The website is www.IndieBookAwards.com. The site will be updated within the next few weeks to display this year's winners.
Showing posts with label The Corpus Chronicles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Corpus Chronicles. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Book Awards!
It is my absolute honor to let you all know that The Essence of Aptitude received a finalist position in The Next Generation Indie Author Awards. This day was a total blur of shock, excitement, and immense gratitude. A huge thank you to everyone who supported me through the publishing process, and to my wonderful readers and reviewers for being so awesome.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
The Corpus Chronicles Book 2 News
About half an hour ago I put the finishing touches on the first draft of book 2 of the Corpus Chronicles! I know it's been a while, so here are all the updates, and yes, I finally committed to a title.
- Now that the first draft is done, here is my expected timeline:
1. Self editing - through to the end of November (that is if I don't do NaNo this year)
2. Beta readers - I'll probably try and make sure they get back to me by the end of December, but schedules vary. Hopefully work based on their comments will be done by mid January.
3. Copy editing - will aim to be done by end January
4. Cover art! - My favorite part. This will probably take from four to six weeks to finalize, but the process might overlap with some of the final copy editing
5. At some point in here I will have to write a detailed book 3 outline to make sure everything matches up before I send book 2 out. Right now I just have about a page and a half covered with a messy jumble of ideas.
In a previous version of this post, I added a title release, but then I realized I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment.
As you know, schedules have a nasty habit of changing themselves around on a whim, but hopefully Book 2 will be in print very soon.
- Now that the first draft is done, here is my expected timeline:
1. Self editing - through to the end of November (that is if I don't do NaNo this year)
2. Beta readers - I'll probably try and make sure they get back to me by the end of December, but schedules vary. Hopefully work based on their comments will be done by mid January.
3. Copy editing - will aim to be done by end January
4. Cover art! - My favorite part. This will probably take from four to six weeks to finalize, but the process might overlap with some of the final copy editing
5. At some point in here I will have to write a detailed book 3 outline to make sure everything matches up before I send book 2 out. Right now I just have about a page and a half covered with a messy jumble of ideas.
In a previous version of this post, I added a title release, but then I realized I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment.
As you know, schedules have a nasty habit of changing themselves around on a whim, but hopefully Book 2 will be in print very soon.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Camp NaNo ending thoughts
This year was my first time doing Camp NaNo. I have done the main NaNoWriMo once, two years ago, and wrote most of a sci-fi book that I haven't worked on since. This time, I was using NaNo to try and finish my first draft of book 2. I already had a big chunk written going into NaNo, so reaching my word count goal should not have been a problem, considering that I already had my entire plot outlined chapter by chapter. But, as a pretty picture of a stack of freshly printed paper hasn't popped along my twitter feed, you can probably guess that I did not.
When I did NaNo the first time, I reached and surpassed my set word count goal, which was about the same as what I set for book 2. The main difference I felt while writing the two stories was that the first time, when I was writing the sci-fi book, I liked the idea of being a published author some day in the future, but I wasn't writing said manuscript for the purpose of publishing it one day. I loved writing, I had a few friends that were doing NaNo, and I went along for the ride. When I began, I didn't have any sort of outline and made it up as I went (which was all fun and games until I realized that I had fifty pages of useless scenes and got my outlining act together).
The biggest difference was that when I wrote that book two years ago, I was writing for me instead of focusing on writing for an audience. That was both a good and a bad thing. Yes, I was a lot less insecure about how my words would be received and that allowed for me to explore ideas with a lot less restraint. But that also had a flip side. Because I wasn't concerned about presenting that manuscript to a reader, the story got away from me and chunks of it were not well thought out/just plain sloppy.
While working on book 2, I didn't have the same problems as I had a clear picture in my head of where the plot was going. However, I had EOA already published. I was receiving both positive and negative feedback on it, and not nearly as many reviews as I had hoped for, despite the endless lists of reviewers I had contacted. I found myself wishing that I had either tried harder to traditionally publish or not published at all. All of my frustrations with marketing EOA translated into fear while writing book 2, specifically the fear of my books vanishing into obscurity, and that fear turned into writer's block.
Camp NaNo helped with that fear a lot, and for the first two weeks, I wrote until my hands fell off. I had awesome cabin mates for encouragement and, when needed, friendly competition, and I more than doubled my starting word count. However, the fear got the better of me during the second two weeks and I fell off the wagon, creeping towards my word goal at a snail's pace. I ended NaNo with a handful of chapters left to write, so hopefully the wait for book 2 will only be a few more months, depending on how the writing goes from here on out.
Anyways, little Smudge doesn't seem stressed. I shouldn't be either :)
He's practically mastered meditation. I could learn a lot from him.
(Of course, right after I type that he runs outside for an endless barking frenzy...)
-Esha
Thursday, July 2, 2015
The side-effects of indie authoring a series
Hey everyone! I know it's been a while since the last time I posted - sorry about that. I've been wrapped up in the madness that is writing Book 2 (which I am glad to say that I finally have a working title that I like for... but I'm not going to say it because, knowing me, it's going to change again in a few weeks :P). So, in the heat of the writing marathon, I've put the old blog to the side a bit which I am not happy about. I think one the main problem was that I was starting to feel really down about the whole writing process while marching along through the endless typing that is book 2.
You see, when I first set out to write EOA, it wasn't nearly as complex of a story as it became. As I outlined, the story evolved tenfold (as stories tend to do), and my original plan of EOA being a stand alone novel was quickly swept away. (Here's the bit where you might not understand everything I'm talking about it you haven't read EOA- I'll do my best to explain the relevance of various names or places from the story. If you have, yay! Keep on reading! If you haven't, you can try to trudge through this bit or skip down a paragraph). In my first outline, the basic structure of the society was the same, but the story was supposed to center on a young woman from the Heart (the slum district) named Juliet Fenn who gets ranked as the First (she basically becomes a very big deal) and tries to use her new position to instigate change in the way the system is run. The book was supposed to be about the political battle that would ensue and the adversity she would face in an effort to make things better for the people she cared about. I had wanted to show the difficulties the people in the Heart faced through flashbacks, but as I was writing, it didn't feel right. That's when Gwendolyn was born in my mind (Juliet's twin sister who stays trapped in the slum districts). As I went on and Gwendolyn began to flourish as a character, I knew that she had to be more than a lense to see the Heart through as changes took place. Her character was independent, feisty, and bullheaded, and the idea of her watching injustices take place without getting involved didn't seem realistic at all. I created the Fracture (a revolutionary group) purely as a stage for her to showcase her strengths, but I knew that she wouldn't be willing to accept the Fracture's extremist ideals if Juliet's character didn't take a sharp turn away from the political idealist I had originally intended her to be. And once I was sure of that, it became clear that the story wasn't going to fit into one book, so I split up my outline into three and bulked up each piece.
Okay, so if you didn't read the last paragraph, I explained why EOA became the first book of The Corpus Chronicles and not a stand alone novel. Moving on... when I wrote EOA I was in love with the story. I was mesmerized by the world and the different personalities that were developing though the cast. And then I made the rookie author mistake of thinking that everyone else would think so too. I didn't plan to go indie in the beginning. I wanted my name to be on one of those shiny covers on the shelves of every Barnes and Nobles (I mean, come on, who doesn't?) under the protective wing of one of those big name publishing companies.
When I realized that if I wanted to see EOA in print anytime soon, I would have to go it alone, I didn't entirely understand what that meant. I didn't understand the hours of marketing it would take to sell one copy or the difficulty of booking a handful of reviews. When a family member said they didn't fully understand an aspect of the society, it was like a punch in the stomach. The beautiful cover art I was so happy with initially became something I feared, and I would find myself wondering if putting EOA out there had been a mistake. And then I would open the book to check a name or place while getting the wheels of book 2 turning in the beginning and I would fall in love with the the story all over again.
I can't truthfully say I've gotten past those fears. I think it's something natural every artist who shares their work with others faces, just another part of the job. Now I'm in the middle of book 2, and I'm facing a new problem while writing. I had heard other authors saying that writing a series was a long term commitment, and to not get yourself roped into one if you weren't absolutely sure you could handle it. It wasn't that I ignored the advice - I just assumed that I could handle it. (Now this is the bit where all that rambling I've been doing all ties together or so I hope) But what changed since last fall when I wrote the first chapter of EOA shelved it to play with later was publishing it and all those fears that came with seeing the book in print. Writing started to seem like something I had to do instead of something I wanted and liked to do. It wasn't that I lost my love for the story, but more that I had deviated so far from my initial plans. I wasn't traditionally published, and I wasn't going to be until I wrote and published the rest of The Corpus Chronicles and then a new manuscript, which I then would to take through the query process all over again and without the carefree optimism of a novice.
Writing book 2 and finishing the series has become a greater challenge than I ever expected. This is mainly because of my own insecurities about being an indie author and the challenges I face because of it, but, as people tend to do, I've said nothing about the good parts - particularly about how absolutely amazingly fun the entire indie publication process was. I have complete control over the title, the cover art, and I am able to write about out of the box topics and ideas that would not be approved by those big name publishing companies I love so much. I've connected with other indie authors and read amazing work I probably wouldn't have found if I wasn't indie myself. Like anything, indie authoring is full of high and low points, and is up to the author to make sure the bad bits don't overshadow the good, and when you write a series, it's like multiplying all those little good and bad bits, the fear and the fun, by a lot.
As promised, one long overdue, non-proofread ramble.
-Esha
You see, when I first set out to write EOA, it wasn't nearly as complex of a story as it became. As I outlined, the story evolved tenfold (as stories tend to do), and my original plan of EOA being a stand alone novel was quickly swept away. (Here's the bit where you might not understand everything I'm talking about it you haven't read EOA- I'll do my best to explain the relevance of various names or places from the story. If you have, yay! Keep on reading! If you haven't, you can try to trudge through this bit or skip down a paragraph). In my first outline, the basic structure of the society was the same, but the story was supposed to center on a young woman from the Heart (the slum district) named Juliet Fenn who gets ranked as the First (she basically becomes a very big deal) and tries to use her new position to instigate change in the way the system is run. The book was supposed to be about the political battle that would ensue and the adversity she would face in an effort to make things better for the people she cared about. I had wanted to show the difficulties the people in the Heart faced through flashbacks, but as I was writing, it didn't feel right. That's when Gwendolyn was born in my mind (Juliet's twin sister who stays trapped in the slum districts). As I went on and Gwendolyn began to flourish as a character, I knew that she had to be more than a lense to see the Heart through as changes took place. Her character was independent, feisty, and bullheaded, and the idea of her watching injustices take place without getting involved didn't seem realistic at all. I created the Fracture (a revolutionary group) purely as a stage for her to showcase her strengths, but I knew that she wouldn't be willing to accept the Fracture's extremist ideals if Juliet's character didn't take a sharp turn away from the political idealist I had originally intended her to be. And once I was sure of that, it became clear that the story wasn't going to fit into one book, so I split up my outline into three and bulked up each piece.
Okay, so if you didn't read the last paragraph, I explained why EOA became the first book of The Corpus Chronicles and not a stand alone novel. Moving on... when I wrote EOA I was in love with the story. I was mesmerized by the world and the different personalities that were developing though the cast. And then I made the rookie author mistake of thinking that everyone else would think so too. I didn't plan to go indie in the beginning. I wanted my name to be on one of those shiny covers on the shelves of every Barnes and Nobles (I mean, come on, who doesn't?) under the protective wing of one of those big name publishing companies.
When I realized that if I wanted to see EOA in print anytime soon, I would have to go it alone, I didn't entirely understand what that meant. I didn't understand the hours of marketing it would take to sell one copy or the difficulty of booking a handful of reviews. When a family member said they didn't fully understand an aspect of the society, it was like a punch in the stomach. The beautiful cover art I was so happy with initially became something I feared, and I would find myself wondering if putting EOA out there had been a mistake. And then I would open the book to check a name or place while getting the wheels of book 2 turning in the beginning and I would fall in love with the the story all over again.
I can't truthfully say I've gotten past those fears. I think it's something natural every artist who shares their work with others faces, just another part of the job. Now I'm in the middle of book 2, and I'm facing a new problem while writing. I had heard other authors saying that writing a series was a long term commitment, and to not get yourself roped into one if you weren't absolutely sure you could handle it. It wasn't that I ignored the advice - I just assumed that I could handle it. (Now this is the bit where all that rambling I've been doing all ties together or so I hope) But what changed since last fall when I wrote the first chapter of EOA shelved it to play with later was publishing it and all those fears that came with seeing the book in print. Writing started to seem like something I had to do instead of something I wanted and liked to do. It wasn't that I lost my love for the story, but more that I had deviated so far from my initial plans. I wasn't traditionally published, and I wasn't going to be until I wrote and published the rest of The Corpus Chronicles and then a new manuscript, which I then would to take through the query process all over again and without the carefree optimism of a novice.
Writing book 2 and finishing the series has become a greater challenge than I ever expected. This is mainly because of my own insecurities about being an indie author and the challenges I face because of it, but, as people tend to do, I've said nothing about the good parts - particularly about how absolutely amazingly fun the entire indie publication process was. I have complete control over the title, the cover art, and I am able to write about out of the box topics and ideas that would not be approved by those big name publishing companies I love so much. I've connected with other indie authors and read amazing work I probably wouldn't have found if I wasn't indie myself. Like anything, indie authoring is full of high and low points, and is up to the author to make sure the bad bits don't overshadow the good, and when you write a series, it's like multiplying all those little good and bad bits, the fear and the fun, by a lot.
As promised, one long overdue, non-proofread ramble.
-Esha
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