and constantly scooping up toys to be put back into place.
During the time immediately following that, I quit playing games as I just could not sit at my desk long enough to log in much less play at all. I lay in my bed and chatting with friend in texts and discord. With everything on my PC in my office, I was watching TV and re-reading books and discovering new ones.
I began ideating. I began making notes and then outlines and re-reading the books that mattered in my Shifter series and I decided to end a story arc that started at the very first Cat Shifter book. I managed to get two outlines for the last two books in the arc, the beginnings of a new series are, and then an idea to close out an open plot from before. I made sure I made notes on everything. My poor oxygen starved brain was working overtime.
It was hard to bring together a plot line that spanned eleven books. I was entering into Nalini Singh territory and it was terrifying. I love her books, and plot and series arcs.
I had started the last book in the arc, and then got hit with the idea for another one. I quickly wrote that one in like a week. While that one was with Stephanie and Mariko, I was finishing up the last in the arc, which I fully fleshed out while editing the previous book.
It was murder to write because it was an end, and secondly, it not a happy ending. We like happy endings, we accept happy for now endings. This one ends on a happy note, but it's clouded by the reality that Pran was correct, it was Zero Sum (title of the first book in the Shifter series) because no matter what choice he made everyone would lose by his decision, there were no winners. So, after stopping and starting and taking forever to write the last chapter, I took a tone of slim hope. I think we all needed it.
I'm happy to be now doing all of the editing on my tablet. No more printing forever, putting it in a binder and then sitting there marking things up, no more sitting at my desk for house rewriting and fixing run on sentences. Now, I can easily sit in my recliner and not be sore and have swollen legs from sitting far too long.
I'm feeling so much better than I did just a month ago. I still tire very quickly, but everyday I'm making strides. I feel like that is our purpose. We strive, we get through, we carry on, we improve.
I hope you all think that I have improved since the first Demonworld book (please God, yes) those books were horrible. I leave them up as a lesson to myself. I've learned so much since then.
Most of all, thanks to everyone who buys and reads my books. You don't have to, but you do and it really makes me strive to be better, to write books worthy of your money. You could easily spend it elsewhere, but you chose to grab one of my books. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
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