Month: June 2023

What’s next?

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So Diwa & Kaffi drops at the end of this week…and I’m already thinking of what I want to do next! I’m definitely feeling the positive rush that I felt when I released my previous ebooks, how having one new title out each year inspired me to keep doing what I love. Sure, taking a few years off for personal reasons was worth it (and much needed) but now that I’m back I really want to return to this schedule.

So what would I work on, you say? Would it be Theadia? Or maybe Queen Ophelia? A sequel to In My Blue World? Or something else kicking around? Or something completely new? [I mean, I do have that romcom idea as well…] Who knows? Either way, releasing this book has reminded me how much I loved self-publishing — even the hard parts like the revision and the cover layout and the formatting — I want to keep going!!

Prepping the manuscript

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WHOOF. I spent most of Thursday afternoon prepping Diwa & Kaffi for its July 1 debut, and it took me a little longer than I expected! Formatting the manuscript itself wasn’t all that hard, though I’m clearly out of practice and had to fix a few embarrassing errors.

No, it was the cover that was the biggest pain in the butt! I’ll spare you the details other than that my photo editing apps were refusing to do what I wanted them to do. For now I’ve uploaded a slightly touched-up cover that I can deal with, but will most definitely upload a much better one when I have more time and brainspace for it.

But yeah, at this point the book is ready to go! I’m right chuffed that this book is finally about to be a reality!

Coming Soon: New E-Book!

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In case you haven’t guessed already, I am planning a quick release of Diwa & Kaffi, preferably on 1 July to coincide with Smashwords’ annual summer sale. This gives me a little less than two weeks to a) finish the ‘temporary’ cover I’d started making the other day, and b) format the Word file to e-book form. Thankfully I can do both in that amount of time as I’m a quick worker and the novel has been completely revised, cleaned up and ready to go for a good few months now.

What inspired this surprise release? Sigur Rós, of all things. Last Thursday they’d popped onto their Instagram feed and simply said ‘oh hey we have our first new album in ten years coming out tomorrow, have fun’. On that very same day, I’d gotten an email from Smashwords about their summer sale, and realized this was a perfect time to send it out into the wild. I posted it in serialized form for my readers here a few months ago, but I felt it was far past time to share it with the rest of the world.

To be honest, I really miss the thrill of releasing e-books like this! My last one was In My Blue World in early 2019, so it’s been a four-year gap. [I’ve obviously been busy since then with writing and real life stuff, of course.] I’m looking forward to getting this one out to you in a couple of weeks! Stay tuned for updates and links!

Diwa & Kaffi: A demo cover

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I’ve been sitting on this novel a bit too long and I think it really needs to be released. I consider it one of my best works, and weirdly enough the only reason I’m still sitting on it is because I haven’t gotten around to researching and commissioning an artist to create what I’m seeing in my head for it. [For those curious, I’ve always pictured it in a light manga style, having the same kind of mood as one of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku tankobon, featuring the two mains on the cover and the other two mains on the back. I’m thinking I may do that for a later edition.]

One thing of note: serendipitously, the curved apartment building in the picture is here in San Francisco and is the exact same building that inspired the Palm building in the novel! Did not expect that to happen when I went looking for pictures yesterday!

Either way, I’m planning on finally sending this one out into the wild VERY soon. Which means I’m back to playing around with Shutterstock’s library and PicMonkey’s platform. This is by no means the final version, of course. I need to tweak a number of things, including the color of the sky and the fonts for the title and byline.

In the meantime, let me know what you think!

Keeping Up

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I’ve actually been pretty good with the 750 Words these days! Once again, it’s mainly because I’m using it for a specific single purpose instead of trying to write something new every day. [In this case, I’m low-key doing a bit of ongoing personal writing tied in with a not-quite-trunked, still-on-the-backburner project, but y’all probably know what it is anyway.] I’m lucking out because the writing I’m doing for it is super easy, and I can hit the numbers I want in about twenty minutes, leaving me with a perfect amount of time for the blogging and work on MU4.

Speaking of MU4, the day after I posted Monday’s entry here, I came to the conclusion that the only way I’d be able to break this low-stakes mindset is to do a complete one-eighty. My first thought was: you want tension? I’ll give you some f***ing tension. I realized I couldn’t just build up to it: I had to make it happen, and make it happen now. An ultimate oh shit moment. And I ran with it.

And it worked! This was exactly the push I needed to get this novel back on track, to give it the boost it so desperately needed. I already know I’m going to need to do some heavy revision of the previous six chapters at some future point to make it work, but that’s par for the course anyway. The important thing here is that I’m right where I need to be again. Now all I have to do is keep it going!

Tension

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I’ll admit I’m having a bit of a problem with MU4 lately. I have some interesting ideas, but my brain seems to be stuck in low-stakes mode for some reason. I don’t blame anything or anyone other than myself for that; I’d put myself in that mode near the start of the pandemic to a) get through it and deal with the Former Day Job and post-FDJ personal stuff, and b) get into the mood that writing Diwa & Kaffi required. Thing is, I’ve been having trouble getting out of that mode ever since.

This is partly why I’m writing MU4, to be honest. If there was any universe that could get me back into the higher-stakes brainspace, it’s the Mendaihu Universe. It’s much easier said than done, however…I like what I have so far, but I REALLY need to start raising the volume, so to speak. I’ve written several scenes that I think are great, but I seem to be stopping short of Big Epic Action almost every single time.

So I think I really need to shake it up a bit. Whatever’s going on with both my new and old characters, I need to do more with them. They need to get in on the action, get stuck in oh shit situations, do things with consequences. Why am I avoiding writing that? Well, it could very well be that Certain Real Life Politics over the last five or so years took a lot out of me and I’m merely avoiding the emotional stress from it and elsewhere, but I can only avoid it for so long.

I need to connect and channel that tension again. Feed it into something creative. I’m good at that. I know I am. I just need to take that step and do it again.