Update: Writing, FileMaker and Blog

It’s 2013 and I’ve already let the blog slide a lot. I’m thinking of redoing my schedule. Yes again. Since other things are taking up my time, rethinking my blog schedule will have to wait for a bit.

~ Writing ~
On the writing front… I haven’t been. 😛 After finishing the Serenity, I decided to rest for the rest of the year. 2013 flipped over and my EC editor said she would have CREAM back to me soon. And she got it to me last night.

I spent today working on it and got through Chapter 4 (pg 36 of 103). It’s mostly finding replacements for overused words and elaborating on certain points to firm up my world building. The thing that’s slowing me down is FileMaker. I created a database in Filemaker to house book information for easy reference should I ever feel like revisiting a created world or characters. And there’s only one way for the information to get into that database — I have to put it there.

So as I’m doing my edits, I’m keeping an eye out for important data to add to the database. Important data such as character names (so I don’t reuse them), character descriptions and personality traits, major plot points and random information about the world created in the book.

The whole point is so I don’t have to re-read an entire novel to find one small factoid. I will enter all my books in the database, whether I plan to revisit them or not, because of the character names. I don’t want to reuse a name by accident and have people thinking the books are related when they aren’t.

After I finish the edits for CREAM, I’ll jump into writing the synopsis for the Serenity sequel and doing a final round of self-edits before I send the book off to submissions. Which, that final round of self-edits will also be when I enter the book info into the database. That will pretty much be how I do things from now on — final round of self-edits equals database updating. I can’t do it while I’m writing the book because there’s too much chance I’ll change/tweak stuff.