Book Three Update

So it’s time for a book update. I have seven chapters left to edit in book three of the Screwing Up Time series. (Seven out of forty-two.) So I’m getting close. Then the book goes to editors. This book has been a real journey. I wrote the first draft faster than anything I previously wrote. I was jazzed and thinking how quickly I’d get it out to my readers. And then, I hit the speed bumps.

Family health issues and lots of them. I think we should get easy hospital check-in. And it’s definitely a bad thing when someone as faceblind as I am begins to recognize surgeons.

Huge laptop problems. My computer spent almost two months traveling back and forth and back and forth for repairs.

My youngest child applied for college. If you have not filled out college applications in a while, let me tell you how heinous it has become. It’s all online, which should be easier, right? But one application we filled out was actually timed. In the right upper corner of the screen was a countdown timer and if the form wasn’t filled out in time, you lost all the data you input. How insane is that? Thankfully, a friend let me know about this feature ahead of time, so my son had his essays written earlier and we shift/copied them into place.

Are there any more speed bumps coming? Yeah. But that’s why I’m getting those last seven chapters edited this week and then the book is ready for my editors. So when I post next Wednesday, I should be announcing that the book is with editors. (If not, I'm sure I'll have a post on what the latest speed bump is.)

Why I Write YA Time Travel

The other day, I signed up for an historical fiction class. I’m an official auditor. (Yes, I loved school and can’t wait to take a new class.) This one has an optional hist-fic writing component. Yeah, I’m all over that.

In any case, it got me to thinking. If you’ve read this blog you know I write both YA time travel and hist-fic/lit fic for “adults,” and I got to thinking about why I love historical fiction. And why I love writing time travel fiction for young adults.

1. I love historical fiction. Sometimes the things that are old are completely new and cool. For example, cockentrice (which I actually have a recipe for and am totally willing to make if someone will bring me a pig and a large capon), poison rings, cuneiform, ziggurats, and cam cloth (oops, that’s from book three).

2. Juxtaposing the modern and the ancient. I love to put the ancient and the modern side-by-side. Because when you do, you discover that although there are so many differences, they still wanted much the same things we do.

3. Young adult fiction has a lot of action. I know writers sometimes complain that writing for young people is intense—your competition is video games, texting, and YouTube. But I love that. The challenge of capturing the intensity of modern life and translating that into another culture in a way that’s fresh to our culture’s jaded eyes.

4. I love writing from Mark’s perspective. Growing up, my brother was a lot younger than I was. He was eleven when I left for college. Now I have three sons (two are grown). And getting to peek into the heads of teenage guys has been wonderful. I think they’re grossly underestimated by a lot of people. I want to give them a chance to be noble, brave, and fallible.

5. Bottomline, I love the rush of blending sci-fi, hist-fic, and fantasy. I can’t wait to finish book three because book four is already waiting to be written. And it’s taking every bit of self-control not to tell you about both of them.

Here's a hint from book three.

Excavated by Jacques de Morgan. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

Screwing Up Time Book Three Teaser

Now that the short story, "Screwing Up Mongolia" is available. Click here. I thought I'd start telling you all a little bit about book three in the Screwing Up Time series.

Here's a color engraving of one of the settings book three. Yes, one of the settings means that Henry and Miranda travel to more than one time. I'd love to show you more pictures, but most of the images are subject to copyright laws. This old image is done by Martin van Heemskerck. (I love those Dutch artists. He also did an engraving of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.)



So, readers, what place/time do you think this is? Leave me a message in the comments.

Screwing Up Mongolia

I had hoped to have "Screwing Up Mongolia" available by today. But I ended up spending most of the week helping a friend who was in the hospital. But my goal for this week is to get the story properly formatted and uploaded to Amazon.

After that, I want to finish editing book three in the Screwing Up Time series. I'm so close, less than thirty pages before I send the novel off for editing crit.

Thanks, everyone, for being patient.

Here's the SUM cover in case you missed it last week.

UPDATE: "Screwing Up Mongolia" is now live at Amazon. Click here.

Cover art by Tara Rimondi, http://www.tararimondi.com/

Screwing Up the Future

Ever since I started writing the Screwing Up Time series, I wanted to travel to the future. And I knew Mark would want to travel to the future, but I couldn’t just “joy ride” there without a reason. It wasn’t until I wrote “Screwing Up Mongolia” (which hopefully will be out soon—when file conversion and cover art are done) that travel to the future became a possibility.

Mark and Miranda’s trip to the future to find Nin is only a small part of the text—the majority of the story is set in two ancient civilizations—but writing about the future opened huge possibilities. It was so fun to play there, though I had to restrain myself since the SUT series is not sci-fi and the focus of the novels always has to be Mark and Miranda and their problems.

As I created the future, the one thing I kept in mind was that human history always seems to be a constant struggle through war, disease, and technology. (I know tech seems to be “modern,” but consider the huge impact catapults, cross bows, and battering rams had in their time.) So I kept war, disease, and tech in the back of my mind as I explored how the future might look and feel. And my obsessive love of reading Popular Mechanics and Chemical and Engineering News gave me ideas on the technology in our near-ish future.

So, in book three (which I’m back to working on after a 6 weeks hiatus due to computer problems) be on the lookout for a couple of scenes set in the future and technology like DNA ident keys, toadstool chemical grenades, and camo cloth. 

PS Does anyone have any idea why the font changes in the middle of the text? I've checked the HTML code and it doesn't show a font change. This is driving me crazy. Thanks.

What Did You Do This Summer?

Someone asked me the other day, “What Did You Do This Summer?” I felt kind of stutter-y. Normally, I do a big project every summer. Refinish cabinets, paint, strip furniture, etc. This summer, I wanted to refinish the kitchen floor. But it didn’t happen. And what I really wanted to do was finish book three of the Screwing Up Time series. 

But my computer developed a glitch, and it spent six weeks traveling back and forth & back and forth to a repair facility. Thankfully, it’s fixed now—or pretending to be. But my summer writing schedule is shot. Though I did get eleven chapters edited even without my laptop. Hopefully, now I can get back to it.

Here’s what I did do this summer.

1. Edited eleven chapters of Screwing Up Time, book three.

2. Wrote 25,000 words for a new novel. (Not young adult) First drafts are easier to do without a laptop.

3. Sewed a Shakespeare costume for my son. Click here to see it.

4. Helped my daughter find a place to live—she starts grad school next month.

5. Moved my oldest son—he’s starting grad school too.

6. Mopped up lots of rainwater that streamed in through the roof. Why do warranties expire right before something goes wrong....

7. Opened a computer file and began making plot notes for book four of the Screwing Up Time series. Yes, there will absolutely be a book four and I can’t wait to start writing it.

Don’t forget to check back in the next week or so. I hope to be doing a cover reveal for “Screwing Up Mongolia” (a SUT short story). And now that my laptop is back, I hope to get the story up at Amazon, Smashwords, etc., this summer.

Paris, My Cure for Writer's Block

As you know, I recently had the vacation of a lifetime—my husband and I went to Paris. (If you want to read more about it, click here, here, here, and here.) But now, it’s time to get back to the grindstone. So I’m editing again. (A fan recently asked when book three was coming out—he has another round of intense physical therapy coming up in the fall and wants the book as a distraction from the pain. Yes, Adam, I hope to have the book out in the fall.)

But it this round of edits, I’m doing something different. Something I’ve never done before. I’m working on two books at once. While I’m editing book three, I’m working on a new literary fiction. Two vastly different books and genres. When I first thought about doing it, I was nervous because I was afraid the books would influence each other—that the voices would bleed into each other and I’d end up with a romantic comedy/literary fiction and a literary/action adventure—not your typical cross-genre novels.

But I tried to write the lit fic anyway. (The story has been in my head for years.) It was horrible. The narrative was flat. I rewrote the first 2,000 words over and over. But they were still deader than dead. I told myself that it was because I couldn’t write two books at the same time.

I considered scrapping the book. But when a story’s been in your head for years, it doesn’t go away. I put the decision on hold when we went to Paris. And when we came back, I opened the document—I was going to rewrite those two thousand words one more time. So I did. And the two thousand words of straw changed to silver (not gold—that takes several revisions).

So the morale of the story: when you have writer’s block, take a trip to Paris. For my next book, I already feel writer’s block coming on. To cure it, I think I’ll need a trip to Venice or Florence. Or maybe both. That’s my cure and I’m sticking to it. 

Here's a photo of my husband and me in the gardens at Versailles.

Don't forget about the book swag giveaway. I still need some more reviews.
Here's a link to Screwing Up Time's Amazon page. And here's one for Screwing Up Babylon.