It's been just over three weeks, but a lot has happened since my last post.
Ten days ago my 3-book deal with Sourcebooks was announced in Publisher's Marketplace and I was finally able to shriek and leap about with joy (or, okay, wave both fists in the air and emit a kind of teapot sound (which you'll see Rose do in Curves For Days when she too receives exciting news).
Then I finished work on the second manuscript and submitted that a little early (my inner procrastinator doesn't know quite what to make of this).
And now I am alternately taking some time off and thinking about the manuscript for the third book. The one I think of as Sin Wagon. I've taken those index cards outlining each chapter back down off my planning board, and I carry them with me pretty much everywhere I go as I think about which kinds of situations and conversations and settings will best let me show what's going on with these characters, in their lives and their heads and their hearts but also deep down inside at a level maybe they themselves aren't aware of.
It's almost time for me to just sit down and do some writing on it. I know that however long I wait, however long I spend thinking about it up front, there will still be things I'll need to rethink and rewrite later. I wrote most of the first chapter a while back and I already know that part of it needs to change, and how that part should be different. It's just my process ... Think. Write. Reread. Think more. Revise.
Or at least that's my process now. It's changed some since I started and I imagine it will keep changing. I get great ideas from other writers on Twitter about how they go about things, how they work around obstacles, how they jar their ideas and words loose when they've become stuck, and that's fun. Shout out to Jenny Lane, who writes beautiful, swoony love stories with queer characters; I plan to use her "just write out the dialogue first" (no descriptions, no dialog tags--those can be added in later) method to get a jump start on several chapters, to get myself going and build up the kind of momentum that leads to enough progress that finishing the manuscript seems less overwhelming.
And then once I have it written, I can reread and fix things to my heart's content, at least until I hit a deadline. Shout out to whoever it was who clued me in to Word's immersive read-aloud feature to help with that; there's nothing like hearing a not-quite-robot voice read back your words to catch typos and awkward bits!
So, tomorrow, back into the writing I'll dive.
Happy Autumn, everybody.

Today I finished plotting my next novel. I had started it a few years ago and gotten it about 3/4 of the way written before I decided that my earlier manuscripts needed a lot of work, and that while I COULD keep cranking out new and deeply flawed stories, it might be better to get some of them into respectable shape. I set this one aside and went back to "fix" the older ones, but this one--which, in my head, I call "Sin Wagon"--has been in the back of my mind the whole time.
So now it's plotted out on neat little index cards, one chapter per card, two scenes per chapter.
I didn't used to do this, this careful planning and plotting and making use of index cards; I just sat down and wrote what I was thinking, sometimes longhand and sometimes by typing. The change in method wasn't due to any big philosophical shift in my mind. I just learned new stuff about length and form and expectations for romance novels. Some other time maybe I'll write about the massive number of things I had to learn, and where/how I learned some of them.
But anyway, as I learned more, I realized I needed a better way of keeping track of all the things I was doing in my stories, so that they had a prayer of ending up looking and sounding like what people in the publishing world think they should. The index card method is my way of keeping track. Tomorrow after reading through the cards, I'll attach them to my story board, which is divided into 4 sections, each making up a quarter of the story. Then, when I start rewriting, I can either work straight through from beginning to end or, if I get stuck and bogged down and don't feel like writing the next chapter in line, I can pluck a card containing a scene I DO feel like working on and write that. Eventually they'll all get done. Progress is progress.
The other thing I've been doing lately, besides plotting my own next story, is reading lots of other good books. I enjoy mysteries, domestic and legal thrillers, speculative fiction, social science non-fiction, current events ... There's always way more interesting stuff than I can read, and thank heavens for that.
My own genre is no exception. I'm thrilled whenever I find a new romance author whose writing I love, especially if I then learn that they have many more books out for me to work my way through. My newest author "discovery"--though I feel like I was really late to the party on this one--is Emily Henry. I just finished and loved my first of hers ("People You Meet on Vacation") and am on the wait-list at my library for 2 more. Those are all contemporary romances, which is my sub-genre too.
I also love reading historical romance, and I've just finished rereading Grace Burrowes's "The Laird" and immediately checked out the other 2 in that series. Ms. Burrowes is a go-to author for me; I've read at least 20 of her books and found them all beautifully written with male characters who are thoughtful and well-meaning even when they're flat out wrong about something. I guess this is why I enjoy rereading hers.
Finally, I got my hands on a copy of Kwana Jackson's "Real Men Knit," which I need to read really fast before her new book comes out this week! So I'm looking forward to a busy productive week.
I wish you the same.