Hi, my name's Diana (pronounced Die-Anna), I'm Canadian (whoohoo!), and I spend my time writing novels. I am working on a four book series to be called PTSD - Promise, Treason, Sacrifice, and Death. I have finished Promise (64,000 words) and Treason (51,500 words) and I am now working on drafting Sacrifice. Follow me on Twitter @DiannaK_books
I'm sorry, I know that I'm a day late again, but I just have so much stuff to do! And because of that, this is going to have to be a fairly short post. One thing keeps coming up after the other. Hopefully things will calm down a little this summer. Hopefully. So, how has everyone been? Good, I hope. I know I have, I am totally enjoying this amazing weather. I'm a summer girl.
Sunless tanning lotion. You know that stuff that you put on and then, after a few days, it makes you look like you've actually put effort into tanning? Yeah, don't use it. The label lies. The bottle I bought said to apply it once a day as a body lotion for best results and that I should start to see subtle results within several days. I used it once, used it sparingly, and the next day, I was orange. And not just slightly orange, either. I mean, I was really orange. You could see my hand prints where I hadn't rounded out the edges enough. It was bad. Also, that hair removal cream? Don't waste your money on that either. All it does is burn you and then laugh at you by not removing half of your hair.
Okay, Treason, well, I have been working... a little... but mostly procrastinating. In my defence, I have been getting a lot of other things done, though! I'm pretty proud of all that I've managed to accomplish, actually. I have come up with a few new characters that are making their first appearances in the second instalment of the PTSD series, and I am working on developing the existing characters that are returning in Treason. Fret not, though, dear readers, because if your favorite character from Promise isn't featured in Treason, they will most likely make an appearance in Sacrifice!
Alas, I must already be one my way. Promise awaits corrections!
Goodnight and check back in next week! I love you all!
xoxox
Di
This week's song is a song that I chose to describe Sara and Nick's relationship in Treason at times. Please enjoy Luke Bryan's Do I?
When you read the title, you were supposed to sing it with the same rhythm as Rebecca Black's Friday. I'M SO SORRY THAT I DIDN'T POST YESTERDAY!
For all of my beloved American readers, yesterday was Victoria Day here in Canada, making it a long weekend, and what a beautiful long weekend it was! I had to spend every night at work, though, but I didn't mind it too much (getting paid time and a half was a great bonus for Monday). I found the time to get all over my notes organized - I'm starting to spend a large part of my pay check on ink, paper and binders- and I got some work done on Treason!
From left to right: Promise by Diana Knight, Promise by Diana Knight, Forever On A Silver Chain by Diana Knight, and PTSD by Diana Knight - Drafts and Ideas
I have almost thirty pages now. Twenty-two of those are written out by hand and are going to be a pain to type up - my handwriting is almost impossible to read - but it will sure be worth it. I can already see myself reaching sixty thousand words, something I couldn't have imagined doing with Promise. Managing to write 63, 989 words for Promise was a huge surprise even to me.
When I first started working on Promise during August 2008 - wow! Almost four years already! - I never intended it to be what it is now. I never thought I'd consider sending out the manuscript, and I certainly never thought that it would be complete enough to even be considered a manuscript. It wasn't even called Promise back then, because I hadn't planned on the other three books that now follow it. There was no need for the first book to start with a P in order to fit in with the series title PTSD. Back then, when I found it absolutely necessary that my first draft have a title, I called it Summer Love, because, that's what it was in essence. Summer Love told a very naive story about a teenage girl named Sara who somehow falls in love with a boy named Nick. The end. I only wrote it as a past time to get whatever idea wouldn't leave me alone back then off my mind. I thought it would be over when I wrote The End on the sixteenth page, but it wasn't. By December 2008, Summer Love had twenty-eight pages, seventeen chapters, and just a little over thirteen thousand words. Sara and Nick found a way to stay with me, even though I thought that I was finished with their story.
It was almost like they had a mind of their own and they did not want to be forgotten. Before I knew it, they were constantly popping into my head in all of these different scenarios that just had to be written down. In early 2009, Summer Love had grown even more. It now contained fourteen chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, adding up to fifty-six pages and almost fourteen thousand words. I printed out the very first copy of Summer Love that I lent out for review on April 3rd, 2009. By that time, it had twenty chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, spanning over fifty-four pages and containing twenty-two thousand five hundred words. May 2009 brought on some editing and the story was cut down to twenty-one thousand words, forty-eight pages, and an unlisted number of chapters.
The original - because of course I bought it! - is now in a time capsule, but I still wear a replica around my neck every day. It's my good luck charm.
In July, Forever On A Silver Chain was complete at almost one hundred pages. The plot was slowly starting to change into something more interesting. The idea of Sara getting hurt was introduced, and more chapters were added. This draft held twenty-seven chapters and was fifty words short of thirty thousand. It took thirteen months for the plot to become what it is today. In September of 2009, still under the title Forever On A Silver Chain, the plot of Promise was created. It took almost two and a half years after that for it to be developed completely into the manuscript that it is today. It was worth it. The series took on the title PTSD, giving the first book the title Promise, only a few months ago. It seemed that this change in title is what gave me the motivation and will to finish the book.
Instead of an excerpt, I'l leave you instead with the table of contents of my very first draft. The pages are few, and the chapters numerous - there was about three-quarters of a page of writing per chapter.
Now, doesn't that sound like a best-seller to you? (That was sarcasm, by the way)
Thanks for stopping in today, even if it is Tuesday, and thank you to those who stopped in yesterday. I'm sorry that I couldn't have something up sooner.
Enjoy the weather, and stay gold!
xx
Di
P.S. This week's song is hard to pick, there's just so many that I've liked over the past week. I'll leave you with two. There's A Place For Us by Carrie Underwood, and You Make Me Feel... by Cobra Starship Ft. Sabi
Here it is, the very first thing that I have worked on that has to do with Treason. Admittedly, it isn't very much, but it's a start. I really want to work hard on this an plan it before I actually get it started. More work has been done since then; I've created a whole thought web, complete with colour- and shape-coding. I have also completed and fully labeled a plot graph (yes, I do already have the beginning, middle, and end) and a completed outline. Today, I started writing the very first pages of the novel and it already seems like it's going to be a pretty interesting piece. I'm aiming for an approximate sixty thousand words again, give or take a few thousand. Hopefully give rather than take, however.
In case you missed it before, Promise is the story of sixteen-year-old Sara Leslie, a Canadian girl, who wants to remember the summer she turned sixteen. After going through a breakup, Sara leaves her quiet home in a still unnamed town to attend a summer camp in a small, forgotten town in southern Ontario. Everything seems promising until she meets a mysterious boy named Nick. Soon after, Sara starts to feel herself being watched and she finds anonymous notes bearing warnings pinned to her door. When she follows the instructions on one of these notes, she becomes the victim of a kidnapping. Sara needs to either hope that she'll be set free after the ransom is paid, or fight to leave with her life.
Treason is the second instalment in the series and continues to follow Sara as she navigates high school and work, trying to find balance between her education, her job, her social life, and her ever-complicated romantic life. The story promises to be funny, witty, and enjoyable... hopefully. You need to have a little faith in me.
It's getting a little late, so I think I'm going to call it a day. I hope to hear from you all soon, and just because I'm in a good mood, I'll leave you with a short excerpt from Promise.
“Well,” I started, “I don’t really know him. I hadn’t talked to him since I met him a month ago. We didn’t really talk much, though because he was kind of mean to me at first,” I explained.
“So if he was mean, and you didn’t really talk, can you please tell us how the two of you ended up alone together in the middle of the night a few days ago?”
“Well, something had happened earlier that day that was really disturbing – ”
“Something disturbing?” the man asked, looking up from his notes.
Let me start off by reminding you how much we all take the smallest things for granted. I think that my bed is the one that suffers most from that sort of abuse. Never will I forget how much my bed means to me. I left early Wednesday morning to drive to Toronto and I just got back. The thing that I missed the most was my bed. The food that I ate was amazing - a lot better than what I can make - but the sleeping arrangements cannot compare to the comfort of my own home.
However, I wanted rest and recovery, and I got it. I am sore all over from exercising so much, and I'm so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to write this, but mentally, I am so much healthier than I was a week ago. I was able to stop worrying about everything for a full week and find myself. Along the way, I also found some new friends that have forever marked me and changed me in a profound way.
Each person has left their mark on me and has helped me grow as a person or learn something about myself. They all allowed me to change and step out of my comfort zone, do things that I normally wouldn't do, and discover all of the potential that I have within myself to be a different, better, person. Leaving these new friends - who had to return to all corners of the province after the retreat - was probably the thing that hurt me the most to do. It only took a few days, but I made bonds with people that I doubt will ever break, and I only hope that we can all keep in touch.
I haven't started writing down anything for the second book yet because I have been so busy, but I have a couple of good ideas, starring two of your favorite Promise characters. I can't tell you who, but I will assure you that two familiar faces will once again be present in Treason.
On that note, I am going to leave you, as I'm simply too tired to keep going. Check in again soon, and I might have posted some new stuff. As always, you can follow me on Twitter at @DianaK_books for more recent and frequent updates on the progress of Promise and now Treason.
I leave you with a picture of where I got to stay for a week in Toronto, in the hopes that maybe it will inspire you to go outside a little and enjoy the beautiful May sunshine.
Good night,
Di
Oh, and this week's song is We Are Young by Fun featuring Janelle Monàe
Sorry! I know that it's not Monday, but I had a two-hour long meeting at work and then I had to stay and work a shift. By the time that all of that was over, I just had too much left to do and too little time to do it. Wouldn't it be great if there was 27 hours in a day instead of 24? Maybe then I wouldn't have so many anxiety problems.
It's amazing to finally be done what I hope is one of the final drafts of my book. Working on it for four years has been a great experience for me and it has allowed me to grow in so many ways - more than just professionally. My feelings about finishing are still all over the place, though. I didn't think I'd be able to finish before the end of the summer, and to have devoted myself so fully that I was able to write more in two months than I ever have in a year is an amazing tribute to my devotion to my work and to my hard-headedness. People tried to make me stop writing day after day. They tell me that it's a waste of time, that it's no way to start a career, that I'll never make enough money to survive and that I should focus more on my other studies than on my writing. To be honest, I'm glad that I didn't. I don't think that I've ever been more proud of myself.
The withdrawl is pretty hard to cope with though. People tell me that I work way too much and that sometimes, I just need to take a break and focus in myself. I decided that since I didn't listen to them about the first things they said about writing as a career, I should probably listen to them about this. "Taking a break," however, is not a very common term for me. I need something to focus on, something that I can do, something to keep myself busy. Now, when I'm bored and there's nothing else to do, I always want to pull out a notebook and a pen and start writing. Then, I have to remind myself that at some point, I need to stop. I've reached that point. The story is long enough, the plot is well developped, and all of the secondary details are there. There's nothing else for me to add.
Recovery. Recovery is also something I'm not very good at. One time, I hyperextended my leg and basically "popped" something - I'm not all that great with medical terminology Admittedly, I probably should have paid more attention when they were telling me what was wrong - in the back of my knee while I was playing basketball. At the hospital, I was told that I needed to be in a full, thigh-to-ankle, leg brace and on crutches for two weeks. Can you believe it!? Two weeks! Well, I ended up losing the crutches after two days, the brace was annoying so I stopped wearing it after a few days, and a week after the injury, I ran a half-marathon. That was three years ago. My knee still hurts, to this day. Note to self: when doctors tell you something, listen. Anyway, all of this to say that I think recovery is a good choice at this point because writing this book has made me miss out on so much. And so, I have set my own parameters for this recovery. First things first: getting my sleep schedule back to normal. No more trying-but-failing-to-fall-asleep-at-eleven-but-staying-up-till-three nights. No, now I try to be in bed and asleep before 10:30. So far so good. I've only been late once. Secondly, no more working until all of my assignments are up to date. I actually started to read The Catcher in the Rye as part of one of my assignments. It's actually a decent book once you get past all of the ever-present swear words. And finally, my eating habits. My vegetarian diet has really taken a blow over the last two months. I haven't started eating meat again - goodness, no. Two years and still going - I have just pretty much stopped eating vegetables, too. My diet now consists of Chinese take-out, snack foods and sugar. It's fast, I don't have to make it, and it keeps me awake longer - I'm too cheap to go out and buy coffee.
Finally, let's be honest, I need a good break. I need to relax and and be away from people and not worry about anything. That's why I'm leaving for Toronto tomorrow morning and I won't be back until Sunday afternoon... Just in time for another blog post on Monday.
So, I hope you are all doing good and continue to prosper in your own work and lives. If you're in the mood to take a break, take my advice and take one. You deserve it. And if you want a new excerpt next week, you're going to have to leave me some comments down below. No comments, no excerpt!
And instead of a song, I thought I'd leave you with a quote to reflect on this week.
If love was a choice, who would ever choose such exquisite pain? -Anna and the King
Thanks for stopping in,
Diana
P.S. I just want to give a big shout out to my friend Brooke who has always been there for me and has been one of my biggest fans over the years. I love you!
