Sequel to Abide with Me is finished!

99, 403 is some marathon writing! Whew!

But…

It’s not over yet, not by a long shot. There’s A LOT of editing, revising, formatting, book description– thank god, I already designed the cover ahead of time.

This vampire sequel took me approximately five months, many late hours of writing—contemplating in a Cathedral— (not at night, though), working, tweeting on the side, and clacking the keys in my spare time.

What’s the vampire sequel about? Without giving it away, it deals with vampires. There’s some good vs. evil parts, some sex scenes– which, let’s face it, those are difficult to convey in writing sometimes and still capture the passion, romance, and all five senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell– yeah, I forgot to weave those in. I don’t know how erotica and romance authors write steamy sex scenes and manage to really pull the reader in. Visualizing it as though you’re watching a movie, is one thing, trying to put it into words and make it flow is difficult.

This new vampire sequel ties in with Abide With Me, my first vampire story. I heard that some author’s like to put prologues into a sequel, kind of give the reader an idea of where the first story left off. And it boggles my mind. I also never inserted chapters into any of my previous stories which again, makes the story hard to read. I rely heavily on page breaks to start each new scene.

Yes, I broke the 80,000 word count “novella”. And I do believe, this staggering word count exceeds Abide With Me. Then somebody pointed out that they couldn’t find any tags for Abide With Me on Amazon. Therefore, I went to Amazon, fiddled with uploading some tags, and don’t know how authors get away with adding four or five tags. For example,

Fiction: occult, horror, supernatural
Fiction, horror, occult, vampires
Fiction, romance, undead, occult, horror

I tried to find these other categories with the specific “undead” and “vampires” included in the tags and had no luck. I could only select two: Fiction: occult, horror, supernatural and Fiction: occult and horror.

Well, that bites.

For some odd reason in the cosmos that I can’t begin to understand or come to a rational conclusion about, I cannot add these specific tags of Fiction: horror, supernatural, romance, undead, vampires so therefore, Abide With Me can’t be found in a romance section of Amazon.

What I am doing is working on the next step: adding in a book description right under the title. Yep, a book description so readers can view at a glance what the story will be about. I have never, ever seen a book description right before the start of any story. Then again I’m looking at paperback novels, not e-books. Plus it helps to add in a book description when kindle readers snap up a lot of titles at once.

Well, that’s a new one on me. And while on the topic of marathon word counts—(I cringe that I didn’t see this before self-publishing) I am going through Times of the Past and cleaning up all the corrupt file errors that magically (and mysteriously) appeared when I uploaded this story on Kindle Direct and Smashwords.

I began writing Times of the Past back in 2003 on a very outdated Word program using Windows ME edition. Then I received a new computer, so I transferred that rough draft onto Windows Vista. I was somewhat up to speed with Word pad, but again, the file was extremely corrupt. So I had to again revise my original story, and change a few things. I like my font set at 12 New Times Roman, but nope, my new computer decides it will make it very tiny and difficult to read, then it goes into some god awful sentence in another font… backspace, and everything returns to normal Times New Roman font. And then, I get a new computer in 2013 and again, the transfer is more than my labor of love can handle. I’m unaware that files do get corrupted and then stories appear to have been written using two different styles of font using three or more different settings. It’s crazy sometimes.

See the beautiful world of writing that authors and writers deal with on computers? It’s a lot faster than hen-pecking glass typewriter keys and far better than digging for correcting paper, a bottle of white out, and a dictionary. Oh, yes, and writing the old fashioned way didn’t give these billion choices for different fonts and you had to know how to double space in manuscript form on a typewriter (if you wanted to publish something in print) which was probably very frustrating I can imagine. And then there’s trouble when you run out of ribbon for the typewriter and can’t purchase another spool for that particular make and model… I sympathize with writers and authors of yesteryear that hammered the keys on manual and electric typewriters.

So I applied my massive brain power to make a very concerted effort to correct all mistakes and font changes, punctuation as I find them in Times of the Past. On Amazon it is still being updated for the right tags. I did add in undead, vampires, romance to the key words so I hope this helps. And really need to do the same to the Smashwords versions.

This current sequel I hope will have all those mistakes in punctuation and extra letters that don’t belong corrected when I run the story through paragraph return. That’s how I’m able to catch all these mistakes that aren’t visible when writing in Word pad.

Again, thanks for reading, sharing, liking, commenting, tweeting, re-blogging. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂

The Camera: my earliest short story I’ve written (pre-self publishing days)…

And it was brutal, no doubt. In fact, I began to have second thoughts of ever publishing or investing too much of my time becoming an indie author. Was it fear that held me back? Who knows. Was it that I didn’t have enough self-confidence to get my stories out there? Again, who’s to say.

I wrote “The Camera” on an old Windows ME outdated program and this made file conversion difficult since back in the day I fought with my extreme reluctance to go out and get up-to-date with a tech savvy crowd.

Computers… I still don’t understand them and likely never will. I have managed to make things impractical for myself by installing Windows XP which isn’t supported by most, if not all, file conversion sites that helps self-publishers and indie authors turn their word pad doc. files into a readable format for kindle devices.

The Camera was one of those “nearly lost” short stories of mine that didn’t survive on my old computer. However, I did manage to find a rough draft copy of it one day and manually clacked the keys and wrote it into Word pad. The Camera is available for purchase from Amazon and The Camera on Smashwords. As always thanks for re-blogging, sharing, tweeting, commenting, etc. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂

Velvet Blue and My Father’s Son short story series of mine.

Velvet Blue on Amazon and Velvet Blue on Smashwords.

Also, the sequel to this is My Father’s Son on Smashwords. This sequel is also available on Amazon: My Father’s Son

As always thanks for liking, sharing, re-blogging, tweeting, commenting, etc. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂

Faithfully: a short story and where to buy it.

Faithfully on Amazon and Faithfully on Smashwords. Enjoy and as always, thank you for re-tweeting, liking, re-blogging, sharing, commenting, etc. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂  Most, if not all of my stories, are just e-published at the present time.

Abide with Me book.

Writing, updating, more revisions… other website takes forever to update and load new content. So, here it is: a list of my books and short stories along with links where to buy them. I figure wordpress is faster than the other website I was trying to use and update which ran at a snail pace.

Abide with Me took me nine years to write and an additional two more years or so to self-publish. It was my first labor of love. I started out with the concept of a ‘good guy’ vampire romance that was geared around being a little old-fashioned and set in modern times. Then I wasn’t happy with how the original rough draft read and totally overhauled it and gave a twist on the religious aspect that I have yet to see in any vampire book or movie. I just didn’t see or read about any good guy vampires other than watching a few episodes of Forever Knight when it originally aired. I was getting burned out seeing vampires nowadays being portrayed as these demonic-looking creatures with no compassion, passion, good guy personalities, or even sensuality. They’re inherently evil, let’s not forget, but…

“What became of Frank Langella, George Hamilton, or even Barnabas Collins (late, great Jonathan Frid) type of vampires in modern culture?” I thought to myself. Therefore, I was determined to create my own good guy vampires. I didn’t add in the religion until about a year before I self-published Abide with Me and really began to flesh out my characters and where I wanted to see them go as they evolved.

Abide with Me available at Amazon and Abide with Me on Smashwords. Enjoy and as always, thank you for re-tweeting, liking, re-blogging, sharing, commenting, etc. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂

Abide with Me book cover.