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. 🙂

Times of the Past my book.

Here’s the links for my book, Times of the Past:

Amazon for Times of the Past and Times of the Past on Smashwords.

This was actually my second attempt at writing a very long novel-type story and it came on the heels of my great grandmother’s death as I recall. Therefore, I was not only writing out my grief over that, but also inspired to create some  ‘good guy’ vampires. I let my imagination run wild with a plot that wasn’t thoroughly thought out before hand. Times of the Past was a combination of different stories involving three of the protagonists and how they crossed paths with one another. Somewhere along the way I decided to weave them into Times of the Past and try to condense them down.

Little I was I aware in my infancy of writing about vampires (and this was many years ago) that not all characters need to have every small detail of how and when they were bitten/ attacked and/ or brought across into their undead existence written into a story. And yeah, it would help a lot if I began adding in chapters instead of scene breaks which are two spaces to began a new scene in a book.

All indie authors/ established authors and writers will have to find “their voice” even if its descriptive and lengthy.

Enjoy and as always, thank you for re-tweeting, liking, re-blogging, sharing, commenting, etc. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙂