Heir To Magic

I’ve been taking an online writing course, so between that and keeping up with the work that pays the bills, my work on Heir to Magic has been a little sidetracked. I have not stopped working on Heir to Magic, just got a little sidetracked away from it as I take a course that will hopefully assist me in getting the novel finished and finding a publisher for it.

The course is Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways and I have just entered into week five of the lessons.  I can already tell that the entire course is going to be something I am going to learn a lot from, and the things I learn from it will be invaluable for my career as a writer.

Okay, so maybe I have not been keeping the blog fully up to date, but as anyone that has visited the main site can tell, I have been working on the site.  I’ve also been working on my novel. I now have it outlined out to about chapter 30.  I loaded it all into yWriter4 the other day and have even added some scenes to it, although I seem to be missing some scenes I know I wrote for it.  That is annoying, but I’m sure that I’ll live if I can’t find them.  Still… that’s almost three chapters worth of scenes I am missing, so it is annoying.

I can see why so many people have the comments on their sites disabled.  The SPAMMERs have started targeting Heir to Magic with their unending keywords of porn and garbage, so now I have had to delete 391 SPAM comments day before yesterday – enough that by the time I finished I forgot I wanted to post to the blog, then today I just deleted seven more porno comments.  Don’t those people have anything better to do with their time?

As I was deleting the nearly 400 comments the other day I was talking to a writing friend of mine and  told her that if those people were going to be inundating people with that stuff, then the least they could do would be to take a few minutes to work their keywords into a decent porn story for people to read.  It would be much nicer than their five pages of random words taken out of the complete encyclopedia of sex and fetishes.

Just removed over 600 comments that were all sleazy ads for — well, you know what kinds of stuff it was all for.  ::shakes head::

I’m still here, and working on things, just not having as much time to dedicate to Heir to Magic as I want to dedicate to it.  I might have some plans for a change to the site here, though, so we’ll see how that works out.  Still testing the idea on another website at the moment.

I have added another 189 words to my novel.  I had to go down to the doctor’s office with my dad today, get a blood test for him, so while we sat in the waiting room, I worked on my novel.  Did not have a very long wait, but enough to get another almost 200 words on the novel.  I started off a scene that I know will make it into the final version of the novel, so it is even a good expenditure of my writing time.

I also got my March/April issue of Poets & Writers today.  I was reading the Editor’s Note, and Ms. Gannon said something I found very interesting, something I want to do myself.  It seems that she has a journal where she notes down her favorite sentences in novels she reads.  I read that and just went “Oh kewl!” because there have been a lot of times over the years where I would read a passage I particularly loved, but I never thought to make a record of them in a journal.  I have no idea how Ms. Gannon makes her entries, but I would think the best method for me would be to enter the passage that I loved, then the book, author and page number where the passage was to be found.  That way I can always find it again in the books in my library.

Something else that caught my attention in Poets & Writers is an article about writer workshops, in particular what is wrong  with them.  I bookmarked that for careful reading when I get a chance to read it.

Only other item of writing note is that I got my renewal for Writer’s Digest mailed off today.  I’ve been trying to get that mailed off for some time, so I was glad to have got it out the door finally.  Now I just have to mail in the talking books deal for my dad.  Should get that done by Friday.