A little (okay, long) update on what I’ve been up to!
The Missing Piece revision
First, a revised version of The Missing Piece went up this morning! It was the first story I ever wrote -- that naive, young Arcadia of oh those *checks watch* 6 months ago -- so it definitely was raw. I do my best to leave a story alone once I hit “submit,” but I made an exception in this case because it wasn’t just some style or word choice things, it was stuff like inconsistent tenses, and I cringed knowing it was still out there.
There are, however, two additions, both in Chapter 4, that are relatively minor but are more than just tweaking what was already there. Just two sentences: one is a completely new addition, the other I swapped for an existing line of dialogue that I thought maybe was a little more distracting than helpful. Together, they don’t really do much more to give readers a window into what’s going on with Charlie, but they are more consistent with what’s there already and I think do a subtly better job of doing what I was trying to do at the time. If I were to rewrite the whole thing completely, I might do all of that subtext differently now that I have a little more experience. But I didn’t want to change the spirit of what was there, just make it the best version of itself, which I feel good about now.
Lupine ebook
Lupine Dreams is now available for free as an epub on the ZBookstore!
I’ve been slammed with work over the past few weeks, so I didn’t have much time to write, unfortunately. But, in addition to the above revisions, I also decided to take a crack at putting Lupine Dreams into an epub format. Mostly the only wrinkle was properly formatting the texting chapter, but that made for quite the sufficient wrinkle haha.
It was just kind of a fun little experiment that was satisfying to figure out how to do. It's free because...eh I just feel weird about people paying for my work. At the moment, anyway, I really just would like my stories to find their audience and vice versa, and I don’t feel like I’m making a colossal sacrifice considering the size of that audience haha. I just write what I feel like writing, and I’m gratified that it’s connected with some folks so far (: Maybe sometime in the future I’ll feel differently, but I have a hard time imagining ever charging for any ebooks I put up. So if you want a cleaned-up version of Lupine you can download and keep for yourself that's made for your e-reader, welp, it's there! (:
What’s next
I’ve got quite a few irons in the fire at the moment! First, I’ll have a very nostalgic, fun story that runs about 35k words out in about 2-3 weeks. I’ve got it “done,” now it just needs some final revisions and polish. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, though, and suspect that plenty of folks will enjoy it (: Unlike almost all my other stories, it’s an unreservedly good time without the plodding melancholy that is pretty much my hallmark. I look forward to sharing it with everyone soon!
Thank you so much for reading (:
Arcadia