Coming soon
Tag: book releases
Year End Review – Resolutions
First things first: END OF YEAR BOOK SALE!
Want some free e-books? My novels are currently available as ‘name your price’ (yes, even free if you want!) over at Smashwords until the end of the year! That’s all three books in the Bridgetown Trilogy, Meet the Lidwells!, In My Blue World, and my newest, Diwa & Kaffi, available in all formats. Go on, you know you want them!
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Anyway! Resolutions.
I’ve looked at a few of my year-end posts from the last couple of Decembers, and I’d like to think that I’ve made good on quite a few of them over the last year or so. I’ve shaken off a lot of the lingering fears, fixed a lot of bad habits, and given myself a much healthier outlook mentally and emotionally. It was a long time in coming, but I’m glad I’ve finally gotten to where I wanted and needed to be.
Because this means I can move forward with a lot less fear and distraction now.
So what do I have planned for 2024?
Well, writingwise I plan to return to cons! I’ll be at BayCon in Santa Clara on July 4-7 and I hope to be on a few panels and maybe even a few readings. It’s been a good few years since I’ve put myself out there — partly for obvious health reasons, what with Covid and all — but mask in hand and multiple vaccinations, I’ll be ready for it.
I have one, maybe two novels I’d like to release as well, Queen Ophelia’s War and Theadia. Depending on which one gets done and ready first, I will let you all know as soon as they’re ready. And I have one or two entirely new projects I’d like to work on as well. It feels great to be working on projects again after the various delays and hiatuses, to be honest.
But what about the everyday, nonwriting stuff? Well, some of that will remain offline I suppose. I’m making a concerted effort not to be so terminally online via social media, as that’s been the biggest time-suck over the last several years. Most of 2023 was spent relearning how to balance my life both on and offline to a level I’m comfortable with. [It also helps that a certain social media site has been deteriorating at an increasingly rapid pace over the last several months. I’ll be locking down my feed there at the end of the month and hanging out mostly at BlueSky and Threads come 1 January.]
Anything else? Well, I still have a few more days to go before the end of the month here at Welcome to Bridgetown, so I’m sure I’ll be talking about it more soon enough.
New Book Tomorrow!
Just a reminder that my new ebook Diwa & Kaffi will be released on Smashwords tomorrow!!
Prepping the manuscript
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!
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
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!
OH HEY I HAVE A BOOK OUT
MEET THE LIDWELLS! A Rock n’ Roll Family Memoir
“Rule number one in the music business: never start a band with any members of your family.
Sure, it’ll start off just fine, everyone having fun, with big dreams of success and gold records, but then you realize you’re stuck in a stinking, too-small tour bus with your siblings for the fifth year running, and your brother hates you. Next thing you know, the band implodes just as it’s reaching its highest success, your family won’t talk to you anymore, the press is having a field day ripping you to shreds, and you’ll need to start your career all over again as a solo act. If you dare to at that point.
Rule number two in the music business: rules were made to be broken.” — Thomas Lidwell
Meet the Lidwells! is the story of four siblings and two cousins who start a band as teenagers and achieve success beyond their wildest dreams. But while they consistently top the charts with their irresistibly catchy tunes, they’re also fighting their own demons: perfectionism, disenchantment, addiction, exhaustion, sexism…and figuring out how to become an adult in front of millions of fans.
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NOW AVAILABLE AT SMASHWORDS!
ON SALE ALL THIS WEEK FOR ONLY $1.50!
Come check it out!
The Balance of Light is now available!!
Book 3 in the Bridgetown Trilogy is available at all fine e-book retailers online, including:
[Not on Amazon yet, but the Kindle format is available at the Smashwords site.]
And don’t forget, you can also shop indie! My e-books are available at numerous independent bookstores that sell them via Kobo. Here’s a few great local Bay Area stores for starters:
Green Apple Books [Our neighborhood indie store, one of the best around!]
Out this Friday!
Woo! It’s finally DONE!
This one was the culmination of a hell of a lot of years of writing, a nearly five-year hiatus, and close to five years of revision and rewriting. Ten years ago I wasn’t even sure I’d get this far, but here we are…three books released out into the wild, and all done DIY.
It’s been one hell of a ride, folks. Sure, I’m glad it’s over and I can now, finally, dedicate the majority of my time to new projects. But right now I’m just feeling a bit of pride that I believed in this project and saw it through to the end, however long it took. I learned a hell of a lot along the way — the writing and publishing knowledge that will stay with me throughout my writing career. I met a lot of cool friends and fellow writers as well.
Yeah, I think I’m gonna stick with this gig. It’s grown on me. 🙂
Editing Complete!
Oof. Note to self: as much as I’m happy that I’ve FINALLY finished galley editing The Balance of Light, in hindsight I probably should not have stormed through the last six (albeit short) chapters in one marathon session last night. I climbed into bed and passed out around 11 last night. Exhausted, but happy.
That said…one MAJOR hurdle has finally been overcome! TBoL was a beast in need of taming, and over the last few months I did my best to do exactly that. Most of the prose that got the axe contained a lot of chaff to begin with — a lot of lengthy phrases that were culled down to much shorter sentences, a lot of visual cues that were cut, a lot of filler words that weren’t needed. As this edit took place purely on paper, I have no idea how many words I cut, but I’m sure I cut a lot of them.
So what’s next?
Well, next is the physical printing of The Persistence of Memories. I have a galley copy here that’s been marked up and everything, I just need to clean up the e-book and prepare the physical copy for release.
Then, one more time with TBoL: create the e-book and physical copy for release.
And that’s it? No more work on the Bridgetown Trilogy? I can put it to bed?
Well, not quite. I have something special that I’d like to prepare for a March 2017 release; something to celebrate it being twenty long years since that first writing session that started it all. A special e-book release, maybe with some fun extras? And maybe shiny collector’s edition versions of the physical releases with extra stuff? Who knows. But it’s gonna be fun!
And then I’ll have to think of what to work on next!
Welcome to Bridgetown 