My Process

 Now, this may be something that you’re incredibly interested in, or utterly bored by, but I’m aiming for the former crowd. If you are in the latter, I hope you stick around, since maybe this is interesting for you. I have to warn you, the word “outline” is used approximately fifty times throughout this (it’s actually twelve times, if you’re wondering), but I’ll do my best to make things as clear as possible. 

So, what is my first step in what eventually becomes a novel? I open a document on my computer and word vomit any and every idea I have relating to the project that I have. In case you’re curious, the whimsy sheet for the first book in the “Healing x3” Trilogy is four pages long. This is what I call my Whimsy Page, or as professionals call it, my Proposal. 

Next, I start my planning, without the outline. That comes last. I start with figuring out my characters, and who they are as people (Yes, I know they’re not real). Once the characters are figured out, I write down my scene ideas, and make sure to number them and give them a title. I plot the Logistical Nonsense, or all of the subplots, before plotting the characters‘ relationships and backstories. This is what I call the easy side of plotting. 

I know what you’re thinking: now it’s time to plot the outline. No. After making sure that I have at least twelve scene ideas (I don’t know why twelve was the number I’ve settled on, but I always end up with more than that), I start the Scene Outline, which is where I take the twelve scenes and arrange them in the order that they occur in the story. Yes, this is neurotic, but it works. 

Then, I start the actual, official outline. Keep in mind, though, that I’m also working on a Scene Outline along with it, which gives EVERY SINGLE scene in the outline a name and a brief summary of the scenes, so when I do the Chapter Outline (more on that it a moment), I know what each scene is. 

Once the Outline and Chapter Outline are done, I start working on the Intimacy Outline, which breaks down each sexual scene in more detail, since it makes those scenes significantly easier to write if it’s broken down like that. Yes, it’s weird, but it’s a part of my process now. 

Finally, after everything is done, I do the Chapter Outline, where I take all of the scenes and divide them into chapters and titling them, because coming up with chapter titles is harder than it should be. 

And then I get to actually write the novel, which is usually over the span of a couple months, and then the real fun starts: editing. Now, if you should take away one thing from this, it’s that I’m insane, but also, that I loathe editing. I do it, but I hate it, especially since I do three rounds of edits on all of my novels, which can sometimes mean I’m reading through thirty six chapters three times…

My first round of edits is entitled “Give Notes”. I read through a chapter at a time, and using the Google Docs comment feature, I make a note where edits should be done. The second round is, you guessed it, “Apply Notes”, where I go back to all of my notes and actually do the edits I’ve suggested. Lastly, I do my “Final Readthrough” where I read through the edited chapters, and tweak anything else I either missed or if something sounds weird. 

And that, my friends, is a breakdown of how I go from having an idea to having a finished novel. Yes, the five versions of my outlines are probably excessive, but it works for me, and I have no intention of changing my process. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

Easy Conflict

Like most writers, I fall into the trap of creating easy conflict, and for me personally, that means villainizing either an ex partner or a parent. It’s not that I’ve had a bad experience with a parent, and nothing too horrific with an ex, but rather, it’s a great place to start with a lot of unsolved emotions, especially if the break up, or whatever bad thing happened with the parent, occurred relatively soon to the story starting. It creates a bit of character motivation. Like does my character want their ex back, does their ex want them back, what caused them to break up and how is that showing up now, etc. Though I am not dissing myself or other writers for doing this, it’s become a bit of a pattern in my writing, and I want to change that. 

See, the villainized ex is really strong in The Cora Anthology, and it came directly from a place of wanting conflict. Granted, there’s a lot of conflict in that series, but for the first book I wrote (which was the second one in the series), that was a big factor. Another place that that trope shows up is in the Healing x3 Trilogy, but that came from a place of wanting to heal that tendency in myself, among other things. Although I have strong feelings on how people react after break ups, and we’re not getting into that here, I want to focus on other things, since Healing x3 (especially books one and two) kind of put the final nail in that coffin, and I’m ready to let it rest. 

As for the parent thing, both of my parents are lovely people who are great parents, and it feels kind of like a disservice to them to be writing terrible parents, especially bad dads, since my dad is the complete opposite of that (i.e. Cora’s dad in The Cora Anthology). Although that experience is not authentic to me, I think it’s incredibly realistic, due to the fact that many people have complicated relationships with their person, and despite the seven books of contradiction to this, not every female main character I write has to be exactly like me, which is a whole other thing on its own. 

I can’t say that I have an answer as to what conflict I’m going to be writing with, but I think it’s important to notice the patterns we fall into as writers, just to keep the writing fresh and interesting. It’s certainly no crime to use the common threads of conflict that we’re comfortable with, but I definitely think it’s important to mix up now and then. 

That's it for now folks!

-C 

The Ghosts of Past Projects

 As I was reflecting on my past experiences with NaNoWriMo (trying to write fifty thousand words in the month of November), it got me thinking about projects I’ve either finished and refuse to publish, or novels that never got finished. And I’m here today to tell you about the best ones. 

I think I have to give an honorary mention to “Why?”, which was actually published online through a company that no one has heard of and is impossible to purchase now. That novel is a raging dumpster fire, and I say that with utmost love and respect for myself. I was very young when I wrote it, and had no outline to go off of, so things severely went off the rails. 

The next novel I seriously started writing was “The Love of Chandre” (Chandre is a couple name for characters named Charlotte and Alejandre). It was romance, not surprisingly, and followed a couple through five plus years as they fell in love, navigated high school, and generally just lived. I will tell you right now that that novel is full of way too many mundane things that aren’t really that relevant. There was an outline, well, kind of, but it got boring while I was writing it, and I walked away from it. I’ve tried coming back to it over the years, and I want to, it’s just there’s a lot of editing I need to do, and right now, there’s other projects that I’m focusing on. 

Now, in thinking about this, I’ve started wondering how many finished novels the average author has sitting on their computer, and then it reminded me that I have a fully finished (but not fully edited) fantasy novel, just vibing in my Google Drive. It’s not good, and again, I want to return to it and make it into something I could actually release, but my brain is too preoccupied at the moment. I will say, I love the premise: a team of spies gets transported to a magical dimension, and with a group of spellcasters, they have to collect gems from each kingdom in the realm and defeat a bunch of evil creatures. Writing that out makes me want to go back to “The Frosted Isle”, and I might have to add that to my 2024 roster… 

After writing an entire fantasy novel, I decided that I needed to return to my roots and write another romance novel. And thus, “Writing To You” was born. Not going to lie, I love the idea behind this (best friends falling in love, she’s a writer, they start doing long distance, and she ends up writing a book of their love story), but I think I’ve used pieces of this novel in other ones, and there’s a lot of editing I would have to do to make the twenty plus chapters usable. Not impossible, but right now, I’d rather just start new. 

The most recent project I’ve finished and left to the graveyard of past projects was “An Author’s Romance”. It was my NaNoWriMo project in 2021, and though it’s better than the project listed above, I will never release it in the state that it’s in. I tried combining it with my other best friends to lovers she’s-a-writer novel “Writing To You”, but it wasn’t working, and I’ve decided to let both of them rest. This was the first novel I really started exploring some darker themes, so I appreciate that part of it, however, you will probably never see this project. 

A lot of why most of these aren’t released is because I don’t want to seriously edit them, but they can’t be released in their current state. I love the ideas, but I don’t love the idea of spending a year trying to rework it into something semi-usable. But, who knows? Maybe someday I’ll publish these novels, and I’ll have a great story behind it. 

  

That's all for now, folks!

-C

Tracking My Word Count...And Why I Stopped

Leading up to NaNoWriMo 2021, I began tracking my word count, wanting to get into the swing of things for when November started. (There’s another post on here explaining what NaNoWriMo is for those of you who don't know.) And for a while, I enjoyed seeing how much progress I was making every day, and so I continued tracking my daily word count past November. When 2022 came around, I decided that I wanted to write five hundred thousand words in that year, and I did over nine hundred thousand. However, I was using my writing as a way to avoid dealing with my emotions, and my writing got a little unhealthy (especially in June, where I wrote over one hundred eleven thousand words). As the new school year started in the fall, I was struggling to make time for my writing, and I watched as my word count steadily declined, and with it, my opinion of myself. 

At the beginning of this year, I decided to take a week off of tracking my word count, just to see if it made me enjoy writing again. To no one's surprise, not being obsessed with numbers made me enjoy writing for the sake of writing, not because I had some number goal I had to reach. So, I retired my monthly calendars where I would keep track, and I haven’t done it in months. 

As November approached, I decided that I was going to attempt NaNoWriMo, and only track the word count for the project I was working on. I would begin tracking again on the first of November and only on “Love Through Anguish”, and the last day of my tracking would be November thirtieth. 

I’ve also learned that keeping a tally of how many words you write in a day is a challenge when you’re spending hours handwriting notes, which is how I spent a lot of September and October. I enjoyed seeing my daily totals, but not enough to count every single word I was writing in every single notebook. And because there are so many projects in so many different stages of development for me at all times, it’s not really feasible to keep track of all of that. 

At the time of me writing this, I haven’t started tracking my word count again. However, I’m not too worried about it, since I have so many other projects on the go that it’s kind of impossible to keep track of everything, and I know how unhealthy the numbers game got for me. I will keep y’all updated on whether or not NaNo makes me want to track my daily word count again. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C

About: Selena

Selena. The girl that would change everything, but not in the way that Jack anticipated. After an immediate connection from their first meeting, it seems like everything could be falling into place for Jack and Selena, especially since he’s quite protective of her. 

But things aren’t as perfect as they seem. Both Jack and Selena have their issues, and neither of them are very understanding about it. They can get through it, though, as long as they trust each other. Not surprisingly, trust isn’t something that comes easily for either of them. 

They want to make it work, however, and that’s what counts. Despite all of their hardships--and there are a lot--they deeply care about each other. It’s hard to ignore lingering flames from the past, and that becomes more apparent the longer Jack and Selena are together. Will they be able to beat out the fire? Or will those flames consume them? 

I had an interesting experience writing this novel, since I actually wrote the second book in the series first. There will definitely be a post about the craziness of this series, but this is just about book one. Selena was a character that I loved writing with in book two (again, I wrote it first) because she was sassy, and knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Through writing “Selena”, however, I developed an emotional connection to her, and the hurt she was going through. I was writing it at a time in my life where I was grieving a relationship, and I think that really comes through when we switch to her perspective. 

https://www.amazon.ca/Selena-C-Hilts/dp/B0C2S279FP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CRTAQV01093V&keywords=selena+c+hilts&qid=1698776629&s=books&sprefix=selena+c+hilt%2Cstripbooks%2C121&sr=1-1 

NaNoWriMo

 As November begins, so does NaNoWriMo--aka National Novel Writing month, where one tries to write fifty thousand words on a novel over the course of November. This year will be my fourth year attempting this, and if I manage to succeed, will be my third year winning. Since I’m starting to write a new project for NaNo, I thought I’d take you on a walk down memory lane for my past experiences trying to write fifty thousand words in November. 

I first learned about NaNoWriMo from a YouTuber named Abbie Emmons, who makes advice videos on writing and has published her own books (would strongly recommend her if you’re looking to improve your writing). This was back before I was consistently writing on projects, and I thought it would be the perfect motivator to get back into the swing of things. So, I started writing on my first published novel, “Timing”, and for the first eighteen days, things went really well. But there was a lot going on in my life at that time, and unfortunately, I stopped writing, and didn’t finish my first NaNoWriMo attempt. However, as we’ve established, I’ve gone on to not only finish that novel, but also publish it, so I guess things worked out in the end. 

In 2021, I was determined to finish NaNo. I finished the outline for the novel I wanted to write about a week and a half before the first of November, and I was feeling good. The desire to complete NaNo this year was what really got me into tracking my word count everyday, but that’s a discussion for a different day. As November first rolled around, I dove into the project, and I’m pleased to announce that I finished NaNoWriMo with a project I will never release, since I don’t like it, and it needs a lot of work that I just don’t want to put into it right now. While I was doing NaNo in 2021, however, I was actually working on three novels at once, and the other two, “Cora” and “Love Through Agony” have both been published, so the moral of this story is to not force yourself to work on a novel until its completion. And since I was tracking my word count on everything I was writing at this point, I feel like I’ve earned the right to brag about the fact that I wrote over one hundred thousand words that November, and I’m quite proud of that. 

Last year, in 2022, I was struggling to make time for my writing as I got acquainted with the chaos that is university, and writing on a project for NaNoWriMo was the perfect way to motivate myself to write. And though I didn’t write nearly as much as I had done the year before, I successfully completed NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, and the novel I was working on, “Selena” was released in March of 2023. 

What have I learned from doing NaNoWriMo? Lots of things, actually. I’ve learned that having a word count goal such as that (writing 1667 words every day, or if you’re an overachiever like me, 1670 words) is good motivation, especially if you don’t have a lot of time, or want to get back into the swing of writing. I also learned that obsessively tracking your word count kind of sucks the fun out of writing, and wasn’t the healthiest thing for me. Overall, though, I love NaNo, and I’m incredibly excited to start writing this year’s project, “Love Through Anguish”. 

That's all for now, folks!

-C