Exciting news!!

So, I've been working on a little project quietly for the last couple of weeks... something I've been meaning to do for awhile now. And yesterday I got a beautiful, shiny present in the mail...

The Curse Girl is in print now!!

Well. SOON. It'll be available soon. That is just a proof.

I am reviewing the proof now and correcting any little errors I see. It's CRAZY how many of those sneak in. I'm convinced they multiply like rabbits.

But!!! It should be available on Amazon in the next few weeks.

I took a few pictures with my cats (as that seems to be the thing to do!) but it was hard to get Sansa to cooperate. She doesn't like having her picture taken. Gizmo, on the other hand, was stoic and blank-faced.

Isn't it soooo pretty??

*squee*

Happy Thursday, everyone!!

PS ~ Check out this great review for The Curse Girl that someone just sent me :)

NaNo Stats and an Interview with Angie Azur

Hey, all!

I have an interview up with Angie Azur on her blog Writing Teazurs. You should check it out... She asked me some really interesting and thoughtful questions, ones I hadn't had before, and it was a ton of fun to respond.

Read the interview!

In other news, I am hard at work on this (semi) NaNoWriMo book. I'm at about 15k, but hopefully I can squeeze out a couple thousand words today. I think I'm finally hitting my groove with the story.

How are your word counts coming, NaNoers?

I'm an Indie Author Rockstar!

You may remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was a contestant in the Indie Author Rockstar competition with The Curse Girl.

Well...

The Curse Girl won!

*fireworks*

Well, we tied for first actually. Which is just as exciting. DOUBLE the excitement, really.

I am November's co-reigning indie rockstar along with author Dan Holloway for his book The Company of Fellows.

Congrats to Dan, and yaaaayyy!

Happy Sunday, everyone!

Don't Give Up

Writers, what keeps you going when you get discouraged? What one thing motivates you to keep telling stories, to keep putting the words on the paper even when you want to quit?

Is it the love of the craft, the thrill of seeing your name on the cover, the pleasure of knowing you've created a world other people can get lost in for a few hours? Do you write from a sheer need to do so?

(c) ganesha.isis

It's all of the above for me, but most of all I think I keep going because of those moments when someone tells me they loved what I wrote. It's a powerful feeling, like a creative hug--we've collaborated together to tell a story. Me by writing it, the reader by reading and imagining it.

I love sharing stories.

Happy writing, all! 

What They Didn't Tell Us (About Being A Writer)

I adore author and speaker Rachel Held Evans and I read her blog regularly. She doesn't usually talk much about writing, but today she posted about the things she never knew when she was a little girl attending writing camps for kids and dreaming about one day becoming an author. Some of the lines really resonated with me:

They didn’t tell me that I’d be working in my pajamas most of the time.

(c) Horia Varlan

They didn’t tell me how lonely this work can be.

They didn’t tell me that I’d go from loving my manuscript to categorically abominating it within a matter of hours. 

They didn’t tell me that this work—this life—would become such a part of who I am that even when it makes me crazy, I need it like I need water and sunlight and love. 

Read the rest at Rachel's blog.

It's so true . . . especially the love-to-hate bit. That is exactly where I am right now.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, and happy writing, NaNoers!

Indie Snippets!

Hey, all! Hope your Thursday is going well!

I was recently featured on Indie Snippets, a blog that posts short excerpts from ebooks. You can check out my entry here.

In other news, today's a good day for The Curse Girl. I'm currently hanging out in two Amazon Top 100 Bestseller lists (both related to fairy tales and mythology). We'll see how long it lasts. But for now, yay :)

*returns to writing*

Onward and upward, everyone!!

Just Keep Writing

As a bunch of us start NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and others of us try to finish old projects, and others of us just try to stay afloat in all the work to be done, I have only one piece of advice.

Just keep writing.

Simple advice, right?

But it's sooooo hard, I know.

Sing it to yourself to the tune of "Just Keep Swimming" from Finding Nemo, if that helps. Visualize yourself as a dancer instead of an axe murderer, if that helps.

Remember. You can revise later. You can bemoan how awful the story is later. You can wish you'd never learned to write later.

For now, just keep writing.

I'm hoping I can take my own advice this month, as I have a bunch of projects on my plate...

Good luck and best wishes to everyone who's doing NaNo!!