Category Archives: Heart of Darkness

I’m in a plotting and planning mood right now. I think it’s a vague attempt to escape writing synopses for Love Immortal. It has been quite productive. I’ve plotted five of my A Day in the Life series short romance stories and have written three of them. I’m planning to write eight of them this year and have chosen which characters will feature. I have to plot another three, but it shouldn’t be too difficult since they’re only 4000 word scenes.

I did figure out my rough schedule for the year to see what it was going to look like. Conclusion: Frightening.

I will write the first draft of Heart of Darkness in February, and after that I need to schedule in two more drafts each on Heart of Darkness, Forbidden Blood and Ascension. And after that I need to proof all three, and write their synopses, etc. When I totted this up on a calendar, allowing for writing, editing and proofing my A Day in the Life stories too, it turns out that to do everything minus the synopses will take me until the end of September. Blech.

I hate it when I figure things out and it basically says – yes, you’re going to be editing, editing and editing until September! Congratulations! Of course, another story will come along and bump that date a bit because I’ll write it in some fevered attempt to escape editing hell. I think it’s a special circle of Hell reserved for writers… or at least writers who aren’t lazy and do edit and do several drafts on their stories to perfect them.

Of course, there’s only one thing for it. I’ll just have to get my head down and get on with it. I’m not going to rush things though. I like to be thorough with my writing and do things properly. If I get my head down I should be able to shave some time off my predicted timescales. A few days off each soon adds up when you’re talking second and third drafts on three novels. If I manage to get three days off each, I claw back a couple of weeks working time. It doesn’t sound like much, but I could probably write 40,000 words in that time. I generally write for four days a week on my journey to and from work, and at lunch, and can usually clock up around 5000-6000 words on each day. That’s 20,000 a week. So, if I knuckle down and get on with my editing and really focus, I could save enough time to write half a novel. Yay!

I really want to get on with my Hades’ Boys series too. I need to do extensive planning on it since it’s a seven book series where the main story arc runs through them all, with each story having its own arc as well. I haven’t written anything like that before, but I have written my three book Prophecy Trilogy, so I know how much planning needs to go into it. A lot! I might start doing bits for it on weekends when I can, but I don’t usually have much spare time then.

Ah, it’s a planning, plotting, writing and editing nightmare, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I just wish that doing second and third drafts didn’t take me as long as writing the first draft does! I could get so much more written and I’m bursting with new stories right now.

Just before Christmas I had another new idea for a story. I didn’t put it on the backburner as it was rather persistent. I believe that I mentioned it back in December and that I was writing notes for it at the time. Well, I finished writing the bulk of the notes for it and now I just need to get them into a coherent order and complete the outline of the novel. At this point, it feels as though it’s going to be somewhere between 90-100,000 words long. That’s a good length for a paranormal romance novel. It might end up longer.

The story now has a title: Heart of Darkness. It pretty much sums up the kind of story you guys are going to get. The hero is the dark one, a little out of touch with vampire society and balancing on the knife’s edge of becoming dangerous and little more than a monster. Of course, the heroine will bring him around and enlighten him about how things are done in this century, and save him from the growing darkness within him.

I don’t often write stories where both the hero and heroine are already vampires, so it’s nice to write something different. I don’t think Love Immortal counts on that front as they’re not precisely vampires. They’re more than that, and the heroine was human at the start.

I am gravitating towards vampires again, but I don’t mind. I know the market for them is probably saturated right now but I think that something different will always stand out amongst the crowd and be noticed. I’m sure that’s the case with this story. It’s quite dark. Yes, I usually write novels and stories that are dark, but this one has a new level, a little like Forbidden Blood has.

I do get to explore their society again, and I like that. I really enjoy having to think about things such as the rules they live by, the hierarchy of their society, the roles they have and how they live in our world without being noticed. It’s fun to tinker with these things.

Besides, the other series I’ve been planning for a while now and can only refer to as Hades’ Boys for now, is non-vampire (they’re demons/gods) and something I’m definitely going to write this year. I’ve been planning this seven book series for over a year now, on and off, and it’s time I gave it some more serious thought and plotted out the rough story arc of each book, and the overall arc of all seven paranormal romance novels. Believe me, it’s not as though I haven’t given this story some serious thinking time already. I have two notebooks worth of notes on the series already, but I’m nowhere near done on figuring everything out. It’s a monster of a series and I’m gagging to get going on it. It’s going to be a challenge to get it planned out in at least skeleton form and bordering on masochistic to write them all. I just need the main overall arc decided and planned, and the first three books fleshed out. The other four can be skeletons for now, which they almost are, and I’ll work on them as I go.

Of course, I can’t start writing this novel until I get other things done. I need to write a couple of my A Day In The Life short stories first, and finish writing synopses for Love Immortal. I think I should be able to start writing it in February, after which I’m going to focus on the second draft of Forbidden Blood. I have that printed out and ready for a nice sit down with some coffee and a read through. I might get out of the house that weekend and spend the day in Starbucks somewhere, so I’m not distracted from reading it. I do get distracted when I read at home. It’ll be a Saturday so I could probably go into Oxford with my husband when he goes to work and read it in a cafe there. I think it’s very important to have a good first read through as a reader, not an editor or author. It’s mostly about the storyline, characters, and any glaring holes at that point.

The other novel that needs my attention this year is Ascension. I think the second draft on this one will take longer than the one for Forbidden Blood. There’s definitely things I would like to change or add to in Ascension. I felt that way with Love Immortal and that took me weeks to do a second and third draft on. It will probably come after I’ve done the second draft on Forbidden Blood and written another couple of A Day In The Life short stories to clear the editing fuzz from my mind.

I’m off to plan a few shorts for A Day In The Life and work out my synopsis writing/submission plan for Love Immortal. Have a great day everyone!