Updates on “Tales of the Supers”

I promise I have not yet abandoned this site! I have been working on several projects, not all of which are currently listed here… mainly because I don’t actually have titles for the series these stories would fall into. They’re getting a lot of interest from at least one of my pre-readers, though, and that’s encouraging to me.

You may also notice that the site layout has changed. I’ve been trying to find a WordPress theme that is (1) free and (2) appropriate for an author and (3) appropriate for the sort of things this author writes. For now, I like this one, but I have a few others I’m fond of and may eventually  play with.

But I have promised an update on Tales of the Supers. Somewhere back in October, I mentioned that I had been working on edits. The external hard drive that had my most recent copy of the edits crashed and burned, taking with it all the changes I had made to the document. Naturally, this was a bit depressive, and so instead I start focusing on writing Endless Loop.

While going through several of my backup discs yesterday, though, I found a copy of the edits. It wasn’t the most recent copy, but it was better than starting from scratch. In point of reference, there are five chapters and an epilogue to Tales of the Supers. The version I lost had edits done all the way to Chapter Four; the version I located had edits through the end of Chapter Two. So I lost half my work… but that’s better than losing all of it.

That in mind, I’ve been editing like a fiend these last few nights, and I’m hoping to have it ready to have one more check done by the end of the weekend. I would like to have it available on CreateSpace by my birthday at the end of February, if not sooner.

This will, however, push the release date for Color of Life: Endless Loop Book 1 back a bit, but hopefully it won’t be by too much.

Finally, please continue to bear with me. As I mentioned in the middle of October, I am unemployed. I’m still unemployed, now in February. In only a few weeks, my unemployment will run out. I have over 240 applications out, but I’ve had less than 10 interviews. I will put the PayPal link back up, because I’m beyond having any pride left.

Twitter fiend?

Apparently I’ve been updating Twitter madly, which is new for me. I’m usually a bit too long winded for 140 characters. I’m trying my best to keep it brief, though. So far it’s working.

As far as NaNoWriMo goes, I’m about 5000 words behind where I need to be for the day. I’m going to try to marathon today and see if I can’t get caught back up. There is the big family thing next Thursday through Saturday, so I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to do massive amounts of writing then. I’ll just have to do my best until I leave Wednesday.

And to keep myself honest, I’m posting my word count widget through the NaNoWriMo site here.

Author photos, at last!

At long last, the author photos are now available!

Of the set that Kari Bishop and I took, we ended up with three good ones. I put it to Facebook to decide which one was the best… and it came to a tie. So I have made an executive decision: one will be used on my author page here on the site, one will be used for my profile image on Facebook and Twitter, and the third will be used on the actual books. So I’m thinking that’s a good thing… other than WordPress not cooperating with my photo posting needs. (It refuses to resize. Grr! I’ll wrangle it in Photoshop when it’s not the middle of the night.)

In the meanwhile, I leave you with the three photos!

Ellie Hicks Ellie Hicks Ellie Hicks

A teaser

Endless Loop 1: Color of Life

This post is mostly for one thing and one thing alone: a teaser image. I’ve finished the cover for Endless Loop 1: Color of Life. The editing on the book is still ongoing, but the cover itself is done.

I’m at work on Endless Loop 2: Blood and Sacrifice for NaNoWriMo this year. As of right now, I’m over 9,000 (!!!) words in, and I think it’s going quite nicely. The live-in pre-reader, Kari Bishop, enjoyed the first chapter; I haven’t gotten her to look at Chapter Two yet. (Though maybe I should be making her read Color of Life in an editing capacity before I give her too much of Blood and Sacrifice, huh?)

So, yeah, this is what happens when I have access to free stock images, Photoshop, and pretty fonts. I make covers. They’re not as good as professional covers by any means, but I’m not a professional cover artist.

And now… back to Blood and Sacrifice. Wish me luck.

Major-ish site updates

Okay, so apparently I’ve been slacking on updating this site. I plead the fact I’ve been working on the editing for Tales of the Supers 1 and writing on Endless Loop: Color of Life. I’m within maybe 10,000 words of being done on Color of Life, and if my computers will cooperate, I’ll be done with the editing of TotS1 before much longer as well. 

The sad fact is that I’m currently unemployed, which would think would mean I would have more time for writing and editing. Sadly, that is not the case. We’re currently living off my roommate’s $400 a week job, which doesn’t stretch too far, so I’m madly applying to jobs everywhere I can. In fact, I counted them up and I’ve put in 130 applications in one month. Three-fourths of those are for full-time positions; I’ve only started applying for part-time jobs in the last two weeks.

Not knowing if you’ll be able to make your rent or pay your bills has a way of causing some stress, which in turn has a way of depleting creativity. So, sadly, until I know I can pay my bills, I’m not progressing on all of this as quickly as I would like.

Hopefully, though, that will change.

Either way, though… I am beyond pride.



Site updates

I’ve made some more updates to the site. So far, it’s just been changing the layout (I think it’s pretty much obvious that I prefer the darker layouts) and I’ve add an RSS feed and an email icon. Both of these are located on the sidebar.

The first book in Endless Loop, entitled Color of Life, is almost done with writing. I’m still going through the first Tales of the Supers book in editing, because all the changes I made were somehow lost.  I did get that book back from the second editor, and she was as brutal as I had asked for. There are a lot of changes to be made. I had made many of them, but again, the changes were somehow lost. Don’t ask me how.

I am finished moving, but I am in no way finished unpacking. I moved in at the beginning of August, but I don’t think a box has been opened since the middle of September.

NaNoWriMo will be beginning in a few weeks, and I’m hoping to have Color of Life completed, so that I can work on the second book in Endless Loop for this November’s book of the month. It will be entitled Blood and Sacrifice. Here’s hoping that I’m able to do this.

Welcome Aboard

After quite a bit of delay, I’m finally working on getting content available on the site. It’s still a bit lean, but I am working on it! Slowly but surely, I promise you there will be content.

Writing has, sadly, been a slow moving process. Part of that has been for health issues, but a lot of it has been a horrid case of writer’s block. I suppose I could blame that on the health issues as well, but it seems like a bit of a cop-out.

The first book in Endless Loop is about 75% completed. The first in the series of superhero stories is about 30% completed. The Knickers fic is, at least for now, dropped in favor of stories that I think I can finish in a decent amount of time. As for the others I’m working on, I really not in a place where I can say too much on their progress. I like what’s written on them, but I’m not sure how well they would do out there in the world.

So hopefully, there will be more to this site soon. Hopefully, changing the site over from static HTML to a CMS-controlled one will help as well. One less thing to handle, right?