I'm finally past the 55,000 word mark and verified my word count on the website. Yay! I've been going whole days, sometimes even a series of days, without writing. It felt strange but my FM's been flaring up so I needed the break. I'm back now and my characters are not exactly cooperating. Kendra is unconscious right now because she's been in her human form for too long and is dehydrated. It's hard to sleep in water when you're a human being. Lochlyn put her in the shower stall but since he doesn't have a bath tub, it's kind of hard to get Kendra as hydrated as she needs to be. He knows she needs to change forms but right now she can't change without experiencing an orgasm and since she's unconscious Lochlyn is a little freaked out about it. This may be their first real fight - the one where Kendra walks out on him (or swims away. How does one get a mermaid out of a second story apartment without drawing attention to her fins?). This whole scene wasn't in my plot points and will change the dynamics of the up coming scenes. Sigh...

I just had an idea (shock!). I'm going to make all the children who were eaten by the goblin in "Into Darkness" be descendants of the pioneers who founded Robin's Cross. More children other than just Clara Belle's had to have been fathered by Puck, only the other women and men didn't care who the biological father of their children was because they were too busy trying to survive. The goblin was attracted to these children because of their Fey blood. This will also mean that Ellie isn't as human as she thought she was which fixes my other problem - how does a human woman end up with so many half-human friends. Yay, clarity!

So I named my little make-believe town in the foothills of Colorado last year at the start of Nanowrimo and now I'm finding the name "Brookside" too pedestrian for a town filled with psychics, half-humans, shape-shifters, and such. The town is populated with numerous psychics, one now banished goblin, a Voudoun priestess, a half dryad-half human, a Cu Sith (a Faerie dog), a shape-shifter whose alt-form is an owl, two shape-shifters whose alt-form are ravens, a shape-shifter whose alt-form is a red panda, a half mermaid-half nymph, and a half selkie-half neriad. And those are just the characters who've revealed their unusual talents to me thus far.

The town is in the foothills of the Rockies, west of Denver (I haven't decided if it's north or south west, yet). There is a river flowing through the town, dividing it into two disparate communities - the poorer side is mostly fields and protected timberlands, while the wealthier side is more mountainous but it contains gold and silver mines.

I'm throwing some new names out there to see what you think. I'm looking for a name that hints at both fording the river as well as a weakness in the boundaries between the mundane world and the faerie realm. Ugh! Let me know if you come up with something else since I'm open to anything right now. I just know it needs to change.

Fey's Crossing
Bridgetown
Brighton
Carrefours (means crossroads)
Four Corners
Crossing Corners (sounds like a children's game, doesn't it?)
Robin's Crossing (like Robin Goodfellow)
Robin's Cross
Hob's Ford

This Spring I posted the first four or five chapters of "Into Darkness" on my MySpace page so that the people I stay in contact with there can get a glimpse of what I'm doing with my time (but they didn't get more than that because I still want some people to buy my books where they're published! *grin*). I started doing the same with "Out of Darkness" and have posted the first two chapters thus far (sans the prologue since there are spoilers in it for "Into Darkness"). Forty people read the first chapter of "Out of Darkness" and so far six people have read chapter two since I posted it last night. The funny thing is that today I got my first subscriber to my MySpace blog (I only use it for book excepts) and it was someone totally unexpected - a guy I went to school with from K-12! It wierds me out that he's reading excepts from romance novels - even if they are written by me. Does anyone else find that strange?

The woman who is editing Into Darkness for me came into the bank yesterday. She said that she keeps forgetting to edit it as she reads because my writing style and story are so engrossing! Woot!

I've given myself a deadline for "Out of Darkness." I want to finish the first draft by the end of October. It should be doable if I apply myself to actually making progress in the storyline and stop getting distracted by making each scene perfect (always my downfall). Last year I wrote 50,000 words in 18 days, I should be able to write 70,000 words in two and a half months, right?

The October deadline is obviously because I have to start book three in November for this year's NaNoWriMo. I know which characters I'll be working with in the third installment of the Darkness series but I only have a rough story idea. Some time between now and November first I'll need to come up with a completed outline so I'll know what I'm writing toward. One pretty cool thing is that when my mom finally finished reading the third draft of "Into Darkness" she told me how much she liked the two characters the third book will revolve around - I'm tentatively calling it "Within Darkness." I think it's great that she noticed the two characters enough to mention them to me since they only had small walk-on roles in that novel. My major dilemma at the moment though is that despite their ESP the main characters from "Into Darkness" are human while Urs, Callum, and Odell are not and neither are Kendra nor Lochlyn. Is it too much for my readers to believe that two human cops in a small town would be friends with all these Fey and half Fey creatures? Should I add elements of the preternatural into the heritage of Ellie and Mac to make them fit in with their friends or should I make the other characters more human? Aarrgh!!!