Just note… it usually does NOT all make sense. I make mistakes. Characters appear or disappear without reason. Stuff is introduced or dropped… again, without reason.

That means that right after reading it, I have to fix it. Which involves reading it some more. And then again.

I don’t want my Beta Reading friends to think I’m an idiot. Even if I am.

This is the time i look for those artifacts of story ideas that changed as it was written.

Jack Dixon was a TOTAL loser with a crush on a girl. She didn’t even know who he was. At all. But his father had bought him a computer and it included a game that approximated life. He discovered that he could “replay” portions of his actual life if things went wrong… he could restart the day.

For anyone that hasn’t read Planning Vengeance, THAT was the story that I started with… It obviously wasn’t the story I ended with. And there were a BUNCH of things I had to root out and change from the first several pages. I kept trying to get it back on track, but it kept fighting with me.

Every time I fought to get the story “back on track,” it left an artifact for me to clean up.

After I go through it and am confident ALL is perfect, I send it to my Beta Readers (always looking for volunteers, by the way). Of course, they send it back and tell me that I was right… it’s perfect. There are NO mistakes. Then I get the actual emails that show me hundreds of mistakes in the manuscript.

So, since it wasn’t actually perfect… I go back through it and fix every one of the mistakes they tell me about.

And find more mistakes to fix.

Awesome, right.

Then, I load it up on Amazon for Kindle. And I download it on my tablet and read it like a any other Kindle book.

Then I reformat it for Print-on-Demand.

Usually, I find some more mistakes to fix, too.

Love lost, love flourishes, sinister vengeance begins. In this first novel of the series, a bad relationship dies, giving birth to a new love between young friends. The vengeance that creates takes you through the romance/spy novel/who-done-it thriller that is Planning Vengeance. The twists and turns reveal hidden pasts, clever players and plot twists, a sinister character hell-bent on revenge and some great nostalgia for some readers. A well written, easy read that takes you on a journey that binds three families in a twisted tale of vengeance and love, and leaves you wanting more.

And it’s FREE.

So, grab your copy TODAY, even if you aren’t ready to read it yet. It’ll be yours to read at your leisure.

To start with, I use Evernote. I use it to track my characters. I have a lot of characters that develop over several novels. Because of that, I keep records of many of them so that they can be consistent over time. As I create a character, I will give them a birthday, a picture, a back story and work out more of their details. I will also copy their physical description into their profile card. Sometimes I have to change something, and I will update that in the profile card.

Some of my other “characters” might also get a profile card. By this I usually mean vehicles, although there are a couple of houses that have cards, too. But I have a variety of cars and planes that I have profiled.

Like I said, I want to be consistent.

Also, in the case of the Dixon-Prince series, I use specific dates. That opens up a host of issues… like making sure characters are only one place at a time, and making sure it is physically possible to get from one scene to the next. I actually have a spreadsheet in Excel that tracks EVERY day mentioned in the whole series. There is a VERY brief note of the major item for that day.

And, since I used a specific day, I have also gone back and checked weather, sunrise, sunset and even tides for that day and location… usually… I do cheat sometimes with the weather. But, other times, it gives my character a workout to figure out how to deal with the weather or whatever physical challenges might have existed on that day.

usually , those sources are adjusted and added to on my read-throughs… which I’ll get to next week.

Spoiler: I love my Beta Readers.

“Pantsing” is some sort of made up euphemism for “writing from the seat of one’s pants.” And that’s what I basically do. I have some sort of idea of where the story is starting, and possibly a little about where it is going to go, but rather than carefully plan out everything beforehand, I just start writing.

There are several drawbacks to writing like this. First, I don’t know how long the story will be. Some have been WAY longer than I thought, but others are much shorter. Another drawback is that as I write, details may change. The problem with that is that I have to go back and find the details that may change…

Sometimes, I don’t even know if a character is good, bad or neutral as they are introduced. I might have an idea, but sometimes it’s wrong.

All that means that I break one of the first rules of writing… I make inline revisions. Everything I read says that I need to write the entire first draft before making revisions.

I. Just. Can’t.

I can’t leave those things alone. If I KNOW I have an artifact earlier in the story that is now wrong, I have to go back and change it while I’m thinking about it. I do the same things with spelling and grammar… if I see it. I know I’ll make those mistakes… and plenty of them… so the sooner I see one and deal with it, the better I feel.

So, the first step, at least for me, is to just sit down and write. I will start with the barest idea of a plot, but I do NOT have all of the details, plot twists or even conflicts worked out. Others do… and that is AWESOME, but it doesn’t work for me.

I’d love to know if you want to write, and maybe learn about your process.

The process I personally use involves me writing (usually with some inline correction of errors… glaring, obvious errors). Then, I try to check for spelling, grammar and continuity (using the automated tools in Word). After that, I do a complete read through of my draft. Once again, as I read I look for the same type of errors, especially word usage issues and other things that won’t show from the automated tools. I also look for “voice”… making sure a character is consistent, or growing at a reasonable rate.

Then I have a first draft. For me, that means I have probably read it five to ten times. I’ve also changed a bunch of stuff and looked at it out of order a few times, too.

In other words, I am confused…

So, I step back and let it go to some beta readers. A couple for each one are trusted readers.. they have read several previous things (now that I have several previous things) and provided feedback. A couple more haven’t done that before, so this is their first time out of the gate.

They send me their feedback and I review it. A lot. For the simple stuff, misspellings and typos, I go back and make those changes right away.

But for the deeper feedback, I stew on it. I fight and ignore, and then acquiesce that they are probably right. And I make the changes, often rewriting significant portions of the book. Once again, it is back to me to read over the book as a whole. And I have to smooth out the changes to make them fit seamlessly. If I can.

At that point, I usually try to get another couple of readers to go over the draft. Hopefully it is close to ready then.

But, after publishing I find three dozen more typos… I fix those, too… Ugh.

It isn’t the first time this has happened. A couple of Dixon-Prince characters appeared near the conclusion of Undercover, which is currently out with my Beta Readers (a SERIOUSLY awesome group of people… if you want to be one, let me know). They were just right for the job at hand.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish, and part of the reason I stepped back from two of the stories I have in the works (which I do plan on getting back to…) is that I wanted to write some new characters. And I really did write new a bunch of characters… but sometimes there is a job to be done and one of your friends is the person for the job….

Anyway, I just found it funny how a character I was writing just lined up perfectly with someone already in the stable… not just the type of plot element they could contribute, but age, attitude, position… Everything just lined up. Keep in mind, this isn’t a major character, but one of the folks that keeps the plot moving.

I’m often surprised by the elements of the stories I write.