Sporadic Blogging

Sounds a bit like a weird disease. Hmm.

I did, actually, get 58k words written during NaNoWriMo for deAngelis, which was a lot less than I thought I would get, but still actually pretty good all the same. I then hit a bit of a lag and haven't written much, if at all, for the last month, but there's been a few changes going on that I think will enable me to write more and better. I do, actually, finally have the plot FIXED. I know I said that several times over the last half-dozen posts or so, but it's actually true this time. The plot is finished.

There's really not a whole lot to say. I'm cleaning up what I wrote during NaNoWriMo and then moving on to finish the rest of the novel (looks like we're going to end up at about 100k words, which really ain't bad at all).

Currently reading Thunderer by Felix Gilman. Usually I have a hard time reading books like this. His prose is wonderful and the world-building is fantastic and the characters are GREAT, but the whole "city of filth" theme really gets to me. It's the main reason I didn't care for Perdido Street Station. China Mieville is brilliant, but it was just so... crude, in a way. I needed more hope in the writing, and I didn't get it. Hoping that I get something different out of Thunderer.

At any rate, suppose I should get some food in me, get some writing done, and then get ready to go MST Season of the Witch with some friends.

Buh.

Wow, yeah, it's been a while. To be honest I have absolutely zero intention of writing anything of worth here tonight/this morning, but I'm gonna do my best not to neglect this thing from now on. I was doing good there for a while, and then it got away from me, but I really would like to be able to keep a blog running solidly for a while, a la Neil Gaiman and/or Robin McKinley and/or Wil Wheaton. With Adam leaving for AT in two and a half hours and being gone for two weeks, and my best friend being in Florida for the next week or so, I'll have very little to do besides plays Monster Hunter Freedom Unite with my brother and struggling my way through deAngelis, as always.

Just a quick update on how things are going...

(1) Got through the Asmodeus/Jenna scene, for the most part. Got done Jenna's argument with Michael.

(2) Working on the Asmodeus/mastermind scene, almost done with that, and it's coming along beautifully, with much thanks to my muse for encouraging me along the way. I mean, really; I doubt I'd be getting the damn thing written at all if it weren't for him.

(3) Got hired to write for a local indie comic entitled Omega Force. My boss is very fashion-forward and fabulous, but he's got a good solid concept here and it's something that I can do and can enjoy at the same time. I'll throw updates about that onto this poor, neglected blog as often as I can. Until then...

Bedtime. Gotta be up in two hours to make sure Adam's up in time to get to the armory. I'll give you some more love tomorrow evening, promise.

Back from the Abyss

Yeah, still alive, even if only barely. I'm going to give a quick sort of update on Things In My Life* and then rant a little bit about writing and then maybe by the end of it I'll know how I'm going to fix it**.

As far as life goes, we're all moved into the new house now and my personal computer is set up and has the interwebs on it and everything is more or less where it needs to be***. I should be going to the gym regularly but dude seriously there are people on the internet who are wrong, I can't just walk away.

My two cousins, heretofore referred to as my little brothers (both nearly ten years younger than I), are moving in here in the next couple of weeks, and my sister's twentieth birthday is tomorrow and I still don't know what I'm getting her. At the moment, I don't have any money, since because of Memorial Day my paycheck is coming a day late (although in all fairness, I will take that paycheck a day late since it's for a good cause, seeing as my fiance is in the military and all of my grand-uncles were in World War II, and I've plenty of relations who were in Vietnam).

Adam and I are trying to put together some things for Gen Con, and as yet I don't even know what the deal is with the Con we're running for the freshman at ISU this fall. Hopefully I'll get caught up with that here soon.

Currently reading Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, Just a Geek by the wonderful Wil Wheaton (alliteration not intended) who might just be my new hero, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. All of them are wonderful. (I would like to point out right about here, WITHOUT A FOOTNOTE, that Wil Wheaton is pretty much my hero, and I wish I could high-five him.)

Now, the Rant About Writing.

More or less, deAngelis is driving me up the freaking wall, and here's why: I overwrote. There's too much stuff happening. Between Major Plot Point A and Major Plot Point B^, I should have maybe two Minor Plot Points. Guess what? I have six. SIX FREAKING POINTS.

There are two possible solutions for this, both of which are a little daunting. The first option is to omit the scenes that I can (gulp) live without in this novel. That would be the cleanest, and the least time consuming. However, it would require me to also omit at least one major character, possibly two, one of which would definitely be Alexander Hunt, and the second would be a toss-up between Adrian McKinley and River de Luca, neither of which I can really bear to lose.

The second option is to move what I thought was the Point of No Return^^ and admit that it belongs better melded with the climax. Which means that I have to rearrange a bunch of things. The Point of No Return no longer exists, and it has to be there. And I think that I know how to make this work, but the fact of the matter is that this is going to put me even further behind schedule, and I would like to get Steel done during NaNoWriMo^^^ this year. My goal is to have deAngelis finished, final draft, by the time that school begins (I've pushed back the deadline at least a half-dozen times since NaNoWriMo last year), so that I have a couple months to rest and put together notes for Steel in time to start writing it in November (although to be honest, I've started typing a few paragraphs here and there already, which is bad, I know, I have noveling-ADD).

And clearly I'm going to go with the second option, which I thought of AS I WAS WRITING THIS ENTRY, and I think I can just go ahead and finish the draft I'm working on as it is now and then rearrange it later, but last night I thought I was going to have to just scrap a bunch of stuff and I was Not Happy. Luckily, my muse, Jason, woke me up with a text this morning and got me up early enough that I've had time to enjoy some tea and toast and think about it, and I think I've got it figure out how I'm going to fix it.

Also over at my fictionpress page there is some new, bad poetry if you're interested, should hold you over til the next update.

*~*~*~*~*

* Because let's face it sometimes I don't even care.

** Now since I have nothing to do but write and serve ice cream to unhappy people, I'm starting to realize all the things that I screwed up.

*** Except for plot points, but I haven't started the Writing Rant yet gahhh.

^ I will admit that I am using James V. Smith, Jr.'s book The Writer's Little Helper as a source for this, but what I like about the Little Helper is that it is fairly accurate and actually quite helpful, despite the fact that most "this is how you write a book" books really aren't that helpful; people forget that writing is subjective, and it stems from the imagination, and everyone's imagination works differently, despite the similarities in a successful end result. Smith did a good job of remembering the subjectivity of noveling and presents a few helpful tools geared towards noveling and lots of tools and explanations geared toward grammar and style, which is honestly more of what a person needs anyway.

^^ Again, still referencing Little Helper. You'd be surprised how accurate and helpful the chart on page six is.

^^^ For anyone who hasn't done NaNo, please give it a thought. It's wonderful, and for people who want to get started noveling but need a little extra oomph to get a rough - and I mean rough - draft out, it's the perfect thing. The community encouragement adds something to an experience that is generally fairly solitary (which is why a lot of writers are so freaking depressed). The years that I've participated, I've never regretted it, and I've won two years in a row now, deAngelis being last year and the reference-purposes-only-sort-of-prequel-to-deAngelis, Ten Thousand Hells, being the year before.

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Noveling! ...without pants.

Well, Spring Break is over and I am cured of my particularly vindictive sinus infection, so now it is back to the daily grind of being an English major and aspiring author. At just-past two in the morning, I did in fact manage to finish writing chapter four of deAngelis, so that's always news of the good sort. My goal is still May 1st, to have the entire thing in its final draft. Still not entirely sure how likely that is, given the way that I've spent the last six weeks struggling through the first four chapters; the last three were spent on the fourth chapter alone.

I intentionally left my computers in my room when I went home for vacation, knowing that the best way for me to get past a rut in a scene or a chapter is to just walk away from it for a while - I've never been one of those people who can just "skip it" and then go back to it later; I always feel as if I'm trying to pretend the entire scene or chapter just didn't happen.

Here's my Spring Break, in a nutshell: working at Dairy Queen for a little over fifteen hours, getting foot rubs from Adam, going to see Shutter Island with Adam (which, long story short, we decided to give 4/5, Leonardo diCaprio has really improved since being king of the dorks), watching cartoon with Alek, and sitting around the new condo crocheting granny squares in psychedelic colors. The only words that I wrote the entire time were in my personal journal, which I'm not sharing here. Also I went to see my mom and that wasn't really that exciting, but all things considered it definitely could have been worse, given that the woman is batshit insane.

At any rate, more work on deAngelis tomorrow after class and gym and hot tub.

Anyone have a good cure for chronic heartburn?

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Noveling and Other Such Things

So, yWriter5 is still pretty fantastic. I feel a little scatterbrained because I can't see everything in one place, but honestly it's no different in that sense that what I was doing before; when I'm using Microsoft Word, I keep one "cumulative" file with everything put together, but when I'm working on a specific chapter, I work on it and save it as a separate file. So really the only difference here is the lack of a cumulative file. Also, yWriter pretty much sets it up so that you not only write each chapter separately, but each scene. While this was a little daunting at first, I eventually realized the wisdom of it - each scene needs to be crafted with as much quality and cohesiveness as is possible from the author. Each scene needs to be strong; no wimpy scenes! Now, that's not saying that each one needs to have the same punch as every other one, because that can wear out the author (and definitely the reader), but you can have a low-tension scene that is also strong. Oh, the things that I am learning from my fiction workshop (did I mention that this is the third time I've taken it for credit?).

Neil Gaiman just made multiple posts about his daughter and her friends and their failed attempt to make pancakes without him. This makes me feel better about my lack of "professional" behavior when it comes to my own writing. I really do adore this man, on an odd sort of level. First it was through his novels - because let's face it, he's brilliant. Then I started following his blog, which was obviously an insight into his life; it was something of a synopsis of what was going on in his head on an almost-daily basis. Following him on Twitter has become a little surreal for me - I get these individual, spur-of-the-moment thoughts from his head that don't really get put into his blog. And sometimes, if I'm lucky, he RESPONDS to me when I mention him on my own Twitter feed. It's like we have a very faint, nonexistent relationship. Or something.

Really my dream is to get deAngelis out, become something of a name in the fiction world. And one day he and I will be at some event, some dinner or something, and I'll lean over and be like, "Oh hey, remember the chick who thanked you on Twitter for the pancake posts? That was totally me." And he will be all like, "O HAI." Or something. (Actually my second awesome dream is that maybe his daughter will pick up one of my novels and fall in love with them. I could die happy, then. Oh please oh please oh please.)

Okay, time for fun stuff that I found on the interwebs.

This one I came across through looking up how to get an apartment properly. I'm transferring to IUPUI in the fall and I need a place to live; while it's looking like I might end up living with my buddy's girlfriend (which would be awesome), I do still need to find an actual, you know, apartment. Now, I wasn't looking on Craigslist, because that just seems like a horrible idea to me, but I did stumble across this little gem. It made me laugh out loud for a good minute or so, which is hard for internet things to do.

My fiance kind of squee'd over this house, because he desperately wants to build a house that is more-or-less mostly underground. While I understand that it will save us on energy bills and all, I really do want my study to have lots of windows. Especially since we're going to build in the woods somewhere. If there's any wooded areas left in this country by the time we get our own place.

Also, this was a fantastic WTF moment that had me giggling all day.

Really I only feel like throwing all that at you. I tend to be better about linkage when I post regularly, which clearly has not been happening lately.

Although, before I forget, go check out my friend Jason's youtube page. I'm tellin' you right now, when I get deAngelis on the big screen, he is definitely going to be in the cast. That's pretty much going to be my only stipulation. Jason is studying to be in the film industry and honestly he is a fantastic voice actor. He sends me little snippets through voice messaging on our phones, and so far I have Sherlock Holmes, David Tennant (as the tenth Doctor), Christopher Lee, and Michael the Archangel from my novel.

Also he has sent me a recording of him reading "Sweet Afton", by Robert Burns.

This guy kind of rocks my world. So go give him some love, but don't tell him I sent ya. :-P

Happy Valentine's Day!

I hope everyone, whether they're single or dating or whatever, is having a wonderful day. It really doesn't have to be about romance. Adam and I watched Galaxy Quest and played Magic: The Gathering for two hours. He kicked my ass. Other cinematic attempts involved Appaloosa, which just wasn't nearly as good as I was hoping - there's a reason Jeremy Irons isn't on the cover of the DVD, and that's because he's barely in the movie at all! And to be honest, that's the entire reason I wanted to see the damn thing. Also, Renee Zellweger is just difficult to look at - she doesn't really belong, visually, in a western. We watched maybe the first half hour of the film and then gave up. By then it was too late to start another movie, so once again we are putting off watching La Vie en Rose. Eventually we'll get to that one. Eventually.

I found this wonderful organizational word processing program, geared specifically toward novelists. So far I've had lots of fun playing around with it, and I've actually gotten some, you know, work done. It's called yWriter5 and pretty much rocks, although I am still getting used to the controls and the organization. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on macs, so I was unable to share its pure awesomeness with my other writer!geek friend, Katie.

We finally got the computer recovered from its massive grand-mal seizure, which was nice, because my laptop was having periodic aneurysms, also known as the horrible BSOD, every so often and for no apparent reason. So now Sharp Tooth is running Windows 7 and so far I love it. Little Foot is going back into hibernation.

But yes, I'm back up there with my Google Chrome and my Trillian Astra and my iTunes, and as I'm typing this, World of Warcraft is downloading, just in time for my last day (tomorrow) of playtime before my account expires. I'm absolutely broke, but then again, Blizzard Entertainment has given me the month away from writing that I needed, so kudos to them.

I'll leave you with this picture of my favorite actor of all time. He captured my heart when I was seven years old and he was bossing around hyenas. Since then he's just been pretty frakking awesome. I love Adam with all my heart, but Jeremy Irons, I wish you were my valentine. XD

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Workouts and Ramblings

So it really wasn't an earth-shattering decision for me to start working out or anything. I mean, I've been failing at it on-and-off again for the past couple of years. Over the past six months, two people have been convinced that I was pregnant because of my physical appearance, and Alek discovered (to our dismay) that he can no longer pick me up and swing me about in greeting anymore.


I'm not sure exactly how much I weigh anymore, although I'm willing to bet it's somewhere in the ballpark of 160lbs. People tend not to believe me, mainly because I dress in a way that more or less hides the weight, but the fact of the matter is that I am five-foot-two and I am about twenty, maybe thirty pounds, overweight.


It's not really a New Year's resolution or anything, this has been something that I've been struggling with for some time now. However, since it's a new semester, and I've always had the tools to get rid of this excess weight, I decided that I would go at it while my resolve was still fresh. (Come to think of it, maybe that's why people always come up with these resolutions around New Years?)


So, my goal is to get my weight down to 135lbs. Tomorrow, when I make my trip to the gym, I'll check and see how much I weigh. I really don't want to know - part of me is afraid that it's going to be more than 160lbs, but I know I really can't be that overweight. Can I? Oh well, I'm going to try and stop worry about it, because I'm finally starting to do something. I managed to lose ten pounds in high school just by changing my eating habits, surely by exercising daily and watching what I eat again, I can get back to where I was at - sort of - when I graduated high school.

I also plan on attending the 10am yoga class on Saturdays, to try and get some activity into those days. Every Saturday I will post my weight and how much exercise I got that week. 


Aside from my body-image stuff, I've been continuing to scribble in my writer's notebook, trying to figure out where I'm going with Otaku. I did finally torrent a copy of Welcome to the N.H.K., which is a little weirder than I thought it was going to be, but then again, that goes for most manga/anime things that I encounter, with the exception of Fruits Basket (don't even ask me what I though FLCL was going to be like...). I had a chat with Yuko, who lives in my dorm and is here on a student visa from Japan, and she was explaining to me what the Japanese otaku are like and how they are viewed in Japanese society. It was a very good chat, and just convinced me even more that Yuko is probably the sweetest girl I have ever met in my life who wasn't about to join a convent.


I'm hoping to get my hands on a decent MP3 player that I can take to the gym with me, it's kind of lame having to listen to the radio station that everyone on campus thinks is "awesome", because let's be honest, my playlist consists of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, The Offspring, MIKA, Cake, and UVERworld, with a sprinkling of Sting in there, along with some Backstreet Boys, Tonic, and one song by Jet. Obviously this really doesn't pertain to most of the demographic to which I belong. I think my cousin has an MP3 player that she doesn't want anymore, I may ask if it's still up for grabs.


Speaking of The Offspring, I've been listening to their most recent album, Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, and it's not nearly as bad as Adam made it out to seem. Yeah, obviously it's not the same as the music they've been making for the last, what, twenty-five years? But Dexter Holland has been wreaking havoc on his vocal chords for a long time and he just can't do anymore what he did on Smash or Americana. To be honest, I think I actually prefer this to their earlier stuff, although of course you gotta do the classics, I would be pissed if I went to a concert and they didn't play "Come Out and Play".


At any rate, time to work some more on the scarf that I'm crocheting for Alek (I swear, at some point I will post pictures!) and watch some cartoons. Did you know that crocheting for an hour will burn 100 calories? For me, at least.

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Switching it Up...

Well, not even a week into the semester, and I've already dropped my only two theater classes and pretty much said "screw you" to the entire theater department. Honestly, studying it in college has completely ruined theater for me - it's not even fun anymore - and I decided to ditch both my directing class and my theater theory class for a "how to teach grammar to kids" class.

I'm still trying to find a copy of Japanamerica, by Roland Kelts, although I have finally gotten my hands on a copy of Welcome to the N.H.K. (the light novel). I'm still trying to collect "research" materials (e.g., books that have the same tone that I'm going for... I'll have to ask my fiction prof if he has any suggestions) and trying to come up with a plotline (I'm not even sure how it's going to end yet at this point, it depends on what my characters end up doing). So far I've had only response on the otaku website that I requested, and I know it would be the worst idea ever to go waltzing into 4chan and ask them if they would please let me interview them. They would absolutely rip me apart.

It's surprising, how difficult it is to find material to help me write this book. I thought there would definitely be a lot for me to work with, and a lot of people willing to help me out right off the bat, but I guess not. My buddy Zac, from Some Sort of Loli Breakfast Machine, has been pointing me to articles and giving me insight into the world, but he's more wota than anything else, and he assures me that although wota and otaku look like the same thing, the details are surprisingly different.

Well, I have my Multicultural American Lit class here in half an hour, so I should probably get ready for that and then take off. Probably I will post again later tonight.

Otaku: A Love Story

Okay, so that part where I said that I was gonna go to bed? I lied.

Instead, I tried to make my speakers work on my computer, which they won't, so instead I started making a Writer's Notebook, a place where I can jot down ideas like character names, novel titles, things I want/need to read, novel ideas, etc.

And I came up with an idea for a new novel. Something to keep me from getting burnt out on deAngelis, which is awesome, because I really just need to step away from it for a while. There are a couple of people who will be pissed that I'm deciding to put it on hiatus, but the fact of the matter is that I care about deAngelis too much to let myself get sick of it. I want to finish it, and get it published, and if I work on it so much I want to puke, that's not going to happen.

So, I'm starting something new, something fun, something that I haven't been stressing out over since I started college.

Instead, I'm going to try my hand at literary fiction. I take a fiction writing workshop class that is all based around short literary fiction, and my prof says that I'm ready to be published. Also, I need something that isn't so depressing and dark. Let's face it, that's what all of my fantasy/sci-fi is.

Image via Wikipedia

This new novel currently has a working title of Otaku: A Love Story, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Mainly I'm just going to be writing a story about two people trying to forge some sort of relationship. One of them, the chick, is relatively mainstream about her fandoms. The other guy, though, is an "otaku". Maybe I'm using the word wrong, but essentially he's a huge anime and manga fanboy. Alek told me the other day that his obsession with certain anime characters probably caused him to spend more time in his room watching anime and reading manga and going to cons than learning how to relate and deal with real-life girls, and that's apparently why he doesn't have a girlfriend. I decided I wanted to write a book about it.

I've already put a couple of posts up on message boards asking anime and manga fans (preferably men, but women are okay, too!) to volunteer to fill out a questionnaire that I'm going to construct, or to (preferably) agree to a Skype interview. We'll see how that goes.

I'm pretty excited about all of this! I can't wait to get started!

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Writing, Returning to School, Etc.

Well, I finally put up another article over at Steam-Vents, which I haven't done for months. Our writing staff kind of wandered off, so we have to get some new people, but Adam's plenty enthusiastic enough to get new people who will be willing to pitch in and participate. As the chief Editor, I just hope the new batch spells, punctuates, and conjugates English verbs better than the last one.

Aside from writing a pretty lengthy an in-depth review on both Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes and James Cameron's Avatar, I managed to get another chapter finished for deAngelis, which is nothing to sneer at. I'm into chapter twelve or so, barely halfway into the story I believe, and the story is already rocking out at 45,000 words. The bad news is that I'm coming up on some plot points that I'm going to have to write completely from scratch, and I'm afraid that I'll fall behind again, especially with the work load that this semester's classes promise to shove upon me.

Here's the classes that I'll be taking this spring semester:

1. US History to 1877. The professor who teaches this is actually the sponsor for the Role Players Guild on campus, of which I'm the secretary and the house officer (the combination of the two offices results in the title of "PR Bitch"). He's a pretty cool guy, with a dry sense of humor that I definitely appreciate, and I know he's enthusiastic about the class, so this really shouldn't be any trouble, especially because it's a 200-level class.
2. Directing. This is one of those classes that I'm dreading. I have to take it if I want to finish out my theater minor, but I really wish I didn't. It's taught by the former head of the theater department. He's strict and thinks that theater, and his class, are the most important things on the entire earth. Obviously I don't agree, but what can you do?
3. Modern American Lit. And by "modern", I mean every from WWII to the present day. The reading list isn't too bad, but the responses that we'll have to prepare for every class may just wipe me out.
4. Multicultural American Lit. How this is different from the above, I have no clue, but it says I have to take it, so I guess I'm gonna.
5. Theater Theory. My advisor told me I shouldn't take this class until I'm a senior, but since I'm (hopefully) transferring to IUPUI next fall, I decided that it really doesn't matter. Also I just don't like my advisor.
6. Advanced Creative Writing Workshop. This is essentially what I took this past semester. It's three hours long and one night a week, but I don't mind, because it's actually a fun class. Let's just hope that a massive bout of writer's block doesn't hit me mid-semester.
7. Women's Choir. This actually is a zero-credit class, and I joined it because I miss singing. I don't think  it's anything more than just singing (no final, no classwork, no homework, etc.), so hopefully it will just feel like an extracurricular.

Shyeah... I have a full workload this semester. And that's if I didn't have a novel I was trying to finish at record speed.

On top of this I have my Dungeons & Dragons 4th ed game that I'm running (kind of), and preparations to try and transfer the hell out of Terrible Terre Haute. Also, at some point, I probably ought to take my PRAXIS I, ya think?

Time to do a little crochet and watch some more anime. Going to be a long day tomorrow... sigh.

Deadlines & Novels Unfinished

My plan, at the end of November, was to have my NaNoWriMo novel finished by the end of December. In January, I would write a rush draft of the second book in the series, and on the first day of February, I would send out query letters pertaining to the first novel, entitled deAngelis: Genesis.

Image via Wikipedia

It seems my body, and my work ethic, conspired against me. I got the first ten chapters of the novel edited within a week, but within two days of coming home for Christmas break, I came down with my fifth case of the twenty-four-hour stomach flu, which kept me in bed for a total of four days, the longest yet, with no appetite and only strength enough to crochet my sisters' Christmas presents and watch thirty episodes of Bleach on Hulu.

When I finally did sit down to get through chapter eleven, I realized that I had skipped the entire first half of the chapter when originally writing, because let's face it, I hate writing fight scenes. I just don't feel like I do them well. To write a good fight scene, you have to give enough information so that the reader knows what the hell is going on... but little enough that the reader doesn't skip the one or two or three pages of action. Also, you don't want him to figure out that you're making shit up and have no idea what you're talking about to begin with.

So, not even halfway through my novel, I procrastinated myself right past my deadline of December 31st, and only just today decided to grit my teeth and get through it. The alternative was my continuing mission to de-Christmasing the house. I shoveled the driveway and took down the tree yesterday, all of which took me about six hours total. What do you think I wanted to do today?

Once more, I'm going to try to start doing two or three chapters a day, like I did that first week. Hopefully, the time that I spent away from the novel will pay off. They say that you want to step back from a first draft for a while, so that you can distance yourself a little bit and be able to approach it more objectively when you sit down to start the writing process. I actually agree with this viewpoint, and I'd probably do that, except for the part where I would like to have something published before I graduate from college. Also, I'm just too freaking excited that the story is actually working.

deAngelis: Genesis follows a main character by the name of Jenna Palmer, a female half-angel who was orphaned at the age of four and apprenticed to a middle-aged man by the name of Leonard, who later adopted her. When she was seventeen, she made a horrible mistake that ended up killing Leonard and alienating her from her guardian angel. Although she had been trained to be the steward of the district, essentially a supernatural cop, she abandons the life she had out of grief and self-loathing. Genesis is about how she comes to take up the mantle of steward and start to get her life (a little bit) back on track.

It's going to be a three, maybe four-book series, with possibly a spin-off series later (we'll see how this one goes, first). I've found it fairly impossible to write stand-alone novels; my ideas are just too large (dare I say epic?) and I honestly just can't cram it all into one novel.

A friend of mine, Charlie, the son of blues artist Dave Morgan, is going to be drawing the comic version of the novel for me, starting this fall. I really want to reach out to as many fandoms as possible, although its no secret that I would love to get into film. All I gotta say is, David Tennant as Michael the Archangel? Now you're talkin'.

So, probably I should stop procrastinating and get on that chapter twelve, hmm?