 Typewriter photo courtesy of Unsplash.com, user Annie Spratt. Text is mine using the font Arial Narrow. Day One of Camp Nanowrimo, April 2019 is over for me. I've set a goal of 70,000 words for the month. If I take off one day per week, that's 26 days, and it works out to 2,693 words per day. I wrote 5,810 today! :D
It was a good scene, at least for a first draft. I had a lot of fun writing it. I struggle with adding description. I don't add enough. I also struggle with not explaining things that are happening. I've had a reader point this out on many occasions, yet I still struggle with it. I guess that's what editing is for. Right now, this month, I'm using a detailed summary and trying to get the story down fast. I'll worry about revising it and adding in more detail and explanation later. I've never been one to overwrite these things. Quite the opposite, I tend to underwrite them. But I'm trying to weave in more of it as I write this first draft. I'm hoping I'll get better at it. Only time will tell. So far, I'm really enjoying my return to Dakota McCabe's story. Granted, it's just the first chapter, but I'm enjoying it. That's what's important. In other news, I've published the first three pirate fantasy short stories in my Tales of the Red Falcon Shorts series. You can find them on my home page. They haven't published to all sites, but there are several sites that each one has published to, and you can find them on their respective pages:
And if you'd rather start with something free, let me point you to The Falcon's Treasure here on this site. It's completely free! A simple request: If you read any of these and like them, would you please consider leaving a positive review. While not mandatory, I would greatly appreciate it. :) Cheers! Lois
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 Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com, user Ella Jardim. I'll be participating once again in Camp Nanowrimo, this time with a complete reboot of the first book in my McCabe Saga series, Dark Horses. I don't want to say too much, but in this version, both Dakota and his adopted son, Nate, are dealing with bullies. At least one of these is very dangerous. I can't wait to get started writing on April 1!
In other news, if you've visited the main page here in the past couple of days, you might see a bit of a change. I've taken my first short story down and plan to re-publish it soon. I needed to change some links, and the cover changed slightly, among other things, so I needed to take it down to fix these issues. I'll be posting two other stories, too. You can see the covers and a brief blurb for each on the home page (opens in new window...all links in this entry do). I also plan to turn my novelette from the Christian romance anthology into an e-Book. I don't generally write romance, but I'm fond of this story and its main characters. It's called "A Second Chance At Love." Eventually, I'd like to publish it as a paperback, but that will have to wait until I can learn the ins and outs of publishing it in that format. I've also taken down a bunch of the short stories I posted here that I didn't think were as good as I'd like them to be. I kept one, but removed some parts that are no longer relevant, and you can read that one here. It's in two parts, and I've linked you to the first of those. I'm in the slow process of getting my first two Relic Hunters novellas ready to publish, too. Not sure when the first one will be ready to go live, but I'm hoping to have it up by June. In the meantime, you can get an introduction to the main star of that series, Bane Asmodei, by reading this short story. It also introduces a rival of Bane's, Brett Holt. So these are the four projects I'm focused on right now:
I'll post updates as I progress. To your reading enjoyment, Lois  "Street Cafe In Barcelona, Spain" photo courtesy of Stockvault.net In less than a month, thousands of writers will attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I've done this several times. In fact, this will be my 13th attempt at National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo (if you don't count the few times I've tried Camp NaNoWriMo), and as always, I can't wait!
This year, I'm returning to a novel I started during CampN back in April of 2015. My goal was 40,000 words, and I won with 2,000+ on top of that. But as I wrote, I realized some things would need to change to make the story better. And in the years since I wrote those 42,000+ words, a lot has changed with the world of Illdirin and the characters involved in this story. So I went back to the drawing board. I kept a lot of the material, but I've also changed a lot of things. I'll be starting fresh, and my privateers will not only have one other ship to contend with in the race to find the sunken treasure ship, Venture, but two. The first is a pirate ship, and the second is a naval ship from the country their nation is currently at war with -- and just so happens to be captained by Sahmi Zamada's former captain, Tobias Hancock, whom he and others mutinied against. I'm having to go back and do a lot more research on ships and piracy, medieval life on land and sea, magical systems, geography, etc. Good thing I started getting ready last month! Aside from my preparations for this year's NaNoWriMo, I'm also working on another Halloween short story to post to this website (I'll announce it when I publish it). If you need something to tide you over in the meantime, check out last year's Halloween story, The Cellar Dwellars: A Hawkins Short Story. (<-- warning for mild language.) Hopefully, you won't regret it. ;) While last year's story involved paranormal hunters on my fantasy world, Illdirin, this year's story centers around two young teens here on earth. The town they live in exists, but I've changed other place names. It was fun to write, but anything more than that I won't say. I don't want to give away any important details, after all! As you've probably noticed, I went on hiatus after my last blog entry. It was unintentional, and I'm not really sure what happened. I'd meant to post short stories every week until I finished posting the Of Blood & Magic series, but then I never did. If you've been waiting with bated breath, you can relax, take a deep breath, and go to the following two links to read the last short stories in Of Blood & Magic: Hunted (book I): SS11: The Rescue and SS12: Unlikely Allies. I'll likely post one short story every week until this series is all posted. If you have any suggestions on how to make the stories better, feel free to comment in response to this blog entry, but please be polite. Otherwise, I'll just delete it. ;) So, here's what you have to look forward to in the coming weeks:
Until then, enjoy the stories linked to above and any other writing I've posted here. Cheers! Lois  Haha! It's been way too long since I posted, so here I am to give you an update on what's been going on.
We started looking at houses this spring, and that picture above is our new 680 square foot "cottage." It's not much to look at right now, and we don't have much furniture, but it's ours! :) I've been weeding out stuff we don't need (we can't store it anyway with a lot less storage space) and trying to get a handle on living a more simple life, but things still get complicated at times. That's to be expected, though. Once we're fully settled in, I'll get more of a handle on things, and it will become more of a sanctuary here. I can't wait! I haven't done much at all with the new trilogy that takes place in the tundra. I wrote a bit during Camp Nanowrimo back in April, but I didn't get nearly as far as I wanted to. I was supposed to write the trilogy from April through this month (June), but it hasn't happened. I need to sit down and come up with a plan that will allow for working on the projects I'm supposed to be working on, as well as those ideas that pop into my head and won't let me do anything else. I need to work on the trilogy, plus revise another smaller project, and start planning another one. I've gone down the rabbit hole once again, this time with a fallen Seraph named Samandriel. I'm basing his looks on Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. I've never played the game, which will probably prevent me from turning the character into a carbon copy of the game villain. That's definitely a good thing, since I have something awesome planned for him. I also started a freewrite based on the crazy stuff happening down in Antarctica. If you haven't heard about it, look it up on YouTube. There are a lot of videos about it. I've got my own spin on what's happening for my freewrite, which I plan to turn into a short story (a bit on the long side, but not a novella, and certainly not flash fiction). There's something under the ice, but it ain't no space aliens. That's all I'll say. ;) I'm also working on the encyclopedia that accompanies my fantasy world, Illdirin. I've neglected it, and I'm finding I have to revise character bios, info on different countries, and add material I came up with but never entered into the project. It's a huge undertaking, but I'm up for the challenge. One aspect of Illdirin I plan to start working on is my map. You can check that out over here. (The page will open in a new window. If you click on the image or the link directly below it on the page, you can view a larger version of it, which will also open in a new window). It's my first real attempt at this map, but I plan to re-trace it and relabel it, add in places that I've come up with but haven't added, and draw in some more of the geography. It's a work in progress, but I have a lot of fun working on it. When I work on it. Ha! (I mostly don't work on it because drawing makes my hands ache, so I'm going to do a little bit each day to minimize that.) I'm also doing other creative stuff -- knitting, mostly, but I plan to start doing a little drawing soon, too, even if, to start, it's just sketches of my characters and working on the map of Illdirin. Anyway, that's what I've been up to. I plan to be more present here in the coming weeks. Just trying to get my groove back, so to speak. ;) So, what have you been doing? Any creative projects in the works? Lois |
AuthorLois Eighmy (pronounced like Amy) is a full-time fantasy and thriller writer. She's also an artist and fledgling photographer. You can see some of her writing and other creative works here on her website. She lives in Missouri with her husband, Jeff, her white calico cat, Chloe, and her brindle mutt, Nikita. She dreams of moving anywhere she can experience an annual White Christmas, but is happily working on being content with where she's at in the present. Archives
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