I hit publish on my first novel (Island of Lost Forevers) in 2014. We were living in England at the time, and I had no real idea what I was doing. I just knew that I wanted to be an author and I finally had a book I felt was worth sharing with the world. …
My husband likes to tease that my to-read list is ten years long. The sad thing is, he’s not entirely wrong. There are a lot of books I want to read. Some have been waiting on my bookshelves through several moves. Others sit quietly on my Kindle waiting for me to scroll through the proper …
You’d think it would get easier to write these release announcements. In truth, it gets harder and harder to talk about a series without revealing spoilers. As excited as I am to share this story with the world, I don’t want to inadvertently ruin anything for the people who have waited months to learn what …
I’ve been taking a look at the various iterations of my published novels to see how they change between drafts. I started by looking at Dreamers Do Lie which, because I took a significant break in between the first and second drafts, has a few less versions to look at. The Celestial Serenade, on the …
The penultimate chapter in the Eternity’s Empire saga is finally here! I started writing this story to fill the space between other, larger projects. So there was a part of me that never expected to get this far. I certainly didn’t know how the story was going to end when I started it. (And the …
I put my first book each year out in February. This year, I hoped to coordinate that release with Valentine’s day. (Sadly, it didn’t work out. I needed an extra week to polish the book properly.) But I had already come up with a cute idea for a Valentine’s themed stream to promote the new …
Every time I’ve tried to write a standalone novel, it grows a sequel mid-way through the first draft. Not that I’m complaining. I’ve always been a fan of fantasy and sci-fi series – my bookshelves can attest to that. I just never anticipated I would write anything longer than one book or, maybe, three. Of …
I decided to do something interesting (and a tiny bit dangerous). I opened an old draft of one of my novels and used Word’s comparison feature to examine how much it changed. For those that aren’t familiar with this particular feature, it essentially highlights in red every change made between the different versions of the …
Pacing is one of the most discussed story structure elements. Everyone knows about it. (We learn about it in high school English class along with tone and atmosphere.) But even if we didn’t study it, it’s an intrinsic piece of storytelling we subconsciously recognize. How many times have you walked out of a movie and …
2021 has been an exciting year for me. For the first time, I managed put out six new books. (One every other month.) It has taken a lot of ups and downs, but I finally seem to have found my publishing groove. But the most exciting release for me is the one I’m writing this …