Sadie Jay

    I can't seem to get a good feel for Embers and Flame . I'm not sure if it's the world around me sucking at my soul or if it's the story itself; if maybe I'm just not finding the chemistry between my characters. It seems to come slowly, sentence by sentence, but I need to move faster. I've got a couple of other stories percolating in my brain. One's a stand-alone and the other is the prequel to When Silverfist Dance . It's basically going to be Devin and Nick's story just prior to when they meet Barry.      So my plan is to go ahead with the Nano Summercamp challenge and see where "Embers" goes, and if it doesn't develop in that month, I'll set it aside and start on something else. Real life really does seem to be messing with my head right now!

I've gotten into manga and anime over the course of the last year or two. Not heavily into it, mind you, just enjoying a bit here and there. Yuri on Ice was lovely and enchanting. Beautiful, I thought. And somehow, I've followed that up with Killing Stalking (which is a Korean manhwa), which is quite the opposite! It's disturbing, but the psychology of it is fascinating. I get a lot of my writing ideas from pictures and little memories from my past. I wonder where the creator of Killing Stalking got her inspiration!

Thank you to everyone who read Like Cracks In The Sidewalk . I've taken it down now, but I'm still looking for beta-readers. Let me know if you're interested. I'm going to finish up a few edits and start working on query letters and writing up a synopsis or 4. It would be great if every publisher wanted the same thing, but no, that would make it too easy! This one wants a two-page, that one wants a 5. Oh, well. I've been having trouble getting myself started on the Ben and Cherry story (which I have tentatively titled Embers and Fire ), but I've finally got a plan. I'm going to spend the rest of March getting my notes together. And I mean literal notes. I've got scraps of paper littering my desk with story lines and dialog. The trick now is to type them up, put them "in order" and hopefully, when I'm done, I'll have a fairly detailed outline. I've signed up for the April Nano challenge with the thought that it will be the incentiv