HARVEST MOON is now available for the Kindle!

Once a year at the Harvest Moon, Rowen is reunited with the spirit of the boy she loves. Every year they have one night together, and then Blake returns to limbo. Every year Rowen knows she should let them both move on...but she can't.

This year she might not have a choice.


Find it here on Amazon US and here on Amazon UK. It's a perfect, spooky little love story for Halloween, and you can read an excerpt here at my Tumblr.

It's not a romance, it's a love story

At the moment I'm working on a short story called Harvest Moon, which should be ready for publication next week (I really wanted to write something for Halloween, and whilst this isn't technically a Halloween story, it's very "of the season." Or at least, I think so). When I started it, I was sure it was going to be a romance. But it's not. It's a love story.

The difference, you ask?

Romance has a happily ever after (HEA). This is one of the things that makes it a romance. A love story does not necessarily have a HEA. Think Cinderella v Titanic. In Cinderella, the girl marries her prince, overcomes her wicked stepsisters and gets to live in a castle with a handsome, loving husband forever. In Titanic, Rose survives but loses Jack. She goes on to have a wonderful, fulfilling life, but there's no HEA for her and Jack because she was too selfish to share her stupid wardrobe door with him.

In Harvest Moon, I was sure that Rowen and Blake would end up with a HEA, despite rather insurmountable odds. But the further into the story I get, the more I realise it's just impossible. If I want to stick to the rules of their little world and keep the story believable, they can't have a HEA. They can have love and they can have happiness, but they can't have a romantic ending.

This makes me sad in a way, but in another, it's quite exciting. It changes things for the characters. It changes the decisions they make and the way they feel about them. It challenges them to move forward and make new plans. I don't want to give any spoilers, so I'll say no more, but now I've resigned myself to giving up on the HEA, I'm looking forward to writing a bittersweet yet hopeful story of love. Just don't expect a fairy tale ending.

Not another book review - Wisdom by Amanda Hocking

When I first started thinking seriously about self-publishing, Amanda Hocking was one of the first authors whose work I tried to test the waters. I wanted to see what sort of quality was being produced and as Amanda was the name bandied around the most, she seemed the obvious choice.

I really enjoyed the first My Blood Approves book. It wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was fun and a little quirky, and a very easy read. I'd expected a Twilight-esque bore-fest so I was pleasantly surprised by Alice's engaging voice, and I went on to snap up the next three available books in the series, as well as a couple of other Hocking titles (Switch and Hollowlands).

Wisdom is the forth in the My Blood Approves series and my favourite so far. Alice has been a rather passive heroine for most of the series, content to drift along and let life take her where it will. In Wisdom she finally realises she can't face eternity that way and starts being proactive. Tragedy forces her into being a little more proactive than she might like, but she embraces the challenge fiercely, regardless of the cost. I liked that. I liked that she was willing to take risks, physical and emotional, as part of her journey in this book. I feel like she's shied away from that previously.

Milo has been a favourite of mine since the first book (I love that Hocking includes gay characters without making a big deal out of them being gay), so it was nice to see more of him and Bobby in this volume too. The continuation of Mae's storyline from Flutter was heartwrenching but inevitable, and I like how that was handled.

My only real complaint about Wisdom is the slightly repetitive nature of the love triangle. Every book we see Alice examine her feelings for Jack and Peter, decide she loves Jack, and then somehow end up offending one or both of the boys anyway. Although it seems like the triangle is finally resolved this time, there's still one more book to go, so I imagine we'll see this again. It bothers me most because I feel like either boy would be a good boyfriend for Alice - I love Jack and Peter (although Peter a little more) and so it's hard to see a happy ending. Most love triangles usually have a clear choice regardless of what the heroine might say, so whilst it's fun to read one where I feel like it could go either way, it's tiresome to see the same issues hashed out, resolved, and reopened in each book.

Phew, end rant. Despite my complaint, I ate up this book, as I have Hocking's others, and will definitely look forward to the final volume! This is literary candy - looks pretty, tastes good, and satisfies a need.

Reaching

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp" - Robert Browning

It feels like forever since I started writing Ravenor. It's a story I really want to tell, a story I enjoy when I actually get some work done on it. But some days I open the word document and just stare at the blinking cursor and feel like the ending is impossibly far away, and that even if I do finish and publish it, it won't be worth it. Nobody will read it. Nobody will like it if they do read it. I don't have the skill for this kind of story. I don't have the talent to even think of trying.

But if you want to get anywhere in life, you have to look your doubts in the eye and say "no." You have to refuse them. I'm refusing mine this week and I'm going to take a shot at finishing Ravenor. I don't think the end is that far away (my word count meter lies, so must be ignored), and I would love to have it ready for publication by Halloween. I did consider subbing it to a publisher, but I think I'd prefer to go indie with this one. It feels right.

So I'm pushing the doubts aside for now. Even if just one person buys Ravenor and says they liked it, it will have been a success. And that is worth working for.

Thinking about subbing here...

At Entangled Publishing. They say they're acquiring novellas in YA, and I haven't seen many other epubs/small presses doing that. I had planned to indie publish all my work, but I might submit Ravenor here when it's finished and see what comes of it. I want to keep my options open writing-wise, and a mix of traditional and indie publishing might offer the widest reach to readers.

Hmm. Better finish Ravenor, I suppose...

Write off September, start anew in October

That's my plan, anyway. For various reasons, September has not been a great month for writing. But October looks promising! I'd like to get a few things done:

1. Finish and publish Ravenor. Although it's turning out to be much longer than I expected, the end is in sight, so that shouldn't be hard.
2. Finish and publish The Snow Fairy's Curse. I don't think this will be much longer than I predicted, so hopefully that can be done too.
3. Make more progress on the Secret Project. I doubt I'll come close to finishing, but I'd like to perhaps hit the halfway mark.

I'm not sure whether I'll continue with December in the Dark. I loved the idea when I conceived it, but other ideas keep popping up that I like better. Sometimes the desire is to try and work on a hundred different projects at once, but then I know I'm not producing my best work, so I must resist! I know some writers can do this, but I'm a slow and steady kinda gal and I'd rather produce one or two works that I'm proud of than a dozen that I think are subpar.

The Tyranny of the Word Count

When I started writing Ravenor, I was almost positive it was going to be a short story, probably less than 10k long. Now, as you can see from the word count metre, it's edging towards my predicted grand total and I am dismayed to find I'm nowhere near finished. I'm now guessing it's more likely to be 20k. This is...well, it's not bad, but I had hoped to be finished and ready to publish by now. I'm not the world's fastest writer and when I see the finishing line moving further and further back, I get discouraged.

That's not to say I won't finish Ravenor, only that I wonder now why I bothered setting a target word count. Why not just write until the story is done, rather than worry about length? I suppose length matters if you're planning to publish traditionally or via epresses, but if you're self-publishing there are no guidelines on minimum/maximum word counts. I bought an indie book recently that was about 1k and it wasn't any less enjoyable for it, so why did I worry about hitting an arbitrary length or, indeed, exceeding it?

Lesson learned: from now on I won't assign targets like this to my stories. Whether they end up being 10k or 100k, as long as I feel I've told the story, it doesn't matter.

Sunday morning muse and news!

First the news! I wrote a creepy little story called GHOSTS IN THE GLASS, and it's going to be published in the Mirror, Mirror anthology from Static Movement. I'm so glad I discovered this place! And I love this cover.

And now the muse. I woke up at 8am on a Sunday, dammit, with a shiny new idea in my head and I want to start it immediately! I feel like I should make a concerted effort to finish Ravenor and The Snow Fairy's Curse first, but this idea is just up in my face shouting "No! Do me!" And who I am to resist the call of the muse when she strikes on a Sunday? So I'm up, I've had breakfast (after a fashion; I'm not sure chocolate chip cookies really count), and I'm ready to write! Let it begin.

The Hunger Games - I'm a little bit worried

Has anyone else seen the teaser for The Hunger Games film?

I have to confess, it worries me a bit. I adore these books (well, the first two anyway; I thought Mockingjay lacked the same energy that made The Hunger Games and Catching Fire so compelling but that's by the by), and I was very excited to hear about the films.

Then I saw Jennifer Lawrence had been cast as Katniss and was a bit worried because... well, she just doesn't look like Katniss as I envision her. But I've heard great things about her as an actress, and of course it's silly to expect your vision of a character to be the vision, so I was still optimistic. Then I saw a picture of her in costume:

She looks amazing, but does she look like she lives in the world of Panem? I'm undecided. She looks pretty healthy and clean for a kid in District 12. She looks fierce and capable, but does she look like a product of a society that forces children to fight to the death? I'm undecided on that.

The trailer hasn't helped convince me either way. I can see this film being either awesome or awful, no middle ground. The casting is great (Donald Sutherland as Snow is geniuse!), but what if the producers just want another Twilight? They might amp up the romance subplot (which, whilst important, was not the reason I loved the books personally) and downplay the political and social machinations that made the books so fascinating to me. It seems like every YA book with a hint of paranormal or dystopian about it is being optioned for film rights at the moment, and there's a danger that a lot of bland films will be churned out in the wake of the Twilight phenomenon. I'd hate to see The Hunger Games fall into this trap.

Of course I will go and see it. I'm still holding out hope it will be awesome, despite my reservations that everything looks too slick and polished to be believable as the world Collins created. But I love that she's been so involved - that makes me believe my fears will be set to rest when the film is released.

What if you hate them?

Your main characters, I mean? I'm steadily working away at The Snow Fairy's Curse, and I've come to the rather annoying realisation that Jack, my hero-in-training, is... well... rather annoying. He's impulsive and immature. He doesn't think things through very much, and when he does, he usually allows fear to rule his actions.

I kinda wanted him to start the story immature so I could have him grow, but I didn't count on finding myself so impatient with him - especially as I'm the one in charge of his actions! Hopefully as the story continues, he'll man up (by which I mean, I'll make him man up), otherwise this could be one of those stories where everyone roots for the hero to die horribly. And that would be sad.

Poetry = published

Earlier in the week I was feeling a bit emo and blue so I wrote some emo poems. And then I thought, maybe someone somewhere will like my emo poetry, so I scouted around and found this anthology and submitted them. And they got accepted! So, yay, my two poems HARM and PORCELAIN GIRL will appear in Poems from the Dark Side volume II. How cool is that? I think it's rather cool.

Not another book review - Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Oh my. Where to start? If you haven't read Shiver, here be spoilers, I guess.

Linger continues the story of Sam and Grace, a boy who was a wolf and a girl who might become one. It also takes up the story of Isabel and Cole, a girl who's brother died and a boy who wants to die. That's a very simple overview though, because Linger is far more complex and nuanced than that. The love story of Grace and Sam, set against the backdrop of the wolves' dilemma - cold makes them wolves, heat makes them human, and eventually they will stop being human forever - is heartachingly well written.

It's also a sharp contrast to the developing relationship between Isabel and Cole. Whilst Grace and Sam have fought - and still fight - seemingly impossible odds to be together, Isabel and Cole are self-destructing, fighting their own demons, lost, hurting, and their abrasive attraction makes a great counterpoint to Grace and Sam's lovely, gentle romance.

This book takes us deeper into the werewolf mythology begun in Shiver, as it is speculated that the basic understanding werewolves have of their condition is flawed, and that Sam's apparent "cure" is no such thing. Nothing is resolved as such in this volume, but the seeds are planted for the third book, and I'm excited to see what Stiefvater has in mind for the finale. Linger is a slow-burn of a book, building chapter by chapter into an emotional firework that left me desperate for Forever. Sometimes it seemed as though not much was happening, but actually the careful building and breaking down of relationships carried the book along quickly and smoothly towards the ending (which was beautifully sad).

I loved the juxtaposition of the four leads (even if I occasionally found the changing viewpoints confusing). Cole's self-loathing and selfishness versus Sam's compassion and need to belong, and the way they reacted to each other, deepened both characters and offered new perspectives on them by means of contrast. Isabel and Cole worked great together too - Isabel is probably my favourite character, so I loved being in her head, and I liked the slow way the pair of them opened up to each other. Grace is perhaps the hardest character to get to grips with for me, but I enjoyed her journey in Linger, enjoyed her battle for independence and her future, both with her parents and her wolf heritage. I would have loved to see Olivia return, but I guess that's for Forever?

I would love to do a really intelligent analysis of why this is such a good book, but I'm still a little overwrought - it's not often I finish a book and feel weepy. Stiefvater has an elegant, melancholy style that imbues every word she writes with meaning and feeling, and I envy that. Between Grace and Sam, the littlest gestures have the deepest meaning. I cannot overstate the emotional impact Linger had on me, and I had to go order Forever immediately. Can't wait to see how this story ends.

I start things

Sometimes I just don't finish them, but that's another story...

Today I started two things: a novella called The Snow Fairy's Curse and a Tumblr for posting pretty pictures and quotes I like. I suppose I could do that here, but there's something I like about having a dedicated place to post pictures of cake.

*Dusts off the blog*

I'm back! I notice I haven't blogged since early June, which I guess was also the last time I worked on Ravenor. I'd like to say I was off having exciting adventures but it would be a lie, so I won't.

Well, never mind. I am back and I am working on Ravenor again. I've added 1k today, which has made me realise my initial estimate of 10k seem rather conservative. Well, never mind that either. A story being longer than I thought isn't a bad thing unless the story sucks (which I hope it doesn't). Hopefully I can actually get it finished and published soon, and then people can decide for themselves...

It's live!

So I haven't managed to get any more work done on RAVENOR this week yet (headaches, man). But LOVE, PRAYER, FORGIVENESS (which has a teaser for RAVENOR at the end) is now officially live and available for sale! So yay! And someone's already bought a copy, which is gratifying, lol.

Not another book review - My Soul to Take, Rachel Vincent

Just as a side note, I really don't like this cover. The US one is a bit weird too though, so I'm not sure which I prefer. The UK covers for the rest of the series are very pretty though. And incidentally, slapping the word Twilight onto every YA book going is a bit of a cheat.

Anyway. I originally read the free ebook prequel to this story a year or so ago, and loved it. It seemed like a really new concept, and I'm a sucker for banshees. Despite that, it's taken me this long to get round to actually reading My Soul To Take (and I won't lie, part of that is that I find the very similar titles for the series as a whole quite confusing and wasn't sure where to start, but that's my stupidity). So I was really looking forward to this book, especially as I love Vincent's Shifter books so much.

And I did like it, I really did. But it didn't grab me quite the same way the prequel did. I like Kaylee. I like the banshee mythology. I like that it is quite different from other YA I've read. But I didn't love it and I can't quite put my finger on why. Vincent is an amazing, visceral writer, and maybe that raw emotion that powers the Shifter books was a bit muted here? It was only towards the end that I felt we were really seeing Kaylee, and before that she was simply going through the motions. I don't know if this was a deliberate choice by Vincent - Kaylee is smart and erudite, but obviously a wallflower, very much used to keeping her emotions bottled up. This made her more outspoken behaviour later in the book very striking, but it also meant I felt like I never got to know Kaylee until the last minute.

I get the sense there's a lot more to learn about all the characters in the book though; not just Kaylee. Tod and Nash will be ones to watch, and I really liked Harmony. Emma felt like a bit of a blank slate, but as she wasn't really a major player in the plot, I didn't mind that so much. I'm sure she'll be fleshed out in the sequel (which I do plan to buy).

In all, I think I maybe unfairly (and subconsciously) compared My Soul To Take to Vincent's Shifter books whilst reading, and of course they're going to be completely different! But it's still Rachel Vincent, so it's still a good book, it just didn't quite live up to the promise of the prequel. I will buy the second in the series at some point, but there are other books taking priority right now!

Fingernail-chewing

Well, it took me all afternoon yesterday, but I think I mastered the whole ebook-making process. Go me! I thought I'd experiment with a short story I originally had published under another name in an anthology I can't imagine anyone has read. Just looking for the perfect cover image right now, then I'll crack on and see what happens. It's all so tense!

ETA: I jut uploaded LOVE, PRAYER, FORGIVENESS to the Kindle! *gulp* I included an excerpt from RAVENOR too. Here's the cover I made:

Should be available in the next 24 hours or so!

Rage, rage, rage

Spending my afternoon trying to get to grips with converting files to upload to Kindle. Amazon's FAQ is horrible. Calibre apparently hates me, and Mobipocket Creator keeps finding errors with my files. I don't know if it's because I use Open Office? Apparently PDF and Word formats are accepted by Amazon, but Mobi seems to be the best from what I can find. So why doesn't it do what I want it to?!

On the bright side, I've added another 1k to Ravenor, so it's not all doom and gloom. Now back to battling with technology *cries*

Chugging Along

Got one thousand shiny new words down on Ravenor, and designed a cover. Yay! Nothing new on DitD, but hopefully Monday, being a bank holiday, will prove productive. Now I'm watching a Louis Theroux documentary on Florida prisons. It's terrifying. I never want to be a man in prison. Or a woman in prison, for that matter, but I would especially hate to be a man and go to prison. I would just get eaten alive. I guess it's probably a good thing I'm not inclined towards armed robbery or anything.

Beginning

Today I shall begin to write. Yes. I shall. I've been getting this idea straight in my head for a while, trying to fit a few elements together to get it clear in my head what I'm actually going to write. And voilà, in the shower this morning, it all came together. There's something about lemon and tea tree shower gel that just gets my synapses firing, apparently.

I'd had the title (December in the Dark) for ages. I had my main character, I had a sort-of-plot. What I didn't have was a monster. For this is a tale with monsters, as all good tales are. I just hadn't been sure what kind of monster. I toyed with vampires and werewolves, but my muse rightly rejected these as overdone. I wanted something different. I thought about British folklore, which is ripe with faeries, goblins, and witches, but although that felt better, it still didn't feel right.

And then, this morning (well, this afternoon if you want to be accurate about it, but it's Sunday, I slept in, it's fine), as I reached for the lemon and tea tree shower gel, it hit me. I wanted to write about these guys:

These guys are known as drow or trowe, and they're the dark elves. Well, that's actually a lie. In Scottish folklore, drow are actually troll-like, short, and ugly, but the nice thing about fiction is that I can pick the bits of folklore I like and embellish them how I choose. So the drow in December in the Dark won't be short or ugly. They will be tricksy and dangerous. And they will fit beautifully in my tale of creepy mansions, violin-playing heroines, madness, suicide, and family secrets. I can't wait to get started!

The Inaugural Post - a book review, why not?

Sam I Am - Heather Killough-Walden

I vascillated back and forth on how I felt about this book throughout reading. On the one hand, I liked the premise and the Celtic edge. I liked Logan (although she was a bit of a special snowflake, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing, and I think Killough-Walden worked hard to make Logan a believable character). I liked the spooky Halloween atmosphere. So all that was great.

On the other hand, I was less keen on other aspects. Take the love interest, Dominic Moldovan (who was nearly always referred to as Dominic Moldovan, as if there might be several other Dominics coming along any minute and we'd get confused). He and Logan have a small handful of encounters throughout the book, most of which involve fighting the villain. So I didn't really buy their "connection" or feel their chemistry. If I were Logan, I'd be slightly perturbed that this boy I've never really spoken to before knows my birthday. It might sound like a small thing, but think about it. Logan's life is one of constant hardship due to her dysfunctional family. She's a loner and something of a misfit at school. It seems odd to me, given her self-doubt and self-imposed isolation, that she'd fall so quickly into any kind of bond with Dominic, who's supposedly a lust object for every female student at school. Why would she trust him so fast? I wanted a little more depth and exploration here, I suppose. I thought Logan had better chemistry with Sam, the bad guy.

Speak of which, I liked the idea of Sam Hain (even if the name was a little too corny), but again I felt more depth was needed to flesh the idea out. I suppose this being the first part of a trilogy, that will come. It would have been nice to get a deeper insight into who and what he was, however, as he spends the whole book just thinking about Logan. I don't really know what his role is in a wider sense, why he actually wants Logan, or why it's really that a big a deal that he's walking the mortal world.

Overall this is a good YA read. It's well-written with some interesting ideas, but it's also underdeveloped, particularly as far as the romance subplots went. It would also have been good to get a better look at Logan's homelife, given the impact it has on her. We know her older brother is ill, but we don't know what the problem is. We know her mother has a drinking problem, but it's something we're told rather than shown. More detail here would give the reader a better understanding of Logan and her reactions to the events unfolding around her. Hopefully the sequels will expand on the world touched upon here.