3/28/2024 → Thursday Skype & Write
Oops. Yeah…sorry about forgetting to post the update.
On Thursday, we worked on our series bible, mostly creating character profiles and updating some existing ones. Sid and James worked primarily on their cozy characters, while Mickie concentrated on her Perfect Coven characters. So not a lot to report, but necessary work and well, world-building is always fun.
The upcoming meeting is our monthly meeting, so tune in Friday to see what we discussed!
1/25/2024 → Thursday Skype & Write
Last night was a good night, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. We did the first of our (new) regularly-scheduled series bible updates.
Sid and James worked on the timelines for their cozy mystery series, the Grey Feather Investigations (Sid) and the Gentleman Farmer Investigations (James). Mickie worked out some plot points and character outlines for her series (name withheld until we have more information; she has it roughed out, but we don’t have all the details yet).
Then we all fleshed out some of the cozy characters and played with the AI module* that comes with our series bible subscription and laughed at some of the characters it generated. Some of them were so far off! One or two even entered the Uncanny Valley. (We deleted those immediately. Our characters aren’t supposed to be creepy!)
One thing I do think about using the module is that it can help you refine your character descriptions based on what it generates, and I personally find that helpful.
*(I know, I know, I also have reservations, but it’s fun to see what the character descriptions generate. These will only be attached to the series bible, only seen by us. All our cover art, promo work, etc. is done by real, human artists that are paid for their work.)
That’s where we left it. Next week is our monthly meeting, so we’ll be back then with another update!
4/13/2023 → Thursday Skype & Write
Last night was our quarterly series bible update. However, it looks like we’ve all been making an effort to keep the program open and update as we’re writing, because it was in relatively good shape. We were pleased and proud of ourselves.
Then we discovered a new feature that’s in beta – image generation. Using that feature, we could get images of our characters and familiars. Sometimes it was pretty close to what was in our heads, sometimes it was so off that we laughed ourselves silly over it (we got one image of Jasper with ringlets down to his waist and a full, red beard, for instance – that was hysterical). But all in all, we had a great time playing with it. I think, after some tweaks, it will be a nice feature to have. It’s never going to be 100% correct, but as a placeholder, it works.
So that’s where we left it. We’re all actively working to keep our series bible current, which is a really good thing, and then we had some fun with it.
Next week is a regular writing week, so we’ll be back then with word metrics to report!
7/20/2022 → Wednesday Thursday Skype & Write
For personal reasons (good ones, fun things) we delayed our meeting a day, so we met last night.
One of the things we discussed at our mid-year meeting was our series bible. We decided to set aside one meeting each quarter and work on updates. Last night was our first one, and we did quite a lot of really good work. We’re satisfied with what we accomplished, but we’re not quite where we need the series bible to be, especially as we’re working on the second trilogy and it will only get more complicated from there. We need to keep characters, places, timelines straight and we are really going to rely on our series bible for that. More work is needed, and we all made a pledge to try to have it open when we’re writing so we can update as we go. This will become especially important for timelines, and will also help with revisions and re-writes.
Goals this week were met (and slightly exceeded) by James, partially by Mickie, and not at all by Sid. We set new ones, and will be back at it again going forward.
And that’s it for this week. We’ll be back on Wednesday next week, so look for the normal Thursday update. See you then!
9/23/2020 → Wednesday Skype & Write
Last night was our usual weekly meeting. We had a small hiccup in that Mickie had to work late, but James and Sid had made contingency plans. They spent the time working on updates to the series bible in notebook.ai.
Speaking of notebook.ai, they’ve added a new feature – timelines!
Sid had requested this some time ago, and apparently she wasn’t the only one. It’s in beta right now, but James and Sid played with it and it will definitely be useful for both the Perfect Coven novels and the cozies, as the timelines in both series are interwoven.
Mickie arrived late, and she worked on her current WIP, a Perfect Coven short story while Sid and James continued to update notebook.ai.
And that is all for this week. Tune in next week for more exciting updates!
6/5/2019 → Wednesday Skype & Write: Monthly Meeting
We had our monthly meeting and much was discussed.
We know that we need bios for the website and for our query, we set a deadline of June 19th to have those completed. We are writing our serious bios. We will be doing more tongue-in-cheek versions for our pen names, but those aren’t as pressing, so we’ll do them later just for fun.
In conjunction with having our bios written, on June 19th we will be pulling our query apart and reassembling it in the final form. We want to actually get a query out instead of just talking about it.
Next year, we are going to schedule a hiatus in May. May just seems to be a weird month all around, and historically, we end up canceling most of our meetings and missing any May deadlines. So we’re going to do our best to get around that from now on.
June is website month. We are planning updates to the site, as well as to our series bible (the two go hand-in-hand). Sid has started a project plan, and she’ll flesh it out over the next couple of days and get it over to James and Mickie. After that, we’ll divide the workload and get to it.
Finally, James has thrown us a new challenge.
Because May is an extraordinarily stressful month, we’ve all been doing a lot of escapist things, especially reading lighter books than we might usually. James has been reading cozy mysteries, specifically cozy witch mysteries.
He put it to us like this: “In most cozy witch mysteries, the witch and magic are in hiding. We could do some interesting things in witch mysteries where witchery is a known factor in the world.”
And the wheels began to turn. Oh yes, challenge accepted!
We think we might each create our own little town with our own little mysteries. Being us, they will overlap with each other, and probably with our main series characters as well (I’m having thoughts about Shelley and Jasper’s hometown – well, about a little town adjacent to their hometown). These will be shorter than the PC series novels, and we aren’t planning to query them, but to publish them on the website and on Wattpad as extras for anyone interested in PCEarth.
And that’s a wrap for the monthly meeting. Whew! It was a pretty hefty meeting.
We should be back on our regular schedule next week, so tune in then for an update!
2/6/2019 → Wednesday Skype & Write: Monthly Meeting
Update is a day late, sorry about that. That day-job thing sometimes demands more time than we want it to.
Wednesday was our monthly meeting where we talk all things Perfect Coven – and occasionally about that day-job issue.
So, we did talk about Perfect Coven, and covens on PCEarth in particular. Watch out for a blog post (or two or more) about that subject. The discussion of covens has prompted Thoughts among the Perfect Coven authors.
We are also investigating a bit of software that may help us keep our series bible straight. All of us are considering giving the trial version a run for our solo projects to see what it will do, and then we will revisit and decide if it will work for us. That is a thing down the line, but hey – we are still thinking long-term on this series.
We discussed the state of our querying package. We seem to be missing an actual query letter (oops!). So, we have added a new deadline to facilitate getting that done in order to reach our goal.
The last thing we discussed was James’s solo project, Hand of the Witch. There may some exciting stuff happening there, but that is for him to discuss over at the Wake The Clans site.
And that’s all until next week!
Perfect Coven 