Audiobooks, New Releases, and Gardening

                                                                 

A Casual Weekend Thing has come out as an audiobook! It’s went on sale at Audible last night! Now I just need to finish re-listening to Rhys Ford’s Sinner’s Gin before I hear it, because jumping from one narrator to another confuses the hell out of my poor brain.

Also, Holding Out for a Fairy Tale releases tomorrow! Dreamspinner is running all kinds of sales this month to celebrate their 7^th anniversary! In addition to 15% off every Dreamspinner title at ARe, they’re offering larger discounts and flash sales at the Dreamspinner site throughout the month!

Check out Dreamspinner's ARe sale!

And beyond announcing the release, I’m going to be a coward about the whole promo thing this time around.

Even with the one year anniversary of A Casual Weekend Thing coming up, I still don’t feel like this new role has really sunk in. With more experience with the publishing process, the emotional roller coaster of book releases and reviews, and attending the Dreamspinner Press Writers Workshop in Portland just a couple weeks ago, I am at the point where I either need to start taking this whole writing thing seriously, or stop pretending that it was ever more than a hobby. And to be honest, I’m still on the fence.

Writing is an isolated and depressing process for me. The most commonly repeated bits of advice for writers on the internet is to write a lot, to revise more than one writes, and to have as many sets of eyes as possible read and critique a story before it ever makes its way into the world. With a super-conservative family who treats any mention of homosexuality as a bad joke, a husband who is quietly supportive of my writing so long as it can never, ever be linked back to him, and being more shy than an anxious house cat, that last step has never been possible for me. Which means the first feedback I typically get on a story is from reviews after a story is already released. And the whole process always stops my current writing project cold. I can’t very well just say, “Be gentle, I’m new at this!” because, when something is actually marketed and sold, the expectation of a professional quality product is totally fair.

So rather than spend two months recovering from the emotional ups and down that are sure to follow this new release, I’m going to go hide in my garden for a few weeks and re-hash my current work in progress with a pen and paper. Again. The prequel to Graffiti can’t decide if it wants to be a contemporary romance or a suspense novel, and I’ve written it both ways a couple times. (Damn mental quirk that insists all stories must have a bad guy….) Once I get it settled into one genre or the other, I’ll try to post the first chapter of the 3^rd book in Least Likely Partnerships—in which Christopher discovers that running away is a hard habit to break.

My dear husband decided to “help” with my garden beds last year. He second-guessed my vermiculite and fertilizer ratios until he managed to make my garden toxic enough to kill everything I tried to plant. He pointed out that at least this season I won't have to pull any weeds. The real silver lining, though, is having plenty of work to keep me too busy to go anywhere near Goodreads.