New Posting Schedule for May and IWSG

I can't believe May is already here. April flew by and I'm not even sure what I accomplished. Let's see what we can discover in my IWSG post. If you want to learn more about this monthly blog hop, sign up, or just find more people who are participating, CLICK HERE.

And...

Although I participated in the A to Z Challenge last month, I felt like the majority of my time was spent waiting to close on my house. I tried to write but found it hard to concentrate. There were a few emotional frustrations dealing with my WIP as well, but I'll get to those in a minute. Since Talia didn't want me to write about her, I worked on three other projects last month.

1. Exiled--a short story originally started for a Unicorn Bell Anthology. We decided not to put out the anthology at this time, but after struggling to come up with this thing for a year I found that I sort of liked it. It's scifi all the way and deals with assassins and travel through time and space.

2. Fallen--a short story that you first got a glimpse of during a Show vs. Tell Blogfest in 2011. I worked on it last year and messed it up. This month I believe I've fixed it with the help of my awesome writer's group. It's on submission so we'll see what happens.

3. Fade Into Me--a YA Contemporary Fantasy (with my scifi twist on it). I pulled this out a week ago because I found myself thinking a lot about Ryanne after I wrote about her for Y day. After a day reading the 34K that I had written I wanted to dive back in. Yesterday I emailed the first 140 pages to my daughter and asked her to just read for 10 minutes and tell me what she thought.

She read for an hour and then said, "Dude! This is really good!"

I just wish I didn't think this was THE ONE, you know? It keeps paralyzing me and I'm afraid I'll never finish.

Which leads me to the insecure part of this post. I really wanted to have Search For Knowledge, the sequel to The Magic Wakes finished by now. It's been outlined for two years and half written for one. I stopped writing while I finished all the revisions on TMW and hoped to ride the high of being published to finish SFK.  I like what I've written so far, but I keep letting the inner editor interrupt the writing. What little I did write last month, I wrote in my notebook. For some reason I just couldn't deal with the doc open on my computer. It was way too intimidating.

I think I finally got to the bottom of my frustration.

I need to stop reading reviews.

Yeah, I know. Here's the funny thing. The written reviews have all been good and I can say they've made my day at times. However, there have been some things mentioned that I agree with, but I can't go back and fix it now. The frustrating thing is that 75% of the mentioned issues are things that got cut from the final product. Knowing that my instincts were right, but I let myself be talked out of them, is hard.

I feel like I let Talia down. Maybe that's why she isn't happy with me right now. She doesn't trust me to tell her story the way it's coming to me.

But I will.

I've learned a lot these last few months and I'm ready to take her story to the next level. If she'll start talking to me again.

How are your characters treating you right now?

Mid-Day Update:
I realize that I didn't post my new schedule for May! I'm going to post on Tuesdays and Fridays for May and probably the rest of the summer. I'll need the extra time to unpack and organize my house. And then it will be time to travel, sit by the pool, camp, etc.

I'll return to M, W, F posting this fall when my kids return to school.