Uber Productive Weekend

It was a hugely productive weekend.  Between Saturday’s date day, headshots, my mom visiting, cleaning the whole house from top to bottom, and manicuring the lawn, I finished all my content for the Indie Book Collective launch (September 13th, more later), and I did a bunch of work on my blueprint for Red. I’ve been going back and forth with Pot.  We’re on round 4 or 5, I think.  I think we’re finally getting to something resembling a final layout of story structure with all the major turning points, the hero and heroine’s inner demons, their goals, motivations, and conflicts.  It’s very different from anything I’ve ever done, and it’s really big conceptually, so it’s been hard to pull it together all in one fell swoop.  Kind of mentally exhausting, actually.  But I feel really good about this book, and I want to get it right.

My first draft of blurbage came out decently:

Elodie Rose has a secret.  Any day, she’s going to turn into a wolf and succumb to the violence that’s cursed her family for centuries. Living on borrowed time, she can’t deal with brooding bad boy Sawyer, who’s named himself her protector.  But she doesn’t just have the curse and an unwanted bodyguard to contend with.  Someone knows what she is and is determined to exterminate her family line.  Will she survive this madman?  And if she does, will she be the first to survive the curse?

I would, of course love something longer, and will have a longer version for my print edition, but this is the starter version for Smashwords, which limits blurbs to 400 characters.

I also had an epiphany about what’s wrong with Devil’s Eye.  It came out as I was trying to come up with my list of 10 ways you’d know a story was by me.  Number 6.  Villains are never just plain evil and always have more complex motivations.  Most of my villains, the ones I have written and the ones I have planned for the rest of the Mirus series, are really complicated.  No one has simple motivations and all the villains believe, in their own way, that they’re doing what’s right.  My villain for Devil’s Eye doesn’t fit that mold.  He’s…flat and power hungry and kind of dull.  And other than the fact that he wants power, I don’t know WHY.  So that’s what’s wrong with it.  Everything is falling flat after the midpoint because I don’t know my villain’s motivations.  That’s what I’ll be keeping in the back of my mind while I move forward on Red. Eventually the answer will occur to me, and I’ll finish it and get it out.

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