Writing Update | Haunted House Flipper

This cover is a work in progress.

Hi guys. I just wanted to give you all a little update on how my writing is going on my current novel "Haunted House Flipper." Once I started writing every day the first draft was done in a couple of months. Now, however, it's going slower. One reason for this is that I do a lot of the first draft while commuting by talking into my phone.

I use speech to text and so my phone transcribes everything I say. It's a really fast way to work and it allows me to talk to my phone while I drive and spit out a story. Of course, there's a lot of editing in post to fix the funny ways my speech gets transcribed into the wrong words, but it's not that bad. My phone is surprisingly accurate and speech to text gets words on the screen way faster than I can type. The dialog also comes out very naturally and seems a lot easier to do than when writing on a keyboard.

All this to say that I can't really edit my work in the way I need to while driving. If I was doing copy edits then that's pretty easy. I have my phone use text to speech to read my writing to me and if I hear something wrong I stop and use speech to text in a notes app to write down the typo. Then I can go back later and use the Find feature to search right to those typos and correct them. I'm happy to say that most of the story, even on a sentence by sentence level, isn't changing.

The problem is that over halfway through my book I changed the mentor character into also being the love interest. I'm also not sure if they're just going to develop a friendship throughout the book or a romance by the end of it. So those are parts I'm going to need to rewrite or heavily edit. Once I see how that goes I'll get to the end and write the last scene. Then my book will be through the second draft and ready for Beta Readers. If you just can't wait you can also be a beta reader for me now on Wattpad. Just follow along there as I publish the revised chapters until the whole book is up there. I'd really appreciate any feedback you have for me. Thanks! Here's a little preview of the story below if you want to check it out right now without leaving this page. From here it will take you right to the story on Wattpad too!

I Finished My Book!

Well, writing every day in March and April rewarded me with a finished manuscript. The first draft of my novel "Haunted House Flipper" is complete! I wrote this in the last blog post but this is more of a hurrah let's celebrate post because it's done! I'm currently going through it to clean it up and change the mentor character into the mentor/love interest character.

Obviously A Work In Progress :)

Other than that I haven't been changing much. Just a few awkward sentences here and there. A bit more description in a few places, but my changes are pretty minimal! I'm very happy about that and Dean Wesley Smith would say that's a good thing too. He's all about first drafts, a little cleanup - and call it good! I'm even more happy that I don't think I'll have the problem with this book that I've had with every other novel I've written. When I got to the end and reread it or gave it to beta readers I could tell the story was broken. No good structure, flow, plot or pacing.

That's because I was new and didn't really know much about story structure or how to outline. My outline is pretty sparse and mostly consists of story beats that are like tent poles that hold up the major parts of my story and it's up to me to fill in all the gaps between. I figure those out as I go, but I like to try and write what happens next with a few sentences because that helps me write way faster. I learned that trick from the book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron. By the way, if you click on that link and buy the amazing book that really helped me write faster it gives me a little kickback so thanks!

So yeah. It's done! Time to revise it so I can get it to Beta Readers and get some feedback on it! If you would like to be a beta reader just let me know. Thanks for stopping by!

A Writing Update and Results from Writing Every Day in April

That's me sitting in the pool drinking a Dirty Monkey. Oh man they're good! I've been gone for a week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with my lovely wife celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary! I didn't have a chance to write up any blog posts, but I'm back and it's time for a nice big update. I had some pretty good writing days on our trip, tapping away with my thumbs on my iPhone. On 5/1/17 I wrote 1,960 words on my phone, and on the 3rd I wrote 818, and finally 1,533 words on the fourth. We headed back the next day.

My manuscript is currently at 59,638 words and I'm calling the first draft done even though I still need to write the last chapter. Let me explain. While over halfway through writing the first draft I realized I needed to change the mentor character into the love interest as well. This means changing the character from a dude to a lady and doing a bit of work on their relationship throughout the story. I'm not really sure where it will end up but once I know that I'll know what the last chapter needs to be.

So, I finished the first draft of "Haunted House Flipper!" I plan on going back through it now while it's somewhat fresh to rewrite little bits with those two love birds and their character reactions. I might not end up changing much because as it stands now they're still just friends at the end of the book. It might take some beta readers to let me know if that is a letdown or not. Either way, I will get this book cleaned up and published sometime this year. Once I finish the illustrations for my children's chapter book that one will be ready to publish too! After that I'm over halfway done writing my novel "Zombie Super Powers" and I have a completed Science Fiction novel called "We're Moving to Space" that needs a huge plot overhaul to fix the pacing. So let's see how many books I can publish this year! It will be at least two. Hopefully 3 or 4! I better get on it. Thanks for stopping by, and check out the data from my Writing Every Day in April below in a nice table and graph:

Here's a table showing how I did writing every day in April:

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Date	Daily Word Count	Total Word Count	Average Word Count
4/1	69	69	508.4
4/2	14	83
4/3	917	1000
4/4	347	1347
4/5	429	1776
4/6	874	2650
4/7	446	3096
4/8	725	3821
4/9	290	4111
4/10	996	5107
4/11	1069	6176
4/12	535	6711
4/13	382	7093
4/14	877	7970
4/15	0	7970
4/16	366	8336
4/17	967	9303
4/18	726	10029
4/19	631	10660
4/20	283	10943
4/21	434	11377
4/22	112	11489
4/23	618	12107
4/24	86	12193
4/25	1492	13685
4/26	316	14001
4/27	33	14034
4/28	258	14292
4/29	213	14505
4/30	747	15252

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Here's a nice little graph:

Haunted House Flipper | Manuscript Update

I'm currently about halfway through chapter 43 of my novel at 49,520 words. When I'm finished I'll have 50 chapters. That means I'm about 87% of the way done with the first draft! It's almost up to the NaNoWriMo standard of 50,000 words. That was actually my goal for the finished manuscript, but many of my chapters are running longer than 1,000 words. I'm okay with it.

I'm a huge believer in outlines, but I also think that you should feel free to change your outline as you write. I'm guessing the book will end up around 60K words. Some of my chapters end in the middle of a scene. I've been using the chapters to get the right length and pace to fit my story structure and plot. After I'm finished with the book and I know that things like my breaking into Act II story beat happens around the 25% mark and my midpoint happens around the halfway point, I'll probably combine some chapters. Okay, back to it. Thanks for stopping by!

Back From Vacation, Back to Writing

The picture above is one I took with my iPhone of a beautiful beach cove looking out into the Pacific Ocean in San Diego. I was just on vacation in SanDiego for about a week. I didn't get any writing done then as we were going nonstop from morning till night. It was a lot of fun. I love my family. The other pic below is of some awesome sea lions at La Jolla Cove in San Diego. While we were in seventy-degree weather it was dumping snow back at home. It was nice to get away for a while.

Now that I'm back my novel "Ghost Hunting Realtor" is coming along. The little meter in the upper right of this website is slowly filling up as I write more chapters. If you want to be an Alpha Reader feel free to check out the first draft of the novel as I post it chapter by chapter over at Wattpad. I do go through and give each chapter an edit, but now that I've finally learned story structure I'm not needing to go back and fix the story. Just the grammar and the way I describe things here and there. I also find a lot of funny typos made from using speech to text to write. I use my iPhone to transcribe my speech into text on the fly. It works surprisingly well but sometimes makes for some interesting word mix-ups. It's an incredibly fast way to write, though! Way faster than typing. I still prefer typing but speech to text is the fastest way to write and produces great dialog I can't seem to get on the keyboard. 

We also go to visit Legoland! That was really fun. I... er uh I mean - our kids had a lot of fun seeing all the amazing stuff made out of legos :) It was a fun trip to remember. Now I'm back shoveling snow and slapping words onto the screen to get the first draft of my novel written. I hope 2017 is treating you well. Thanks for stopping by!

Writing Plans for 2017

Widgets! Long ago I used to have little widgets on the upper right-hand side of my website with word count tracking meters. I just put some up again! They're fun! You can see my progress on the books I'm working on. I'm hoping to consistently update them and fill them up all year!

This year I'm hoping to publish at least 3 books:

1. A supernatural drama called "Ghost Hunting Realtor"
2. A mystery chapter book called "The Case of the Missing Snowman"
3. A Sci-Fi Thriller called "Zombie Super Powers"

Right now I'm working on finishing the novel I started during NaNoWriMo. That's "Ghost Hunting Realtor," and it's super fun! I should be finishing "Zombie Super Powers," because it's over halfway done, but I haven't touched it in ages and I have a lot of momentum going on this book.

Here's the synopsis:

A realtor stumbles on some magical items that can rid a property of ghosts. He decides to use them to change his career and finally become a house flipper, but on a grander scale. He wants to flip old haunted mansions that no one else will buy. Then he plans to rid them of their ghosts, renovate them, and sell them for a hefty profit. The ghosts turn out to be demons with swords, and getting them to leave isn't as easy as he'd hoped. He also discovers there's also a man in town buying up all the haunted mansions to destroy them and put up apartment complexes in their place. 

Last year I wrote a "The Case of the Missing Snowman." The first draft of the manuscript is completed, and it's even been handed off to beta readers for feedback. So after I go through their feedback I'll make another pass at the manuscript and make changes from their feedback. Then I'll give it one last polishing pass to try and spot any typos that still made it through or clear up any sentences that don't make sense - and it will be done! So what's the holdup? Why didn't I already do that and get this book published? Well because it's a chapter book. My oldest son got excited about reading chapter books and so I bought him a ton and started reading them myself. I loved them! They're super fun! And they have awesome illustrations. My chapter book needs to have awesome illustrations too, and that's the holdup. I still have a lot of illustrations to finish for my book.

The last book, called "Zombie Super Powers," is the novel I workshopped on The Roundtable Podcast. I have no idea why I stopped writing this book. It's really fun, it really moves and has tons of exciting scenes and I think it will be the most page turn inducing book I've written to date! So after I get these other two books out the door I'm hoping to finish this one in 2017.

That's all I got. Thanks for stopping by!

2016, A Year In Review

It's been a crazy year—for all of us. That said I did get some really exciting things done in my writing career! Here is a little table showing my accomplishments in 2016 and plans for 2017.

2016	2017
Destruction Road revised and published as a paperback.	The Case of the Missing Snowman publication
Sword and Urn revised and published in paperback and eBook	Ghost Slaying Realtor publication
The Case of the Missing Snowman written	Zombie Super Powers publication
Slug Teeth short story published in audio by The Melting Potcast, and published as an eBook	Sword and Urn audiobook published
Ghost Slaying Realtor novel started during NaNoWriMo	Destruction Road audiobook published

 

Destruction Road Revised and Published in Paperback

I wrote a novelette a long time ago and published it as an eBook by the name of "A Second Chance." It's about an abused teen who decides to run away, but he ends up destroying another family by taking all of his anger towards his dad out on a stranger. My friend, and fellow author, Timothy C. Ward was kind enough to go through the entire thing and edit it for me. He had a ton of great ideas and edits and this year I finally picked that old story up and went through all of his suggestions and made a ton of updates and revisions to my story. It is a much better story now and I'm really proud of it. I gave it a new title, a much better cover, and even published it as a paperback.

Here's a link to get Destruction Road free as an eBook, or for $5.99 as a handsome little paperback.

Sword and Urn Revised and Published

This year I revised and published my novella "Sword and Urn." It's available as an eBook and a Paperback making it the second paperback I've published. I'm really proud of it and think the paperback version looks great and feels wonderful in your hands. I'm very proud of the interior design and layout on that one.

Here's a link to buy Sword and Urn for $2.99 in eBook and $5.99 in paperback.

The Case of the Missing Snowman Written

I spent most of the year writing and illustrating my upcoming Chapter Book "The Case of the Missing Snowman." I finished writing it and have received a lot of feedback on it from beta readers, but I still have yet to give it one last polishing draft and complete all of the illustrations for it. It's at the top of my list for 2017 publication.

Ghost Slaying Realtor

I also started writing a book called "Ghost Slaying Realtor" for NaNoWriMo this year. I'm really excited about it and I plan to finish it and get it published in 2017.

Zombie Super Powers

I also am over halfway done writing a novel called "Zombie Super Powers." It's the book I served up to the chopping block when I went on The Roundtable Podcast to have it workshopped. The guys and the guest host, one of my favorite authors Dan Wells, came up with some really amazing ideas that helped me reshape the story into something way more exciting and fun than my original idea. I have no excuse for not having finished this novel. I'm really excited about it and I think it's the best novel I've written so far. I think it's a book I'm doing a good job of leaving all the boring stuff out of. It will be my most page-turn inducing novel I've written and I can't wait to get it out there. I'm hoping to finish and publish this novel in 2017 as well. It's already over halfway done, I need to get that thing out there.

So here's to: the first year I had books available in paperback, books longer than short stories put up for sale, and a very productive year of writing and publishing in 2017! As always, thanks for stopping by!