Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 

 One thing about me, I do love a list. I love organizing. I love excel spreadsheets. I love a to-do list. I love a Plan. that is meant to be capitalized.  I also love making a new Plan. I love a new spreadsheet and a new to-do list and a new way to read the book wall to death. Side note, I have been on this book buying bet ban for like, almost a year now and that shit's insane. I've also been re-reading The Stand for several days now. Over a week, I'm pretty sure. I love The Stand . It's just like, jacking up my reading pace. Like, I'm lucky that I was like fifteen books ahead on my reading goal or a bitch would be behind now.  I'm also slogging my way through Tinon #3. I'm 20k in on the rewrite and I wanted to be ready to edit by March. I have one month, and one short month, to rewrite the rest of this fucking book, and all I want to do is write something else that won't take me seven years. Maybe that's what this rush to break free from all of thes...

 

 

 

 

 I'm working on the twelfth (!!) Aughts Boys book right now ( first four are published, if you're interested ), and this bitch has no plot. To be fair, I've been having a lot of fun. The beauty of the Aughts Boys books is that they are a series of interconnected standalones. They skip around so much in time that I really should scrawl out a giant timeline so I don't have to keep skipping back into my drafts of the ones that are published to make sure I don't contradict stuff. One thing that I do really, really enjoy, though, is taking these characters that were in books one through eleven and aging them down and trying to figure out how they got to be the people they are in "earlier" books.  Book twelve of the Aughts Boys series is called Loser and it follows Benji Holmes (not to be confused with Benjamin Stephens, star of book eleven because I'm some kind of dumb motherfucker) in his eighth grade. His first year in Monticello, so it's a Monticell...

 A wholly uninspired title, I'm aware--but it's really the only thing that encompasses what I'm talking about, and it's eight PM, and I want to get three things done before I go to bed and go back to school tomorrow because it's going to be a late night tomorrow; it's donkey basketball and I will be in concessions. That same place I was always relegated to as a student, because I was the only person who could make decent fucking change. Dungeons and Dragons.  I've been playing DnD for five years now? Before then all I knew about it was that my best friend's boyfriend played it a lot. When I was in college, my library coworker approached me with an idea to play a "library DnD" game. Her husband would DM, and everyone who played would work at the library. Later, several of those other people dropped out, more people were added (including my old psychology professor at said college, which was mildly weird at first), and we have gone through one fu...

 

 This year, I have made it a goal to write 500 words on my first draft a day. When I finish one first draft, I will start a new one. This will enable me to write many first drafts and not feel guilty for neglecting the next fucking Tinon book that I have to write. (I kid, I kid, Tinon#3 is actually going surprisingly well, especially given the amount of dread I felt when it popped up in the random number generator. Maybe it's like when it's winter and you're bracing yourself for -30 but then it's like, 4, and you're like, oh! Oh, this isn't so bad!)  so I'm about 4k into my next first draft. It is an Aughts Boys book. It's the Benji book. Benji Holmes, from Right or Wrong , the dork who Matt used as a, SPOILER, stand-in for Luke, who was the real person he wanted to beat up. SPOILER OVER It's talking about his first year in Monticello, as an eighth grader (after some quick skimming of ROW to see if I'd specified that Benji was in Monticello earli...

 

 

Today one of my seventh graders asked me how long it takes me to write a book. The question is reasonable, as I do, you know, put out around six books a year. It gave me some pause, though, because this last year I did change up, sort of, how I do things.  How I used to do things was I would be working simultaneously on several second drafts/edits. I would work on one Pentalogy book, one Aughts Boys book, one Tinon book, one SKWC book, one Vendettic book, and one standalone. This resulted, a lot of the time, in things getting done in chunks. I would put out like four books in the same month because they'd all get done at the same time. Some time last year I moved to the revolutionary idea of only working on one book at a time.  (Well, one second draft/edit at a time--I am, this year, running a first draft at all times now too because I just love drafting.)  And it's been interesting. It's been easier to enmesh myself into a world, and I don't resent working on the Tinon...

 

 Today is the last day of Christmas break, and I am spending it as I spent most of the others: sitting at my desk, listening to 2000s emo/pop punk (more emo than I would like to admit), "working." I do consider it working because it is a lot of writing, most of the time, if I'm doing things right, but I am also working on novel studies for school, which is really just reading--the moral of this story, I think, is that I have adjusted my life in the way that I can mostly just read, and that's how I read 527 books last year.  I'm ambivalent about going back to school. I mean, obviously, I'd love to continue my hermitage, but it'll be nice to see people again. In the last two weeks of Christmas break, I've left the house three times. Once on Christmas Eve, to go and see my family. Once to get groceries. Once for DnD. That's it. Steven went to the school to get some work done a couple of times but as the only thing I have to do is novel studies and the...

 

 2023 is a number I like. I do like the odd years more; 2022 was a blip, but 2021 was fun. 2020 was too even, 2019, great. Don't even get me started on 2017. Harsh edges. Odd numbers have harsh edges that I like.  So. New year. I do have some goals. I would like to publish another four or five books. This will be my fourth year publishing books. I am currently working on a rewrite of Bandit Born , the third Tinon book. ( Link to book one is here .) I don't know what I'll do after that because I do randomize which project I work on next, which is how I ended up working on Bandit Born . But, some possibilities: Class B , which would be a companion-y continuation of the Pentalogy --the main series concluded last year. Flip Flop Felony --third book in Abnormal Murders. For My Country --novella/prequel for the aforementioned Tinon books. Until I Fall Away --fifth Aughts Boys book, ladies and gents, it's the Matt book. Sunset --third and final Vendettic book. And there's ...