A Little Update

Hi Ink Drinkers,

Here's a little update on all the stuff I'm doing.  

I've been working on uploading If Diamonds Could Talk on Booknet, Inkitt, Quotev, and Royal Road.  

The girls on Booknet have been giving me a lot to look forward to as they have shown a lot of enthusiasm for the story.  I've really appreciated that as sequels don't really get much attention.

Things have been quiet on Inkitt and Quotev, but the hits keep going up, so I know there are readers.  They're just not saying much.  

I get into long conversations with readers on Royal Road, so that's nice.  It's really something to look forward to. 

All in all, writing sequels has been rather thankless.  At least, that's what I think until I remember Sleeping Prince which did very well despite being a sequel, but Rose Red is one of my highest-performing books.  His 16th Face didn't do nearly as well as I hoped when I was writing it.  

Moving on... Born in January

This is a novelette I will release this year.  Here's the synopsis:

Annaliese and Trip are best friends.  They've known each other since they were children.  They were best friends through high school and went to university together.  Except, they have a secret that they've never told anyone... until they tell everyone.

This is a project very similar in nature to Tiny Wishes.  Not only was Tiny Wishes really fun to write, but it was also extremely rewarding.  It was a fourth of the word count of a decent-sized novel.  The hit count for it has rivaled much larger projects.  The success of it basically caused a revolution inside me.   I decided to take on a collection of smaller projects.  This is the first completed of the new round of stories from me.  I'm delighted.  

I'm also delighted with the cover.  I have been sampling yellow covers for quite some time and they never have as strong an impact as other colors, so yellow keeps getting overlooked.  But this time, the yellow was strong enough.  I may do a post about the graphic design process and how I got that great cover, but not today.

Moving on... Octavia Girl Vol. I

I have been promising this book for well over a year.  I had a major problem with my male protagonist.  My alpha reader scolded me so soundly over the creation of Sardius that I basically had to rewrite all his dialogue.  It's better now.  However, I am still 1,200 words off the desired 60K.  I have to figure it out before I finish releasing If Diamonds Could Talk because this is the next project I'm going to release come hell or high water.  I have a little over a month.  

I have also written the next two books in this universe, which means that I have to follow my alpha reader's instructions and rip apart a ton of dialogue and realign the plot.  I'm really looking forward to it, but I absolutely can't start that job until I get that 1,200 words I need for the first book.  

Where the crap am I going to find 1,200 words?  I keep adding a paragraph and going, "That's fantastic!  Surely I've added a whole 200 words there!" ... Only to find that it was more like 20.  

Moving on... Sleeping Prince

I have been preparing this book as a full ebook that will be released on all the big sites: GooglePlay, Amazon, Smashwords, AppleBooks, Barnes and Noble, DriveThru Fiction, and more.  I'm close to being finished the first half of the manuscript preparation.

The most rewarding thing about it is how few changes are needed.  I wrote this book in three weeks and it is so good.  How come it is some of my best work?  

So, that's all the books I'm working on right now, except for the two I'm not ready to talk about.  Come back and I'll tell you more updates!