THE END

Boy am I happy to see those words. I do believe that the initial write out of Night Finds is finally done. With all of my home projects and work projects butting in the last month, it has taken a little longer than I usually like to take on that first draft. My two week max normal went about an extra week. I also didn't write the end early on for this one and that may have made things drag a little for me. I really like having an end point to head towards. Good thing I have the next book's end already written.

Another first for this series, it is an even book in the series and Sebastian doesn't have any negative mojo going on at all at the end of it. It is actually quite the opposite and I would almost call it a happy ending. For those out there that know me, that is probably a pretty scary statement. Happy endings for me could very well be Night Owl City blowing up. Since only about five seconds of this book takes place in Night Owl City, I think it is a safe to say that isn't the case.

Anyway, it is on to my initial edit and then many, many proofreading sessions. I will probably post the first five chapters after a couple of those proofreading sessions, like I did for Night Lurks. I don't know if anyone likes to read that kind of thing, but I like hitting buttons, so I will do it anyway. I would post some of my favorite lines now, but only about 15 people have probably read Night Lurks and the lines would most likely give away the other book's ending.

Night Lurks is up now on Amazon

I got everything together last night so I could submit Night Lurks to Amazon last night and it looks like it is up now. Hurray! I believe this is the link to check it out. Like the other books in the series it is currently 99 cents. I am still trying to determine where the right price point will end up being for the books. Once I have them all written, I will think more about marketing and pricing and such. Right now, I just want to get my thoughts all down and get some feedback on whether the world thinks those thoughts are crazy.

I had to spend some time with book five over the last couple of days, so I didn't spend as much time with Night Finds as I would have liked. It is over halfway done and will probably take another week instead of being done this week like I hoped. Anyway I look at it, I am ahead of schedule because I started writing before I finished editing the last book.

Also, just as a note, this weekend I am going to be playing with the design of this site. If you see anything crazy looking, it is just me working and hopefully it will fix itself by the time I am done.

Oh, and for those of you who don't have a Kindle or the Kindle app, I did post Night Lurks on smashwords while I was typing this post. I wasn't going to originally, but I know not everyone can view a mobi file.

Sophia it is

I originally was hoping one of the, I don't know, younger names would get the nod, but after seeing someone vote for Sophia, I think it will be the right choice. I know that the person who voted for it knows who the name is for because she has already read Night Lurks. Being one of my beta readers has those kind of perks. They get to know just how far I jumped off the deep end before I am even ready to admit it.

I won't lie, before I sent it on to the beloved betas, I was really worried where the last chapter went. I couldn't help it though. Things just fell into place and helped prepare everything for the last two books. I am told that it isn't something anyone would see coming.

Since I was waiting to know the new character's name, I was a bit limited on how far I could go in starting Night Finds, said character is mentioned really early on. Now, I am able to really focus in on getting it written. With a few hours of writing yet to go tonight, I am at around 15,000 words. I am hoping I can get a few more thousand in, which should take me to about a third of the way to my goal.

There was a little while where I was dragging a bit, but I worked through that point and in the process found a twist that I didn't see coming. I really do hate when characters sneak those in. I am still laughing about how funny it is in my mind.

Well, I need to get back to the drawing board. It is less than a week until Night Lurks is out there for all to read. I am expecting Night Finds to take another week and a half to get to the point where I am ready to edit. I really hope it is only a week, but real life does tend to happen sometimes and I have a lot of projects going on around the house.

Night Lurks Excerpt

I still have another round of editing, but I thought I would share the first five chapters of Night Lurks. You can read them here. Along with that, since I am in a really good mood, if you haven't read the first book yet you can get it for free on smashwords.com for the weekend by using the coupon code QV84F.

Happy reading,
Amber

To kill a character or not?

I have been debating killing off one of the characters close to Nyx for the past couple of weeks. I played different scenarios out in my head for killing off just about every character other than Alex and Sebastian. Oh and Clyde. I couldn't live with myself if I killed Clyde off. Other than those three, no one was safe in my mind.

In the end, I had an epiphany this morning on how to end the series, which is where I was considering adding a death, and typed out that last 3,000 words chapter. I have a place to end now and it feels really good. None of the characters are really safe, in fact safe would be the last word I use to describe what ends up happening. I won't lie; there may have been tears threatening as I wrote it.

The fifth book is pretty much all set. I will go through and do a final read a week from Friday and then go ahead and publish it. This is the book that really sets up the last parts of the story. In it we finally find out just what Nyx is and we get the unpleasant gift of meeting her mother. I am glad that secret will finally be out.

While I am waiting to publish that book, I have started in on the sixth one. So far, the cover and about half of the first chapter is complete. I haven't wanted to get too far yet because I am waiting to decide on a key character's name until the poll I posted over the weekend is complete. I plan to close the poll end of day on Friday and I have posted the poll again down below in case anyone wants to add their two cents on a name. If there is a tie, I will go with the name that is first in the list.

Time to get back to work writing and piecing together a synopsis for Night Finds. Happy reading.

survey services

Help choose a new character's name

So I am pretty sure about 5 people have found my blog and actually follow my posts. I haven't promoted it really anywhere, which makes that number not at all surprising. I am trying to find ways to get some user interaction and I landed on creating a poll to help me name a new character.

The new character appears at the end of the 5th book, but wasn't officially named yet. I have at least one or two names that I am leaning towards and I was hoping to have some help making a final decision. I added a couple more names to my initial list and came up with the poll below.

I cannot really give away who the character is going to be, but she is female, young, and will be in the rest of the books. The name will also be featured on the cover for book 7. If you have a name you like better, leave a comment and I may just add it to the poll.

Poll will be open for the rest of the week. I would like to have the cover completed by next weekend.

survey services

Another book down

I have made it to my goal as far as words go for the fifth book. I am so happy with where I drove the end of it. Part of me feels like I have fallen off my rocker because of it, but I just cannot help be practically giddy over what happens. I don't think this one has as many twists and turns as the other books so far. It does contain the big reveal on just what Nyx is and I guess that could be considered a twist. From the beginning I knew how that was going to turn out, but I did put a slight adjustment on what I originally planned for her mother.

I have done the initial spell check and am fixing to convert my document to a pdf so I can spend the next few days having my computer read it to me while I follow along and fix the parts where my fingers weren't listening to my brain. I am hoping by Friday to have my initial advanced reading copy ready to go out to the people that cannot wait for me to mark it as totally edited. The plan is to listen to it about three times this week and then set it aside until a day or two before I plan to put it on Amazon. At that point, I will sit down and read it normally and hopefully there won't be more than a few commas running amok.

In the meantime, the sixth book is already writing itself in my mind. The first line is picked out and as soon as I get some editing done I plan to launch right into it. I waited to start this fifth book, but I don't think I will be able to do that with the sixth.

That's about it for tonight. In parting here is one of my favorite lines from Night Lurks. It, of course, comes from Clyde and is said right after Alex calls him peculiar.

“Am not. Tell him to quit talking smack. I will graduate from chewing on his shoes to peeing on his porn collection if he isn’t nice."

Working away

I was able to get a little over three chapters worked out yesterday on the fifth Nyx book. The first two chapters aren't exactly the same as the ones I lost, but I think they have the same general feel. Today I have at least doubled that and the day isn't over yet. I should be around 13,000 words by the end of the day and since my goal is at least 50,000 that is a great start.

My writing process is a bit different from most of the other writers I read about. I don't make outlines to organize my thoughts and figure out the path of the book before I start writing. I usually wait for an opening line to pop into my head and go from there. Sometimes it can take a couple of days, but I had this one planned out for the past couple of weeks.

For once in this series, it wasn't Nyx saying something, but rather a little inner dialog working in her brain. It gave me an opportunity to explain something no one has asked me, but something I always wondered for myself. A character having at least a first name is a given, but since Nyx was abandoned at birth I have always wondered where the Slaughter came from. You would think as the author I would know that, but surprise, I didn't. It is kind of a silly idea that I came up with, but I like it.

When I start writing a book, I do have a general idea of where things will lead to by the end of the book. As has happened with the other books in this series, I get about a fifth or a quarter of the way through and the ending just reveals itself to me. Things twisted in my mind and I ended out typing out the last chapter for this book that I never expected. Part of me hoped I could take it there, but I didn't see a good way until this afternoon. My initial ideas for who Nyx's mother was warped into a funny coincidence and is going to only further complicate things. I just love complications. Now the easy part for me is just working the rest of the chapters to get to that point. Most of them are already rolling around in my mind, so it should be easy.

Well I better get back to it. I am really hoping to have most of the book on paper, so to speak, by the end of the week. It will probably run a little into next week, but it will still give me at least two weeks to go through my editing process before I release it at the end of the month.