Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season, and survived the year unscathed!
For me, it has been an uncommonly bad year, as you may have guessed from my lack of new releases and mostly non-existent emails—if you want to hear the more annoying details, you can check out Friday’s Read Around the Rainbow #RAtR blog post—but today is the beginning of a new year, and a fresh start. And I have plans!
But first things, first! Greetings to all our newbies! Whether you follow me somewhere online or only here in our little reading group, I am exceedingly pleased you’ve found us. And thanks to everyone for your emails and reviews, and all of those word-of-mouth recommendations. All of it means so much to me, especially as I try to reclaim my life after a rough six months.
Since I started writing in 2014, I’ve mostly ended my December with a look back at the year and by making plans for the next. And I did just that with Read Around the Rainbow this past Friday, and I thought it would be nice to give you some of the highlights.
I started 2023 with big writing plans, including five books I intended to finish scribbled onto the whiteboard hung by my desk. As the year progressed, that whiteboard became less of a quick reference to where each of my projects stood and more of a reminder of just how much of a writing dumpster fire the year had become.
Still, 2023 was not without its successes, and in times like these, we must count every one we can. I did begin a TikTok account and a Facebook Page in early 2023—I’m far too shy to have a group—both of which I have every plan to utilize far better this year, if only for the fact that making videos is so fun! I even managed the publication of Findley Black and the Reaper of Shivelly Park in July.
On top of that, I’m excited to be able to say that I’ve finished the first draft of Revenge and the Sinister Seven which I hope to submit to my publisher by the end of this month/early February.
Unlike so many of my more recent stories—Smoke, The Twelve Coffins of Dr. Coffin, How to Cheat at Dirty Santa, The Death of Digby Catch, etc—which were publisher calls or group projects, where so much is set in stone and you have specific due dates and publication dates, and even hard word count limits—deleting scenes to make word count can feel more difficult than writing the story to begin with—this is on my own schedule, which means there’ll be plenty of time for more extensive beta reading and time to finally do another ARC giveaway. Yay!
I’ve also finished the first draft for Diablo’s Pit, the third book in my self-published House of Witches series pet project. I have even made some serious writing progress on The Monastery, Angel’s Ink, and Hemophilia, books four, five, and six in the series.
And there are some lovely covers for them as well!
Last but not least, I’d like to pick up where I left off with Demetri Forlorn and the Library Between Places for 2024. This story was supposed to be part of a project with the Naked Gardening gang—Holly Day, Nell Iris, A.L. Lester, and K.L. Noone—this time celebrating World Letter Writing Day. I pulled out of the project this summer, and it still breaks my heart! But I will not let Demetri fade away completely, he has wet footprints, a secret admirer, and a bee infestation to deal with after all, and I won’t let him down!
Oh, and if the Naked Gardening gang has another project, I’m all in!
And those are my hopes for 2024! I hadn’t planned to go into this year with such specific goals, but there you have it. While I’m well aware my plans may change, I do believe 2024 is already set to be a good year for releases!
Wish me luck. And talk to you all soon!
Oh, and before I forget… JMS Books is having a sale!
You can find my titles—both those released through JMS Books and my publishing-partner books—by clicking the image below.
You can also grab books from other RAtR authors Addison Albright, Holly Day, Fiona Glass, Ofelia Gränd, Nell Iris, A.L. Lester, K.L. Noone, and Ellie Thomas by clicking their names!
