Happy Birthday to Me and a g1ft for you

Today is my birthday. I like gifts, but I can never decide what I want so this year I’m going to give! Today only, my first book, Come the Shadows, is free at the community website Worldliterarycafe. To access the gift you simply need to complete a free registration on the site. Enjoy!

Actually, I am also going to ‘gift’ something to myself. For several reasons, I have been unable to write in nearly a month. It’s not writer’s block – in fact I’m at the BEST part of book 3, just before the climax. My gift to myself is that this weekend I *will* write and I will get ever-closer to finishing that first draft. I had hoped to bring the third book out at the end of March but that’s not realistic now. New goal is the end of April, early May at the latest. I’m more than ready to have this trilogy complete and start the next book, which is actually the FIRST book I started, two years ago. The plot of which is very lightly referenced in Come the Shadows… 🙂

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All Aboard the SuperSonic #TeaserTrain!

Today is a special TeaserTrain Thursday – the WLC is hosting a SUPERSONIC TeaserTrain where you can check out all the books at once. Be sure to also search the #teasertrain tag on Twitter to see all the books and links to their excerpts, including my excerpt from COME THE SHADOWS and the one I hosted here – Sheila R. Lamb’s ONCE UPON A GODDESS.

Enjoy the reads! If you decide to purchase some of the books there are special offers to receive some free books too!

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COME THE SHADOWS is now a bestselling Mystery!

For awhile I’ve wanted to break into the top 5k books on the Kindle (or Nook) store and lo and behold…..COME THE SHADOWS went all the way to 724 yesterday 🙂

And, this morning, I saw the UK store:

So now the book is rightfully an ‘international bestseller’ and I am a ‘bestselling author’. I love this feeling!

Thank you to the Kindle 3 books Facebook page Kindle Lovers for giving me that wonderful push!

What should I shoot for now? 🙂

 

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#teasertrain Thursday – Choo Choo! COME THE SHADOWS featured

I am happy to announce I am participating in a new feature on Thursdays – the Teaser Train!

Please check out Shelia R Lamb’s blog to read an excerpt of COME THE SHADOWS.

Other authors featured today :

AR Silverberry – WYNDANO’S CLOAK – @ Howard Hopkin’s blog

TM Souders – WAITING ON HOPE – @ Kellianne Sweeney’s blog

Follow the #teasertrain tag on Twitter to keep up with all the great excerpts!

Choo Choo!

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Cover Art – Red Sky Warning

It’s here! Last night we finalized the cover art for the next book in the Campbell Creek Mysteries: Red Sky Warning.

Only 3 weeks to go!

We also tweaked the original just a little. This is a 3-part series and the covers all work together. It’s a learning process. When I put out book one the most forward-thinking I could go was just to get it done and out and available. In retrospect I would have punched up 1 even more so 2 and 3 could get the same treatment but at this point I think it’s more important to not flip number one on it’s head with a brand new cover, and to keep them consistent. I want people to look at them and recognized they go together as a series. I have so many books rumbling around in my head, and some will involve the same main characters more than once, but these are the three that truly are linked.

I also know the title of the last book already but am no where near having the cover art done. We were going to go ahead and start it but found out the picture I had is unsuitable. Back to the drawing board…

One last note:

The image from Come the Shadows is 100% mine. The image on Red Sky Warning is courtesy my mom, who has been incredibly supportive of my writing.

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Review and Interview – Norma Budden loves Come the Shadows

I’ve been connecting with a lot more people on both Twitter and Goodreads lately. Social media is such an important part of the new Author Paradigm, as Karen Baney pointed out here recently, and it comes with pleasant surprises and support.

Author Norma Budden took the time to pick up my book and give a very nice review of it on her blog and on Amazon. We also had a chat and she has posted an interview of me today.

Back to the edit/rewrite closet I go 🙂 This week is devoted to writing 8 chapters (mine are all 3-5 pages) that were not in the first draft. I’m the backwards lady that always has to add…. 🙂

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Second Verse, Harder than the First

I’ve read multiple lines that all say the same thing:

The second novel is much harder to write than the first

I breezed through the first draft of my second novel, Red Sky Warning, spending almost one less month writing it than I spent on the first book, Come the Shadows.

Great, right? Commence back-patting.

But the hip-hip-hoorays were short-lived. Only when I dove into the editing did I see the true nature of the idea that the second novel is harder than the first. Writing is more than just the first draft. It’s a process with many stages, layering onto the piece everything that makes it a good read in the end, and frequently ripping out a bits – large and small – in the process. In those changes the work truly takes flight, but it’s work, plain and simple.

I am finding that, contrary to what I hoped, editing the second book is far more challenging than the first. Come the Shadows was an inspired idea while Red Sky Warning is a much more cerebral exercise of continuing that story. I knew how I wanted book two to end but not exactly how I wanted to get there.

I took a few other ideas and added them in. Some of them I am now having to take out. The overall story has worked out very well, and I think it is a great follow-up piece, but it needs…refinement… that the first book did not need, or at least did not require to the same degree.

So yes, I must agree with the statement that it is much harder to write the second novel than the first, but what an experience! I know my craft grows and with challenge comes improvement. It will only get better (even if it won’t get easier) from here.

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Playing Catch-Up

It’s time to play catch-up.

Or drag my feet.

Whichever way you want to look at it.

Thursday evening I completely finished my massive typing job. I was disappointed to find out the book is currently only 48.5k words (Come the Shadows is 66k, almost exactly average for the genre) but know that editing turns into ADDING for me, instead of taking away. I write so quickly, with my mind jumping from one thought to the next, that I frequently leave out everything but the bare bones. That leaves me putting in the softer bits as I edit.

Here’s where the feet dragging starts. I love the results of editing. I know every change makes the book better. However, I really don’t like editing. And, well, I haven’t started it yet. I’m putting it off until Monday.

Before you go getting ideas of pedicures, days in the sun, and lazy naps I have to point out that I fill my feet-dragging time with more work, thank you very much. It’s a personality flaw.

So, while I drag my feet on editing Red Sky Warning (which comes out Nov 29th) I am doing other important stuff.

I am re-editing Come the Shadows.

Yeah, the girl who hates editing, is reediting the first book.

I’m not changing characters, plot or any other information. But I have found some errors I need to get corrected. Most people probably won’t notice them, but some will, and it’s my duty to give the most error-free work I can. If you have purchased an earlier copy and you find errors, please accept my apologies. I hate them, but find it very hard to catch them all even with numerous pairs of eyes looking for them. No excuses, just know that I hate them and I want to destroy them 10x more than you don’t want to see them. (Confused? Sorry 😉 )

I am half way through that process on Come the Shadows. I committed to finishing the full read and mark-up tonight, and actually implementing all changes and updating 4 different sites tomorrow (with different files) to ensure that moving forward there are fewer errors. I wish I could say it’s error-free but how often is a book completely error-free? Yeah.

That leaves me with the set-in-stone commitment to start the diligent, sweat-inducing editing of Red Sky Warning this Monday and gives me seven weeks to complete it. Yahoo. I love deadlines. Without them I’d never get anything done.

I’m not working alone this weekend, either. My lovely husband is hard at work on the cover for Red Sky Warning and I hope to share it with you all soon.

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Final day for the 99c deal on Come the Shadows

Just a quick post in reminder that today is the last day to get Come the Shadows for 99 cents!

Kindle – Come the Shadows

Nook – Come the Shadows

Smashwords – Come the Shadows

The short story One Final Night (which now has a few more 5-stars on Amazon!) will remain free.

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Time to go old school

I wrote Come the Shadows without any form of outlining. I knew the answer to whodunit (which, coincidentally, changed) and that’s about it. It was based on a script I wrote 3 years ago, which provided about 5% of the content of the book. The rest I wrote very organically, step by step, day by day, until a full book emerged.

When it was time to start book two, I drug my feet. To kick-start things I began an outline and came up with nearly 30 chapters of material before I actually started writing the text.

The outline has officially ended.

I’m again flying by the seat of my pants and while I’m a bit unsure how I’m going to get from M to Z I know X Y and Z, and a few bits in between. I have a feeling that I might just get faster now that I won’t be tied down by a plan. I hope so! It’s more than a little exciting to not know what exactly is going to happen in the next chapter. I get some of my best stuff that way (for example, most of the 2nd half of the last book).

In a few weeks, hopefully, I will be saying that the first draft is in the bag, and complaining about the three weeks of typing ahead.

PS.

If I had gone the traditional route, I might not even be writing this book now. Then again, I probably would write it right away despite the most well-intentioned advice. I do better when I finish a story fully so I can put it aside and free up all that mental room for the next one.

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