Tag: publishing

Audiobook Pre-Order and TLR CON

Hello! Some exciting news today!

If you’ve been so patiently waiting for an audiobook version of Honey in the Marrow, you are not alone. While it doesn’t come out until October 10 (which is closer than may appear in the mirror), you can PRE-ORDER it today! Click the image to take you to the pre-order site.

Pre-orders of any kind really help authors, so if you’re inclined to listen to audiobooks, please consider pre-ordering mine, narrated by the beautiful voice of Anastasia Watley. I listened to The X Ingredient by Roslyn Sinclair which Anastasia narrated in anticipation, and let’s just say excited is an understatement.

ALSO, TLR CON kicks off today. It’s not too late to get tickets, or claim your free ticket if you are a TLR Champion. My panels, Friends to Lovers vs Enemies to Lovers and Cops and Criminals are tomorrow, but there’s some great stuff today and Sunday, including a hotly anticipated panel with Abby Craden and Angela Dawe on narration.

Since last we spoke, I’ve had a birthday and caught a cold, so please forgive my scratchy voice and stuffy nose tomorrow. It’s not covid, so I can’t complain too much. I also had a bed bug encounter so stressful at work that it kicked me into an auto-immune flare! The public library will literally throw anything at you. You can try to be prepared, but one day you’ll be minding your own business and open a DVD case full of bed bugs.

I’m physically fine, the building is fine, but emotionally, I am…haunted.

Please consider attending the con if you want the inside scoop of the sapphic writing world or just want to hang out with some cool authors and please consider pre-ordering my audiobook because the fact that I have an audiobook is cool as shit. Thank you!

Super Bloom

We traveled recently to the east coast to witness my dad getting remarried. I’m so extremely happy for him and his new bride, a lovely woman I’ve known since I was a child, which made it all the more easier to fold her seamlessly into the family. I read Mary Oliver’s Don’t Hesitate during their service and even got to sign the marriage certificate as a witness and it was good fun.

California has been experiencing a super bloom due to all the rain we got earlier this year and while that sounds beautiful and colorful and fun, what it really means is that everyone’s allergies are trying to kill them violently. So when I stepped off the plane and felt a little stuffy, I was like yes, this makes sense.

Woke up very stuffy Wednesday, went to work and by the end of the day felt like perhaps I was dying. I left an hour early, worried I’d picked up covid on the plane (we were part of the .05% of people wearing a mask on the flights) and I didn’t want to pass it to my coworkers or expose anyone.

What I picked up, I guess, was just a cold. I was miserable on Thursday and felt better but still not good yesterday, and today I feel a little stuffy but way, way better. I tested three days in a row for Covid and they were all negative, so that’s good. But I hate colds. They are so, so miserable and I gotta say, I was not that brave about it. I also feel guilty that I went on vacation, worked part of one day and then called out twice and now am getting a five day weekend because of it. I swear I’m not gaming the system, I swear!

It is nice to be home, though. Before we went east, I planted pumpkin seeds in the yard and not only have they sprouted, but they’re growing fast. I like to go out in the mornings and look at them like no one has ever grown something before. I am the first and the best. I’m just being silly, because I know how easy it is to grow pumpkins. Last year, one grew because I tossed an old pumpkin in the yard to rot, and it was exactly no effort. This year, I am determined to overrun my yard with pumpkins and become the true bog witch that I am.

I also have round two of edits to do. The next book should be out in the very beginning of 2024. I am not at liberty to reveal the title yet, but I will say it has a number in the title. I am really excited to be at this stage of things. The bulk of the work is behind me. It’s the kind of nit-picky editing now where you have a spiraling crisis about a comma or realize you don’t understand grammar and you actually never have, and further more, you never will. But you also get to think about the cover and the marketing and that part is fun.

Honestly, being a writer is as much about having the wherewithal to complete the publishing process as it is about writing well. Writing well helps, DON’T GET ME WRONG, but if you have endurance, follow through, and thick skin, you too could publish a book someday.

this love is glowing in the dark

I started writing when I was a pre-teen and never stopped. I remember I visited a friend once during the summer in middle school and she was annoyed that I spent so much time scribbling into my notebook. It was like there were so many words inside me and they had to spill out into somewhere. I still have a plastic tub full of the notebooks and journals I used to keep as a teenager. Full of fanfiction from my favorite shows, original stories, and just regular journal entries.

By the time I got a computer in my bedroom, I wrote fiction there and my personal journals became scrapbooks. I glued down anything that had any meaning or would jolt my memory of an event. Concert ticket stubs, movie ticket stubs, wrappers and receipts from coffee shops, promotional items from my many trips to local book stores. When I went abroad, I would glue down train tickets and press flowers and sketch vistas.

At some point, even that faded. I kept a livejournal instead. It was easier than lugging around journals so full that they didn’t even close anymore.

Even though the places that I wrote changed, I’ve never stopped writing.

I can tell you that the stories I wrote were not great. When I was writing Harry Potter fanfiction at 19, they were overwrought and melodramatic and full of the most predictable of tropes, but people still liked them because when you’re obsessed with something, even bad stories can be good stories.

The stuff I was writing at 25 when I was in grad school was certainly better, but even that I look back on now and think, oh I would change this and I would delete that and I would never say such a thing now. But people liked it because I was writing for the love of it and when you love something that much, the love always shines through the obvious plots and incorrect comma placement.

I still like a lot of the things I’ve written in my thirties. I was 36 when I signed on with a publisher who liked one of my stories well enough that they wanted it to become a book and 37 when that book came out but even a story with thousands of hits and hundreds of kudos and comments was imperfect and needed work. I know I will like things about my second book better than my first. That’s just how writing goes.

There’s no perfect timeline. There’s no age where things are ~supposed~ to happen. I’ve never written toward a goal other than finishing the story and maybe posting it somewhere. If you publish a book at 25, that’s amazing but I assure you in ten years, you’ll have evolved and you’ll look back at it and cringe a little, no matter how much people liked it.

It’s also never too late. You can start writing now. You can publish a book at fifty or sixty-eight or seventy-two. Anytime is a good time if you’re writing for the love of it. Your people will find you. Some people might not like it, but some people will. I still get comments on that Harry Potter fanfiction and every time I click on that notification, I prepare myself for the worst but it’s always praise. Somehow, they still love it, imperfect as it is. Somehow, the love still shines through.

The Process

Speaking of, did you know that Honey in the Marrow made The Lesbian Review’s list of Best of the Best books from 2022?

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Honey in the Marrow is available for preorder!

Just popping in to say you can preorder the book here! Woohoo! It will be available to purchase as a physical book on October 12th, but if you prefer ebooks, you can preorder it from the publisher and get it October 5th. That’s less than two weeks! Adsfhjasdfk!

Thank you so much for all the support I’ve seen so far. This is so exciting. 💜💜💜

hashtag icarus

It’s not that I don’t want to achieve my goals, but sometimes it feels like I’ve girl bossed a little too close to the sun when I have too many things up in the air. I can plow through obligations with the best of them, but I can’t do it forever and the recovery is always kind of dicey.

I signed with Ylva Publishing in April, turned in the first draft of my book in the summer and then spent most of this fall working through the editing process. And somewhere in between waiting for edits to come back, I started the second book. Now, the final, final draft has been submitted and it’s a big weight off, but ALSO, the first draft for the second book is due at the end of the year, so now I’m just realizing that I’m always going to be caught up somewhere in this process of writing and deadlines and edits. Maybe in multiple places at the same time! It’s okay, but I’m new at it and so it’s been somewhat of a learning curve, figuring out how to manage it all.

My body knows, too, when I’ve completed something stressful and important because the moment it’s off my plate, my body forces me to take a break. Sleep all day, nurse my joints, survive a migraine. I spent most of yesterday in bed. (Relatedly, I cannot recommend the Starry Eyes Self-Warming eye masks enough for people who get migraines. I use the ice hats a lot, but sometimes you just want something warm and not cold and these are great for naps.) I even gave myself the day off from working out, and I hate to upset my routine, so you know it was ~serious~.

It’s easier to beat myself up about not being perfect at handling a bunch of new responsibilities on the first try, but even I know that’s not productive or a good use of my mental energy. And the truth of the matter is, even though it’s been difficult, I think I did handle it well. I learned a lot about how I need to structure my time and my environment to make progress. I’ve been lucky to have the physical space to work and a partner who has been very supportive of both respecting my time and helping me change my space when I realized my original set up wasn’t working.

I’m a very disciplined person when it comes to work. I’m organized, I’m self-motivated, I’m efficient and so I was suited to take on a side hustle, so to speak, but knowing you can do it and actually doing it are two different things! But now that I’m somewhere between doing it and having done it, I find myself strangely motivated to keep doing it. To do it better. To have some success at it, even! I’ve watched my body slow degrading since I was a teenager and my vague plan about that, besides pretending it’s not happening, has always been to just work until I can’t and then it’s just like a blurry row of questions marks, but now maybe I do have a back up plan? Wild. Next stop, the sun!