First of all, if you’re visiting from the Halloween Blog Hop, hi! Please enjoy my little blog, and click here to read about my top 5 scariest film monsters, and tell us who your scariest monster is in the comments.
Speaking of Halloween, if you’re looking for a fun and spooky read to get you into the holiday mood, my paranormal fantasy novel, Restless Spirits, is FREE for the Kindle from now until midnight on Halloween. Get it here.
It’s been a while since I’ve made a progress report for Dominion of the Damned. I edited Chapter 38 this morning, and I’ve got about a dozen chapters left to go. I have now shorn up all of the plot holes and character inconsistencies, and there’s only one major thing left to fix that caused all of my beta readers to raise their eyebrows. So the rest of the edits should go pretty quickly. I’m hoping to be done with it by the end of this week.
After that, I still want to set it aside for a week or so and then give it one more read-through to make sure I caught all of the errors and typos, and that I didn’t create any new ones during my revisions. Once that’s done, I’m thinking of offering free ARCs to a handful of volunteers who are willing to give it an honest review in a public place (as opposed to just telling me what they think) and to tell me if they catch any errors that I missed. So I think we’re looking at an early-to-mid December release (I don’t want to release it in the middle of NaNoWriMo, anyway).
And in the mean time, I think I’m going to experiment with pre-selling it on Kickstarter. Mostly, I want to have experience with Kickstarter so I can teach others how to use it, but if I can pre-sell enough copies to raise the funds I need to finalize the cover, that would be awesome.
In other news, I thought I knew what my next book was going to be, but my actual next book came and whapped me upside the head the other day and told me to write it instead. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m closer to actually starting it, but for now I’ll tell you this–it’s a real departure from anything I’ve written before, and my most ambitious story yet in terms of world-building and the prep-work and research that I’ll have to do. That’s why I usually write contemporary and urban fantasy and horror–I tend to be really lazy in the research and world-building areas, and it’s so much easier to write in an era and setting that I’m already familiar with, and just make up the fantastical parts.
But this… it’s steampunk, for one thing, and historical (well, alternate history, but you have to know something about history in the first place in order to alter it convincingly), and it’s going to be a lot of work. But I’m really excited about it, and I can’t wait to get started, and I really can’t wait to tell you what it’s all about.
Let me know how your Kickstarter thing goes. I have been wanting to use that for an invention I have. The problem is that I don’t have a prototype made, just the drawings and details. I was doing some calculating the other day. The people who started Kickstarter take 5%, which is fair. Thus far in 3 years they have made 17 million. Not too shabby!
Will do. I won’t have a big goal, since it’s more for practice/the experience than anything, but my husband has some business ideas that it might come in handy for in the future. At any rate, I figure it can’t hurt to give it a try. If nothing else, it’ll help raise awareness about my novel.