Yeah, I know, it’s late in the day, but it’s hard to do my Wednesday updates when I’m here at work. So let’s see what’s going on.

For my current WIP, the garden gnome horror story, I’m still behind on word count. It’s because I’m not writing every day. I’m having a little trouble with it right now. For starters, it’s going in a direction I didn’t really originally intend. I’m going to let one of my beta readers take a look at it early and see if it’s so bizarre that it’s falling apart or if it works. If I go in this direction, I’m going to have to go back and add a few things to make this all make more sense. But I think I can make it work. Also, I originally intended for this to be a novel, not a novella. In horror stories, especially the slasher kind, things move pretty fast. But I think I moved this one a little too fast. I wanted to get at least 50K words out of it so it could really be classified as a novel. Right now, I’ve written about 35K words, and I’ll be lucky if it makes it to 40K. So it’s right on the cusp of being a novel. Most of my novellas have run between 25K and 26K. So I’m not sure what to do with this. I know it needs a little more fleshing out, which will be done in the second edit, but I don’t know if it will be enough. I refuse to pad it just for word count.

Things are going well on the Christian romance I’m writing. I’m not setting a particular word count goal on this one because I never know when I’ll be going out for lunch instead of staying in and writing. I’m sort of shooting for at least 500 words for each lunchtime writing session. So far, the word counts have been 579, 908, and 926. I still don’t know whether to use my real name or another pen name. I wanted to use my real name so the people at church that read Christian romances would know it was me. But now I’m thinking I can use a different pen name and just TELL them it’s me. That way I won’t have to worry about stalkers and such. Because some authors actually get them.

Don’t even ask about my exercise progress….

On watching TV (yeah, I know this isn’t a goal) – I’ve watched lots of episodes of Dark Shadows. I’m LOVING this. It’s so much fun to revisit the show that started my love for vampires (and other paranormal beings) as a kid.

Read Full Post »