I stood in the doorway, hesitant to enter.  There was blood smeared across the floor, leaving a wet, red trail into the next room.  I was called in to find the body.  The snarky half of my mind wondered if they had followed the bloody trail, but I  prevented the sentiment from leaving my mouth.

I crossed the threshold and felt the shimmer of a ward caress my skin.  Interesting.  Mr. Reynolds should not have needed a protection ward unless he thought he was being targeted.  It also meant that whoever killed him was a friend because he or she was invited inside.

The ward was weak but still intact.  If I became a danger to the one it was meant to protect, the ward would activate, with nasty results for the attacker.  At that point, the killer would have had two options:  break the ward or vacate the building as quickly as possible.

I thought perhaps the killer used a third option—kill Mr. Reynolds somewhere else and dump the body back into the house.  If he was already dead, then the ward wouldn’t activate.  But why?  Why move the body back into the house?

The question plagued me.  A murder to send a message was possible but all of our info on Mr. Reynolds said he was quiet and straight-laced.  He wasn’t involved with the mob and had no known enemies or even activities that would create enemies.

I followed the bloody streak on the floor.  It led from the living room into the kitchen before abruptly ending in the middle of the floor.  I scanned the room.  Magic remnants were thick in here.  So this is why I was called in.

The bloody smear ended in a perfectly straight line.  Something had erased the blood and left clean floor in its wake.  Two things came to mind.  The first was a teleportation circle, though that should have left the blood in an arc instead of a straight line.

The second was an illusion spell.  I moved closer, watching the ground carefully.  It shimmered ever so slightly as I moved.  I walked past the end of the blood.  Nothing.

An illusion that altered space was a difficult trick.  This meant a very powerful witch or wizard was involved and that narrowed the suspect list to only a handful of people, myself included.  I stepped back out of the area of illusion and called up my magic.

The illusion shivered as my magic rose, like a mirage or heat waves off of the hot August pavement.  I felt the edges of the foreign magic, a square about six feet across and two feet high.

The illusion was good, masterfully crafted and completely generic.  My eyebrow rose.  Magic was linked closely to the wielder.  Like a thumbprint, magic could be traced.  It took an enormous amount of time and effort to remove that thumbprint.  The list of suspects narrowed again, but without the magic link it wouldn’t stick to any of them.

I pushed gently, my magic curling around the edges of the illusion spell.  It held.  I pushed harder and the spell still didn’t budge.  Interesting.

“Mike,” I shouted, knowing the police chief was nearby, “you may want to pull back.  No telling what is going to happen when I crack this thing.”

Mike’s bald head popped into the kitchen.  “You find something?”

“Yeah, illusion spell.  Good one, too.  Going to take some doing to break it.”

“Okay, we’ll be outside.  Try not to blow yourself up…again.”  He smirked and ducked out of the kitchen.  I sighed—blow yourself up one time and you never live it down.

The novel I’m currently struggling to edit is from my first year of NaNoWriMo.  I’ve found out the hard way that writing for NaNo and writing for possible publication are two completely different beasts, at least for me.

During NaNo, a 2,500 word scene in which my main character meets with a lawyer seemed like a good idea.  After all, that’s a day and half’s word count done in one scene.  It’s genius!  I’m a fantastic writer!  Book contract here I come!

Cue the harsh dose of reality.  That scene added almost nothing to the book.  I axed it and summed up the whole scene in two paragraphs.  Two short paragraphs.  And so it goes.

The first three chapters of my NaNo novel were just over 15,000 words.  The edited version turned into four chapters and just under 12,000 words.

That’s a 20% cut.  At this rate, my 50k novel ends up 40k.  It needs to end up 85k.

Hmm…maybe that scene wasn’t so bad after all…

You know what’s harder than writing a book? Revising it. Especially when the book was written a year ago during a single month. Yes, I’m working on revising Novel One. Novel Two is cooling its heels until the magic, sparkly, OMG-I-love-this-book-so-much phase wears off and I can look at it objectively.

I have three main problems with revision. The first is that the English language is no friend of mine. Sure, I’m a native speaker, but I’m also a Computer Science major so they almost cancel each other out. I spent four years in college learning to write code, not prose. In fact, many of those years were spent trying to figure out how to avoid taking any humanities classes at all. Whoops. Who knew that was going to come back to haunt me?

My second problem is that I’m a huge, HUGE procrastinator. (See what I’m doing here? Writing this post? That means I’m not revising.) The only reason I finish NaNoWriMo is because I’m competitive and I have a hard daily word count goal. With revision, it’s a bit trickier because goals aren’t as set in stone. Some chapters need major rewrites and others need minor proofing so a chapter-by-chapter breakdown isn’t that easy. A friend and I are both revising right now, but since we’re both procrastinating, we’re neither getting anything done. Procrastinators unite!

My third and final problem–and the one that is contributing to my lack of motivation–is that Novel One currently stands at around 50,000 words. For a first-time author in the genre, it needs to be more in the 85,000 words ballpark. That’s an extra 35,000 words that I still need to write.

Thirty-five thousand words. During NaNo that would take about 21 days.  In this case, it’s going to take a lot longer because I have to fit it in with what is already written and I just don’t want to write it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real problem. Writing a novel is fun; revising a novel is work. Both are required if I want to have any hope of getting published. I just have to tough it out. Wish me luck.  :)

This snippet is the first 250-ish words of my 2009 NaNo novel.

I opened one eye, only to squint angrily at the clock.  The red digits glowed brightly at me, oblivious to my foul mood—3:08 AM.  Ugh.  “Nicolae,” I said without turning my head, “go home.  It’s an ungodly hour.  I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

Nicolae is the vampire sworn to protect me by an oath to my father—the father I never knew.  He also had the worst habit of popping in unannounced in the middle of the night to check on me.  It woke me up every time, even from a dead sleep, because I could subconsciously feel the change in the room and it set off little alarm bells in my head.  Tonight was especially bad, though, because I had gotten to sleep less than an hour ago.

“Ava,” he gasped, “help.”

I sat straight up, adrenaline surging into my veins.  Nicolae never, ever asked for help.  I’d seen him single-handedly take out an entire coven without requiring any assistance from me.  I scrambled for the switch of my bedside lamp and flicked it on, throwing the room into stark light and deep shadows.

He was crouched at the foot of my bed, his body hunched in on itself.  The left half of his shirt was shredded.  A wound in his side that looked suspiciously like a bullet hole was bleeding steadily.  It was his eyes, however, that put me on edge.  Blood red and practically glowing, those eyes meant trouble.

…me!  Just over fifty-one thousand words in thirty days.  NaNoWriMo is complete with hours to spare.  Hours.  Woo hoo!

And now for the editing.  Oh, the editing…