Hello, guys (After a long, long time!) I am here to share a quick update about my 2019 NaNoWriMo progress. For this year’s I am aiming to complete the 7th draft of Sinister Town and so far, i.e., in 15 days, I have written 29,132 words. I am trying to finish this draft this month itself as this is going to be the final manuscript, more or less.
Here’s how my NaNo stats are looking and I’m happy with the progress so far but I hope that I can keep up with it:
So that’s about it. How about you? Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are your goals and how far along in your project(s) are you?
I’m so, so, so excited to announce the worldwide release of Deceived e-book on the Kindle Store. Now Deceived can be read and enjoyed by people all around the world! This makes me so happy and grateful.
If you haven’t already have it, grab your copies today!
Deceived
You can get your copies of my book, Deceived, here:
I’d like to thank Citrus Publishers for fulfilling my lifelong dream of being a published author! It means so much to me to be able to live the life I have always dreamt of as a dreamy little girl 🤗🥰
And I’d like to thank Vishal for his relentless support, immense love and irrevocable belief in me. He was the only one who believed in me when even I doubted myself ❤💕
And lastly, thanks to all my readers, social media friends and followers for all your love and support ❤
Hello guys and welcome to my Monthly Updates post series. The month of May wasn’t the best month I’ve had so far in the year because Vishal got sick and was bed-ridden for the most part of the month. He’s still not well, but his recovery is steady and hopefully he’ll completely recover in another week or so.
Here’s what I managed to do the time that I was able to scrape out from the hectic schedule I had this month:
Writing:
I have finished revising all the old drafts of Sinister Town and plan on working on the next draft, which will be the final one, in the month of June.
I am in talks with a literary agent who seems interested in two of my manuscripts and has suggested some major changes for them – Sinister Town and Alone In The Dark, so I’ll be making those changes to my books in June
Hello, dear readers. I missed March Monthly Updates post but didn’t want to miss April as well, therefore, I thought that even though I am a bit late I’ll go ahead and do a quick update post.
Writing:
I participated in Camp NaNo with a target of 30K words, but all I managed to write were 20K words. Though I did manage to revise a couple of thousand words, around 8K so overall I’m still happy with my progress.
I am working on 3 books simultaneously so at times it gets hard to track the progress individually, though I’m making steady progress with 2 of the 3 works and the 3rd one is coming along slowly as it is in its early stages.
Reading:
Lost Man’s Lane (Miss Butterworth #2, Mr Gryce #by Anna Katherine Green – 5/5
Kill Code by Clive Fleury – 4/5
We Call It Monster by Lachlan Walter – 4/5
Aristophania(The Kingdom of Azur #1) by Xavier Dorison – 3/5
The Magicians: Alice’s Story by Lilah Sturges – 1/5 – DNF
Hotel Dare by Terry Blass – 4/5
A Promise Of Return by Rebecca Crunden – 4/5
A Dance Of Lies by Rebecca Crunden – 4/5
Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1) by Tehereh Mafi – 3/5
The Circular Study (Miss Butterworth #3, Mr Gryce #10) – 4/5
Out of these Lost Man’s Lane and The Circular Studies were free audiobooks from Librivox and Shatter Me was a paperback. Rest of them were all ebooks.
Miscellaneous:
I joined the swimming classes. I bunked a lot but still, now I know how to float and release bubbles. I will be taking a break this month from swimming as the chlorine is affecting my sinuses and I am getting one-sided headaches again. But I will be resuming in June.
I joined Multifit right at the end of the month and began functional training. It is exhausting, to say the least, but totally worth it!
In new releases, I watched Avengers: Endgame, The Curse Of The Weeping Woman and Pet Sematary.
In old movies, I re-watched Wall-E (twice in April cause I love, love, love that movie), The Magnificient Seven (the old one), Apollo 13, KGF, and a couple more that I am forgetting now.
On Netflix, I watched Black Mirror S1 & S4 and started watching Hemlock Grove.
And obviously, I watched all the episodes of Game Of Thrones S8 on HotStar. I feel that the makers have totally ruined the characters and the plot that GRRM worked so hard to create. TV series can never do justice tot he books, still, the show was going pretty good till S6, but from S7, essentially the part where the show left the books behind, everything feels rushed and incomplete and… off. GRRM anyway hasn’t given away the original ending so the books are anyway not spoiled. Now I’m eagerly waiting for the TV series to be over and the books to come out soon!!
I created my IGTV Channel! You can follow it through my IG profile: @CrazyCatWriter.
That’s about all I can remember from April (it’s been almost half a month since April ended so it’s hard to remember), but I’m sure I covered all the main things I did. I hope you all had a fabulous April as well. May is getting hotter in India, and hopefully this year the rains will come sooner than usual. Do share about how your Camp Nano went and what you’ve been up to last month.
And finally, I’m doing the monthly Updates post after a long, long time. I loved doing these posts before and I’m really excited to do it now. To be honest, these update posts help me in knowing exactly where I stand in terms of my writing and helps me plan ahead serving as the much-needed motivation.
February was a good month for me, not only as compared to January’19 but also as compared to all the months in the last year. I did have some good writing days last year, especially in the second half where I edited a lot and wrote a considerable number of words, but my muse only came in bursts of 5-7 days at a time and then faded away for good. But this February, I not only wrote consistently but was also able to work on posts for my blogs. This makes me feel like I’ve finally reached the headspace I wanted to be in order to complete the projects I’ve been working on for a while now.
Health-wise, it was a good month for me. I even started visiting with my dietician again and slowly getting back into my morning walk routine. Though Eva, my 1.5-year-old cat, got a liver infection probably because of the cat tree we got in January (it happened due to some chemical and we cannot think of anything else as the source.) She had to undergo a very extensive IV therapy which lasted more than a week. 4-5 days into the treatment and the poor girl started running away and hiding from Vishal and me whenever we tried to get close to her in the evenings thinking we might put her in the crate and take her to the vet. She continued doing this even after her treatment was over for around 1 full week. It was disheartening and I’m just glad that now we all are back to our merry old selves.
Anyhow, moving on here’s what I was able to do this month:
Writing Updates:
Wrote around 10K words, not counting the scenes I wrote while plotting my projects
Plotted and planned the contemporary fiction novel I started working on last year. I call it the Unnamed Project (UP.)
Got a new story idea, a really good one! It’s more on the lines of slasher fiction – pure, mind-numbing gory fest. I have already written 8 chapters for it, which is big for me because it has been a long time since I wrote with such fierceness.
Learned new ways of plotting and story structures and will try and implement these in March for the projects listed above.
I didn’t work on Sinister Town this month as I was trying to distance myself from it in order to figure out an issue I’ facing with one of the characters and it seems like I’ve figured out what the issue is so distancing myself from it paid off. I’m planning to work on Sinister Town in March.
Read 2 very disappointing reads: Stillwater Girls by Minka Kent and The Nightmare by Lars Kepler. I had big expectations from both these books: Stillwater Girls had a great blurb (because of which I requested it off NetGalley) and The Nightmare is the sequel to Hypnotist, a book I fell in love with. But both turned out to be very dissatisfying reads and I had to mark them as DNF reads, much to my dismay.
Read 4 decent reads by the authors I know: The Afterlives Of Doctor Gachet by Sam Meekings, Treading The Uneven Road by L.M. Brown, The Memory Tree by John A. Heldt and The Curse Of Time by M.J. Mallon. I’ve reviewed all these books on my book blog, The Reading Bud, so do check out my reviews there.
Apart from these, I read a book that completely changed the definition of Classics and Cosy Mysteries for me – The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Greene. My very good friend and co-moderator of RMFAO, Dagny, introduced me to this author and after reading her book and biography, I’m totally blown away by the fact that I never heard of her before and that she is so underappreciated. I’m presently reading another one of her books, That Affair Next Door, and it even better than the one I read for Feb.
8 episodes of the 6th season of Orange Is The New Black. It was good as usual.
Cargo on Netflix. Not good at all. They totally ruined a potentially good concept.
Tidying Up with Mari Kondo on Netflix. It was kind of a life-changing event and I will be doing a blog post soon on how I’ve adapted the Kon Mari method in my life and home.
In new releases, watched Gully Boy and Uri – two of the best movies till date in Bollywood.
Apart from this, I hosted a lot of guests (well, the same guests over and over a couple of times) and was busy in taking care of Eva. So the month went by in a flash. I’m just glad that I was able to get some writing done.
Hope February treated you all well. I’d love to know how you spent your month and what progress you made in your writing, reading and other aspects of life. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Finally, after almost 1 and a half years, since Eva’s arrival and the start of my health issues (both unrelated, of course), I am feeling like myself again. After such a long break, I have also started re-working on my 2nd novel, Sinister Town, with the kind of energy I always seemed to have before things started to get sour in regards to my health. Lately, I’ve even started with my fitness regime again, though that is coming along a bit slowly. But I’m in a kind of a happy place now where I am doing all the things that I love doing and I am not sick nor coughing my lungs out the entire time.
Though my medical tests are still pending, I’m positive whatever it was is long past and now all that remains is for me to conquer the world again (see, that’s how good I’m feeling.) And it’s not that I’m just feeling good now, or this week. This has been the case from last two month since I’ve recovered from my last allergy bout. And that is the reason why I’ve been able to blog again to my heart’s content in the last few days – I’m not only blogging on The Reading Bud and this blog, but I’ve also taken up cooking occasionally again and have started posting on The Baking Bud too.
Eva in our backyard
I guess my last sickness bout made me very appreciative of the life I have; my loving, caring and such a devout husband and my crazily adorable and loving cats, Eva and Katie, and also the ever-goofy and always smiling Max. With so much love around me, I guess I’ve not only bounced back to being well but that I’ve been able to come back in a much better frame of mind.
Katie lazing around
For now, my focus is solely on getting Sinister Town ready for my alpha and beta readers and then polishing the dark short story collection I’ve been meaning to work on for some time. I’m also trying to read more and incorporate cooking regularly, more and more, into my daily schedule.
I’ll try and post here more (at least once a week) even if just a life update kind of a post as I hate not being in touch with blogging here. I’ll also try and visit all my favourite blogs more often (haven’t done it in so long that I’ve almost forgotten how great it feels to read everyone’s posts.)
Like every year since 2014, I’m participating in Camp NaNoWriMo April’18. For this month I don’t have a lot planned out, but just a basic idea of what needs to be done. I’m mainly going to go for 2 things this time – sorting out the ending of Sinister Town and writing the first draft of a story I’d started as a short series flash-fiction, Jessie.
Over the last couple of months, I’d have some really good, strange, outright hilarious and some really amazeballs story ideas and, strangely enough, I wrote them all down. I never really write down random story ideas anymore, I used to write them down very carefully when I started out as a writer, but after I heard the invincible, and my writing idol, SK mention in one of his many speeches, that if you can’t remember an idea for a year (or basically a long time) then it’s not worth
working on. That was the point where I abandoned scribbling down ideas and, now that I reflect on it, maybe that was one of the reasons for my major writer’s block. Anyway, so I’d been writing down random ideas, mostly because I’d been in a writing slump lately (for like a year and a half now) and so I just wanted something different to write about – something random that would help me in ‘pantsing.’
So I have those story ideas to develop too. One of them is a dark elf story and I can already feel it coming together beautifully as a full-length novel. So I hope I have enough things to write and meet my goal of 50K words as I really need to get back into my usual flow of writing, something that I dearly miss!
I wish all of you who are participating in Camp Nano April all the very best!
I’ve been meaning to redesign The Reading Bud – TRB, for a long time now. Ever since I laid eyes on the Tweak Me theme by NoseGrace 2 years back, I knew I HAD to get it. And finally, I did. It was a huge step as a blogger because shifting platforms is never easy especially if you have a lot of content. I had over 200 posts (mainly reviews) and it was important that it was done right.
It took a lot of research, some serious brain digging and tons of hours poured over tutorials and posts by other really awesome bloggers and finally, I was able to do it – all on my own! TRB website is now live and you can visit it here: http://www.thereadingbud.com
TRB’s new logo
I’ve also redesigned the logo and header and now I feel like TRB is completely settled.
I hope you guys like the new design and the interface of the website.
I had planned for 2 short stories and 1 article on Writing to post in through April and May, but unfortunately, things got in the way (as they usually do) and I completely forgot about the drafts (some half-baked some ready to go up) sitting patiently on my dashboard. I thought I’ll get back to blogging regularly now by scheduling the posts – like I do with my reviews at The Reading Bud, but before that, I wanted to drop by and post updates about what’s been since 8th April, the last time I posted.
Updates –
Books:
Deceived has been entered for the Hindu Literary Prize 2017. Hindu is one of the top newspapers in India.
Deceived is being translated into Marathi (a regional language of Maharashtra, the State I live in.)
The English release of Deceived is set for 24th June and it might be a soft launch by the looks of it because we want to do a big launch cum release with at least 2 languages so most probably, that’ll be sometime in July as the translated Marathi version will be ready by then.
Deceived has crossed 66 ratings on Goodreads.
Deceived is now listed on Amazon.in (Amazon.com and other Amazons will still take another week or so.)
Book reviewers are loving Deceived and I’ve already made a few fans.
Sinister Town is going slow and steady and should be ready by the end of this year.
Work:
I have 3 Novel Critiques lined up for the coming days and I’m already booked until the 20th of July.
I have 1 editing lined up for the month of July so the rest of the July is also packed.
I’m working on 2 other projects for Citrus Publishers, mostly marketing and HR related.
Reading:
I suffered a reading slump in late March, hence wasn’t able to read much for the last two months. These are the only books I read since April: Under The Dome by Stephen King, Hannah’s Moon by John A. Heldt, Girl In Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow, Gerald’s Game by Stephen King, A Fatal Twist by Tracy Weber, The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, Something Needs Bleeding by Thomas Singer and Christopher Long, Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg, The Bronx Kill by Philip Cioffari and The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James
I have to read another 6 books by Grand Central Publishing, 2 by MM Publicity and 3 by EG Publicity for review. Other than these I have about 8 NetGalley books that I want to read ASAP and another 10 that I’ve bought. So I’ll be busy finishing these books in the coming weeks and months.
Personal:
We had an awesome holiday in mid-April in Goa. Lots of sunbathing and booze.
We’re shifting to a bigger house – a row-bungalow on 1st June. And now I can finally get my pets.
We’re planning a trip to Thailand in August.
Right after the vacation, we’ll start our hunt for the perfect kitten and GSD pup!
I developed a bad rash on my arms and later found out that I am allergic to UV rays. The rash was due to extreme sunbathing in Goa last month. So I’m just trying to stay away from the direct sunlight as much as possible. 😦
Right now I’m busy with the shifting, readying the house for the Packers and Movers, so I’ll be seeing you guys next week. Stay tuned to my Twitter as I’ll be sharing the new bungalow’s pics there.
Do let me know how you spent your month. I’d be more than happy to know what you’ve been up to!
