books – Page 2 – Cheryl Low

Extreme Editing

17 April, 2018 No Comments

The emotional roller coaster of extreme editing! One week to get through my edits for Detox in Letters. I jotted these down last month when I was knee deep in edits and pretty much been caught in the whirlwind of work and editing until now.

Day One: Everything is amazing! I’m on fire. My edits are a breeze, my plan is solid, this is going to be a piece of cake.

Day Two: Okay. Things aren’t quite as easy as I expected. My energy levels have waned. Why is there no food in my house? Didn’t go to the gym. But I did make it through 90 pages of edits.

Day Three: I have never read this slow in my life. No gym. I’m running out of milk for the coffees. This is getting serious. Couldn’t see straight by the end of the day, but I made it to page 207! We’re 2/3rds through this thing.

Day Four: I’m doubting everything. What happened to Day One feelings!?

Day Five: My brain is SO tired! But there’s a dragon and it’s AMAZING!

Day Six: A last run through of my comments to myself and then searching the words I overuse. It’s not good for the self-confidence levels…

Day Seven: The required hour of staring blankly at the screen repeating “It’s done. We’re done. Just let it go.” before finally sending it to my editor.

Blog, Books, Life, Vanity in Dust, Writing

2018

2 January, 2018 No Comments

I’ve never been particularly sentimental about New Years but I do love the opportunity to make lists and organize. It’s like each year is a drawer full of the things we did, thought, read, and experienced.

In 2017,

I published my first novel, Vanity in Dust
Did a bunch of writing and editing on other projects
Read piles of books
Wrote a scifi
Put together half a dozen Ikea things
Visited my family in California
Dyed my hair pink (admittedly, I did very little of the work, but I did sit still for a long time)
Visited New York for the first time ever
Went blonde
Turned 30

And what do I hope to put into the drawer of 2018?

Publish the second book in the Crowns & Ash series, Detox in Letters
Read all the books piled in my Amazon cart plus all the ones I run into this year
Figure out how to put screws in that concrete wall in my kitchen
Find an agent for my scifi series
Do a bunch of book giveaways!
Get pastel mermaid hair
Publish a horror
Write at least one more book

Wish me luck! And I hope all of your years get better and better.

The beautiful picture at the top is another amazing photo by Linn Arvidsson of Books and Knitting. Check out her webpage or add her on instagram if you like pretty book pictures in your feed.

/Cheryl

Blog, Books, Life, Vanity in Dust, Writing

Author Goals

13 October, 2017 No Comments

My firsts goals in writing were to finish my books and be published. I’ll never be done finishing books, because there’s always another one waiting to be written, but this year my first book was published.

So, what do the rest of my author goals look like at the moment?

See my book on a store shelf. I get excited whenever I see Vanity in Dust anywhere. I’m sure I’ll have a full on giggle fit when I see it on a store shelf.

Finish the Crowns & Ash series. I can’t wait to get to that ending! I have the second and third written and the fourth and fifth outlined.

Science Fiction! I want to publish a scifi series. Space ships, high tech adventure, pirates, maddening viruses and androids! I have the roughest rough draft of the first book waiting in line to be revised and I am so excited that I dream about it.

Fanfiction! It would be a real “achievement unlocked” moment for me if anyone was ever so interested and invested in one of my worlds that they would write a fanfic for it. And the stranger the better.

Write enough books that I can start doing hilarious dedications. I love funny dedications! But I have a list of people I want to sincerely dedicate books to that I should probably get through first.

Publish horror novels. I like writing scary books and would love to see some of those published too.

I’m sure there’s more but maybe that’s enough for right now. We’ll see how many more I come up with in another year.

-Cheryl