About Kaige

As the title of the blog claims, I’m an aspiring romance author. As of right now, I don’t have anything published. I’m currently writing for myself, but I’ve set a goal of finishing a novel instead of giving up, again! I participated in the 2007 NaNoWriMo and managed to get 35,856 words finished in November.

Throughout the following holidays and two nasty colds, I finished a very rough draft. The total word count now sits around 42,086 words. There’s some big gaping holes I need to go back and fix, but I’m getting closer to that first goal! This WIP is not the same one I was pounding away on in Aug/Sept mentioned below, but takes one of the secondary characters from it and throws him into the hero’s role.

In the writing section, you’ll also find a story (~2400 words) called Revealed, which is what formed the basis of my 2007 NaNo project. Don’t ask me what I was thinking trying to cram that story into such a tiny word count.

My background is in business, economics and game design, which might explain my heavily theoretical tendencies. I’m also stay at home mom with two kids. Sitting around waiting to pick them up, I find a lot of free time to read. I love romance novels, especially ones set in the Regency period as well as ones about Highlanders and Pirates. I used to read Westerns as well, but they haven’t called as loudly lately.

I’ve began journaling daily since the end of June 2007 and only missed a handful of days in there before November 2007 and NaNoWriMo. I decided that I couldn’t keep both up since I was averaging entries of around a thousand words in about half an hour to forty-five minutes. I won’t subject you to the ramblings contained therein. I also try to post regularly here to the blog as part of my routine, which the holidays kind of killed, but I’m going to make more effort.

Back in August/Sept 2007, I set a daily quota of trying to get at least 2,000 words further into my WIP. That didn’t mean any were keepers, it just meant I had to keep moving forward. Real life intruded many days, and that’s ok. As long as I wasn’t walking away from it, but came back the next day and try again. For the curious: the WIPs are set in Regency London, and described over on the Writing page. I’m currently working on this project again for my apprenticeship in the Romance Divas Mentor Program. I’m considering everything I had in 2007 as “notes” (ouch) and reworking it from scratch. That 2k/day goal seems so unattainable right now.

I also finished a contemporary short story that clocked in around 6k words. It’s better described in the post Drafted! — still a long way to go on that one.

I’m trying something new this year (2009-wow, when did that happen?). I’m tracking everything I read on GoodReads.com and tagging it with the current year. You can look at my version of my reading list, or you can visit my GoodReads profile.