Progress update: Butterflies in December

Well, I'm back to work in earnest. After this very difficult autumn, winter is a welcome relief. Cold is somehow cleansing, isn't it? You know, a chill to shake the brain awake or make you appreciate the warmth you left behind. Writing is such a personal thing and for some weeks after my brother passed I wasn't sure my words would return -- how soon or how quickly.

Every life milestone affects us differently. For some authors, writing is cathartic. I find that as well, but I took solace in writing about Joe and for him for awhile rather than drumming up imaginary scenarios for my WIP. His situation was far too real to spend time dabbling in fantasy. I thought. So returning to the work I love isn't cathartic, but it is a necessary and integral part of who I am. I guess I needed some time to be okay with that.

I missed my characters and the mess I got them into. So, the story's been re-read and edited. The first half of the pages have been sticky-tagged for tweaks, and I am on to the second half of the book. Progress continues. I'm about 75 percent of the way through the book with edits. When I finish this second half, I'll re-read and tag those pages. Then I'll re-read the entire book, say a prayer and send it off to my beta reader and my editor.

You can't see me shaking with nervous anticipation, but I am. Note to self: Butterflies are good, girlfriend. Butterflies are good.

Peace.
Stefanie
www.stefanieworth.com

Happy tears and mounting edits

Hard for me to believe that I haven’t blogged since January.  But if you know me – or follow my musings – you know my life is a festival of happenings. There’s always something going on around here that competes with or supplants my writing time. (Not my desire – just the hours I have to execute.) Just as importantly though, I don’t consider these real-world intrusions as negatives. Take February through August, for example. In those months, we completed another senior year of high school and summer of college prep in my house. Whew! Two down. One to go.

Now that the chaos has calmed, I have to say that I miss my middle child. Desperately. Not that I didn’t miss my oldest just as much when he went off to college. In fact, I cried every day after he left – each time I passed his high school on my way to work…or the grocery store…or the movie theater…. You get the idea.

This time, with this son, I miss him in a way that’s nearly palpable. I get teary whenever I hear Big Sean sing "I hope you learn to make it on your own. If you love yourself just know you'll never be alone... And when you get it all just remember one thing - that one man could change the world." Those lyrics ring so true. I had to pull off the road one day and cry. Really. But like I told my youngest, my happiness for her brother outweighs the sadness.  So his going away isn’t any less difficult, just different. In the way that each child is different.

That said, sending my son off to frolic with the higher learning crowd has added a little more than 100 minutes of non-pickup/drop-off time to my daily schedule. (You don’t think about that while it's going on or else you'd talk yourself out of taking on the task. Or go crazy.) For years I've wished for extra hours in my day and – BAM! – like magic, I got ‘em. To top that off, my youngest is back in school and has freed me from her vampirish stay-up-all-night summer schedule.

 

So voile! I’m back to editing like the author I am. Here’s my magic to-date:

 

Gaging by numbers alone, my progress count would deceive me into thinking that I’m almost halfway through revisions. HA! I’ve actually added 8,424 words to the story. (Mind you, I cut 4,500+ words by deleting a chapter early on.) This means my actual word count – if I submitted the story “as is” today – would be 97,170. Oh my.

All that math made my head hurt. LOL Thus, the moral of this blog post is that it’s time to get back to the book. While my son's out learning how to change the world, my goal is to finish editing before autumn passes me by. 

#thatisall #amediting

www.stefanieworth.com
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The World I Live In

Companies have focus groups. I have my children. We are huge lovers of all things fantasy, sci fi and supernatural, and wage serious word wars about the merits of earth-bending over X-Ray vision and things of that sort. For a while now, we’ve had an ongoing discussion – serious discussion – around the merits of a panic room in the basement that we can access in the event of the zombie apocalypse. The only thing we agree on so far is that having such a room would give us a huge advantage in our escape – but only so long as the zombies aren’t smart like the ones in I Am Legend. (((shudder)))

Shhh! Our potential panic room. Please
don't tell the zombies where we're hiding.

Tonight I asked a question I probably shouldn’t have about the tentative powers of the heroine in my current work-in-progress. Oh, the debate that ensued! My daughter re-wrote my story's entire Black Moment – and my son shot her whole notion down citing an example from some anime he watches. I let them finish before thanking them for the tangent and deciding my direction is a good one.

I love our spirited conversations about things that don’t exist. I cherish their unbridled willingness to not just think outside the box, but concede that there is no box at all. We need the escape. Heck – I need the escape. There is so much sad, bad, heart-wrenching news outside the walls of our happy home that I approach my Facebook newsfeed with a healthy dose of trepidation these days. They know that life is hard and unfair and some kids live with unspeakable horrors. We are lucky, we know. The dangers we conjure live only in our minds and on my pages. No one is harmed in the making of our “what if’s.”

So this is the world I live in. The crazy, every day realm I share with children who will one day blame their warped perception of possibilities on their overly imaginative mother. I figure they’ll either forgive me or wind up on Dr. Phil’s show. My money is on fond memories and grandchildren who appreciate a Nana who believes in fairies.

Stefanie

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