Category Archives: Writing Journey

First Drafts Can Suk it!

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Writing is hard. Like, seriously.

One of my favorite quotes come from All The Bright Places and comments on said fact.

Writing is so difficult that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

And first drafts. Seriously, they can suk it. Like, all of it. They make me wonder if my brain even works. Do I sound like this big of a moron when I speak? I need to stop speaking. Like, when you go back to some quickly jotted notes, and you can’t decipher your own writing, that’s what a first draft is to my thoughts. I’m reading what must be a sentence. There’s a period at the end of a string of words. That’s a sentence, right? But this makes all kinds of sense that is nonsense. How am I supposed to EDIT this into coherency when there isn’t even a base coherency to be found?!

But, somehow, it gets there. Probably with multiple missed chances at brilliance. Those pure moments of genius that didn’t form themselves well onto the page because my meager human existence struggled to decipher, it and it’s now lost forever. Who knows? Maybe my basic fun, adventure novels were meant to be more, if only I’d trained my brain to translate from the muses better.

It’s a question I often see on author posts, asking what part of the processes is their most and least favorite. I could never answer. Well, I can now. First Drafts can SUUUUUK it.

Needless-to-say, I’m a little bit with the struggles right now on my current first draft. It’s not even that I don’t know where its going, or where it is, or what I want to happen. I have a plan for this story. I’ve even written the ending. But I just can’t get the words onto the page.

Maybe I should be the one sukkin it. Maybe I’m just having an aversion to work, because the first draft, I think, is where the most work goes in. The literal creation of something from nothing. I like when it’s finally here, when I can go in and fine-tune, when I can sculpt a clean product from the ragged suggestion of it. That means, finishing this first draft. *insert annoyed, toddler-tantrum expression here*

What do you think? Are you sukkin first drafts, too? Or you just think I don’t have the chops? Go on, be honest 🙂

And here. Let’s all suck it…

Catching Balance Update

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Some tertiary characters get to come forward in book 4, many of them the females who’ve given themselves to assisting Dee’s plight.


Dee’s Shadows, Subra and Fera, who have been by her side since Zosma assigned them her protector continue their role, while Nirah shows herself to be a great tactician. Acacia is just an all-around solid Soldier. Someone we’d all be lucky to find at our side, and she’s one of the few trained as a medic. Anyone else remember Dee’s guts splattering onto the floor of a plane?


Hope you’re enjoying these mini character profiles. No free books this week, but if you’re a reviewer, send me a DM. Also, all my books are shareable through Kindle, so don’t be afraid to send your copy along to someone you think might love Dee and her friends 👊

Check out the first 3.5 books by clicking image

A Little Mid-Week Tease

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The first draft of the final book of my Fool’s Path Series is coming along. It’s possible I’m still on track for a summer release…

Here’s a little teaser:

Once upon a time, this story wanted to be a graphic novel.

Hamal blamed Porrima. If he’d never let her into his apartment that evening; if he’d never allowed her to open her laptop to display Zibanitu waiting to speak with him, he might never had taken the simple mission of watching some plain girl. Underestimated. Underplayed. Underwhelmed. Underpaid. So many unders he could associate with everything that had happened since that day. Even the girls he’d met, the girls he’d used to distract himself from his growing attraction to the girl that could never be his had been under. Just like this mission. Underplanned. Underscouted. Undermanned. Un-FUBAR-able.”

Hamal is Dee’s first guardian; her mentor. A human among superior beings, he knows Dee will need more than the help he can give. But he can’t help putting his neck out for her, despite knowing that path will only lead to trouble.

Catching Balance is Book 4 of 4.5. Check the series page here.

Are you a fair reviewer? Message me to get copies 🙂

You Ever Do That Thing…

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Writers, do you ever do that thing where you start writing at some random point in your story because you’re feeling it, and it’s the fun and exciting part, only to realize there’s not an organic way to actually get there, so now you have to re-write everything you wrote? Asking for a friend, of course.

Picture from Unsplash by Benoit Beaumatin

Seriously though, after five completed projects, you’d think I’d just start plotting. I say I will and then some exciting epiphany of a scene won’t be ignored and I find I have 15,000 words of a book that hasn’t really come out of the idea phase. It’s possible I just spent the last three days re-working the front quarter of my current project because of this. I just really, really, really wanted the story to get to this specific place, but it just couldn’t. It wouldn’t. Not without being forced. Because it was forced, and you (I) could definitely tell.

I did a lot of sitting and staring. A lot of but what if I did this… Eventually, I had to accept that it wasn’t happening. These characters do write themselves and my simple-mindedness was not smart enough to outwork them. It just means a little patience (okay, a lot of patience) and some extra work. I’ll get to that point I really, really want to show. It’s just going to take a few more (many) pages. And who knows, maybe when I get there for real, there will be an entirely new place there.