New Location, Same Great Fantasy

Thanks for dropping by. A lot has happened since I moved the blog to my website, including the release of two of my novels.

You can find me at my new website. 

You can find the blog here: http://www.rebeccachastain.com/blog/.

My urban fantasy novel, A Fistful of Evil, hit the Top 100 Fantasy bestseller list on Amazon just two months after its release. It can be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBook, Smashwords, and Kobo.

My internationally selling fantasy novella Magic of the Gargoyles is also available, exclusively on Amazon.

You can also find me on Goodreads and Facebook. 

Drop by and visit me: I love to hear from readers!

Eva for the Win

I have just finished a sprint at the end of the novel-writing and -editing marathon, but by the grace of some serious chair-butt and a week off work, I have submitted Eva to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest! Thanks to my husband, it even has a good title: Tiny Glitches.

Pause for celebration. Go on, get out of your chair and dance with me!

In the last week, I cut over 11,000 words from my novel, rewrote the final two chapters and the first chapter, added in and refined the magic throughout the entire novel, and polished the manuscript, reading and editing the entire novel at least three times through, and some chapters at least five times.

Emotional Change: Insight into Editing Your Own Work

I spent this morning as I have the last several mornings: going through the outline of Eva and making sure each scene has an emotional change.

I first learned of this story principle from Robert McKee's Story (he calls it a Value Change, I believe). This guideline now seems so obvious, and I'm chagrined I didn't figured it out on my own.

A scene without emotional change is a scene that has a character in the same frame of mind or experiencing the same emotion at the beginning as it does at the end. Scenes without emotional changes are wasted scenes. Either nothing happened to move the plot forward, or nothing happened to the character (no character development).

Hello, World. Remember Me?

What my cat was doing a month ago.

I feel like I've been buried in work, but it hasn't been that long...

Hang on. It's been a month? Okay, I have been buried in work. It was a good time for it. My husband and I had a large setback in a business venture that took the wind out of my sales. On top of that, or because of that, my creativity well was tapped.

What my cat was doing today.

I've been working on my novels, but it's the kind of work that no one can see (not that anyone has seen my books yet, but you will, I promise!). I went through my problematic Book 2 in the Madison Fox series (Book 1 was Conventional Demon, which I submitted for publication the first of this month—still no word from the publisher saying they're in love with it). Book 2 has holes in the plot, and needs corrections to streamline it with changes I made in Book 1.

Jordan, Good; Queries, Bad

If editing is my favorite part of the writing process, writing queries is my least favorite. It's mindbogglingly difficult to simmer down 430 pages into two to three paragraphs of energized, informative, colorful text.

Case in point, I just spent two and a half hours writing queries for Eva. I created two solid queries, both which need refinement. Total word count: 556 words. It's a slow, deliberate process.

A Just Update

After 17.5 hours of edits on Conventional Demon, I think this book is as polished as it's going to get. Bring on the submissions, Harper Voyager. I'm ready.

I did a lot of subtle trimming this round. A sentence removed here, a paragraph there, a few words here and there. Nothing major. I don't think there's anything major left. I've been through this book more than a dozen times. More than 20 times. I've lost count. The fact that I'm calling this "Draft 6" reflects only the number of times I've done major rewrites.

It's Just Out of Control

After my last post, I wanted to see how often I used—ah, overused—the words just, simply, and definitely.

The results are telling:

Conventional Demon: Total Word Count 94,000

• Simply: 22 times
• Definitely: 40 times
• Just: 244 times

Two hundred forty-four times! That's insane.