Writer's Sketchbook 9

    As I said in my last post, I'm taking a break from my work on Rose.  Trying to balance all the different characters and all their different plots became overwhelming and upsetting.  I'm definitely going to keep working on the Magique Trilogy, but I needed a break so badly.  I was dying for some traditional fantasy writing.  I tried reading some of my old favorite books, but it wasn't enough.
    So I switched focus for a brief period of time to Powerful.  I posted the first chapter here, but it's clearly not going to be the first chapter of the novel.  As I sat down to write the next chapter (which will most likely become the actual first chapter), I realized I hadn't done character sketches, and this book has a lot of characters.  I will be working on developing all the characters over the next little while, and posting them here for you to see.  Here is the first of those sketches.

Crown Princess Kylanore (Kyla) Tykranne

A Brief Update About My Hiatus

    Sorry I've been gone for a while.  Life has been crazy.

    First, my computer has been out of commission for a week and a half, making it very difficult to blog.  I can post from my phone, but it's a lot more complicated and I don't like doing it, so I haven't.

    Second, happy holidays!  I spent 10 hours in the car driving home for the holidays (I'm still back in good old California!) and being around so much family has taken up a lot of my time, so I haven't been able to blog.

    Third, I'm taking a pause from writing Rose.  It has become very difficult and overwhelming to write.  The stress led to a lot of writer's block, so after a few weeks, I decided to dedicate some of my brain power to working on Powerful.  I've been saving the idea to work on so that I could focus on Rose, but I'm in desperate need of some traditional fantasy writing, so I'm giving myself a break.  (Also, I spent the majority of the past week working on my wedding scrapbook which never got finished.  But now it is finished and I don't have that hanging over my head anymore!  Whoo!)

    That's pretty much the extent of my update.  Here's a random writing quote.

    ~Alyson

It's Up!

    My very first author interview was posted this morning!  Here's the link!  Thank you to Chanel Blake for taking the time to interview me!  Here you can check out her other author interviews.  The one right before mine is H. L. Burke, who I mentioned previously on my blog twice, in this post, and this post.  There's plenty of fun things to look at.  Now enjoy this picture of my book nerdy adorableness when I was little.

    ~Alyson

Writer's Sketchbook 7 & 8

    That's right, I've got two more character sketches for you.  I should have done all these months ago (because they've all appeared in Rose multiple times), but I'm lame and lazy and my writing suffered because of my laziness.
    I'm back to rewriting.  I got like 3 chapters farther this time.  Yay.  But at least the changes are minor and shouldn't take too long to get through.
    But I'm not here to talk about rewrites.  I'm here to introduce Dahlia and Florian.  Who my readers have already met.  But not formally, because I'm lazy and tried to skip my way through my writing.  But not anymore.  
    And in case you're wondering, that flower is a Dahlia.  The snow white Dahlia.  The flower Dahlia was named after.  You're welcome.

Writer's Sketchbook 5 & 6

    This sketchbook will be different than the ones I did for Rose. Now that I have Scrivener, there's actually a character sheet for me to fill out.  I used it with Rose so all my information would be in one place (because if I have to switch my screen it's very easy for me to get distracted by things like Facebook and Pinterest), but I originally just copied and pasted my character sketches into the page.  It was very unorganized.  Now that I'm starting fresh with new writing in Scrivener, I decided to use the Scrivener template for my character sketches.  
    Today I'm going to post two character sketches because I'm really excited about it.  I spent all week working on these sketches because they are really important for the next chapter of Rose, and I felt really uncomfortable moving forward until I had all this information figured out.  Now it's figured out, and I'm super excited to present to you Ella and Henrie for the next installment of the Magique Trilogy.

Ten Days

    Just a quick tidbit of information-
    I had to write my very first author bio yesterday (which was totally surreal) because my very first author interview is coming out in ten days!  Keep your eyes open for it on December 15th!

    I'm really excited to share it with everyone, so of course I'll post it here once it gets published.  Anyway, I figured I'd talk about my author bio today.  Having never written one before, it was quite the challenge.  I had to try and balance professional with personal, and not having a ton of professional experience made it difficult, so I had to present myself in a way that would attract positive attention.  It was hard.

Best Day Ever

    Christmas of 2007, my grandma gave me a book called The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.  I fell in love with the book and begged for the rest of the series.  The second book, Enna Burning, is still my favorite book to this day.
    Over the years I've had to buy newer versions of The Goose Girl and Enna Burning because they've been worn down and destroyed in my backpack and purse.  The original 2007 copy of The Goose Girl got destroyed by a leaky water bottle too, so in 2011 my grandma bought me a new hardback copy that I've somehow managed to keep in perfect condition.  
    Enna Burning got lost along the way when I left for college,
 and I couldn't find it anywhere.  It was heartbreaking to lose my favorite book, so my grandma bought me a new hardback copy of that one too, completing my collection (because the last two I originally owned in hardback).  Eventually my original copy was found (one of my sisters borrowed it and didn't return it), so I have two copies of it.

NaNoWriMo 2014 The End

    Today is December 1st, 2014. NaNoWriMo is officially over. It ended at 11:59 pm last night. My word count for November is 20,226. That's right, I hit made it to my 20,000 word goal. Here's the official week by week tally:

    Week 1- 6,255 words - 20,372 words total
    Week 2- 9,273 words - 15,528 words so far - 29,645 words total
    Week 3- 4,435 words - 19,963 words so far - 34,080 words total
    Week 4- 263 words - 20,226 words so far - 34,343 words total

    Yeah, this past week wasn't very awesome. I was crazy busy with my family here, and I only focused on my writing on Monday.  I didn't even get another chapter written, so technically I still can't claim that I'm halfway through my novel.  The only reason I hit my goal was because when I rewrote chapter 14 from first person, I cut out a lot of Phillippe's thoughts and forgot to put them back in.  So I added them into chapter 15 because they were really important to the story line and his part was only a few lines.