I’ve been digging into the edits on Vessel, the sequel to my recently released novella, Tribute. I’m on chapter 16, so two-thirds of the way there! I’m happy with the quality of the draft, and able to focus on adding foreshadowing and detail. Hopefully when I’m finished editing the draft on paper, I’ll have taken care of enough of the new writing that the computer revisions won’t take much time.

The cool part is that as I’ve worked on edits, new ideas and connections are surfacing for the next couple of novellas. I’m feverishly typing those out on my iPad to keep track. And I’m getting excited about writing the third novella — I actually started the first scene with the female lead yesterday, because I could see how I wanted her story to start so clearly. Just a few hundred words, but the groundwork for a whole new storyline…

I’ve been feeling creative and inspired again after kind of a post-release crash once I’d published Tribute. Now the problem is fitting in writing time. One more weekend out of town over Labor Day. Luckily, my mom-in-law is a fan of me taking time for writing (and having my kids to herself. LOL.), so I’m hoping I’ll finish the paper edit of Vessel this weekend. That would leave two weeks to incorporate the revisions in the manuscript, and meet my #ROW80 goal of having Vessel beta-ready at the end of Round 3.

I’m a little down again about my current writing WIP. I broke 10,000 late last week, which felt awesome. Then I spent a couple of precious hours going through what I’d written so far. I liked it, and that was a great mood boost. I made edits, added to scenes here and there… and then the big bad happened: my computer bit the big one that very night. And since we’d moved our computer two days prior to the living room in a misguided attempt to reclaim productive hours after putting our youngest down to bed in the office (don’t get me started), our most recent time machine backup missed all my work on my WIP. Serious boohoo!! I was able to reclaim the bulk of the word count because I’d written it first on my iPad, but not my edits and revisions on that beautiful day when I felt so in love with my WIP. I’m sad! More to the point, I haven’t picked it back up. I will, but I need a good block of time or what I’ll be able to accomplish will just make me nuts. I really have no idea how long it’s going to take me to write this baby… I might be plugging away at it well into Round 4. At least I have the first 20% written — the stage is set.

All that said, I am writing this post on my gorgeous, powerful new iMac. She’s really pretty, and I love her. 🙂