What's new, pussy-cat?

Thanks for the beads - I mean memories, New Orleans.

Hey there booknerds! I wanted to pop on the good ole blog and give you an update on what’s going on, and what you can expect from me in the coming weeks/months.

So, first things first, I'm moving again. I know, I know, it doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was packing up my life and moving to New Orleans where I focused on my writing full time. Well, that’s because it was only two years ago. That’s right, almost 2 years to the day of starting this adventure and this website (which was actually started in May but it took me a bit to write the first blog), I’m moving back to California.

Never fear, my friends, just because I’m going back to my old stomping grounds doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop what I’m doing and go back to what I had been doing before. No, I’ll just be transporting this adventure back to familiar ground. So, in case you were worried, don’t be. That does mean that the next few weeks will be awful though. In case you’ve never moved cross country with pets, I don’t recommend it. Unless it’s just a dog, they’re pretty chill. But unlike kids who may abhor road trips, you cannot reason with a cat.

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The girl cat is the grey one. The one already giving the side eye.

You can’t console cats and reassure them that after a few days of annoying driving, it’ll be over. That they’ll be somewhere new and awesome and the torture will end. No. All cat’s see is: THIS IS MY LIFE NOW AND OMG I HATE YOU, HUMAN!

They cry and howl the whole time unless you drug them. Or my cats do, anyway. And yes, some people have told me that if I don’t keep them in their carrier that they’ll be much better on the road. The thing with cats is, they like to be in your face, or near your feet—or, again, my cats do. Which means it’s only a matter of time before one of the fluff balls decides that under the brake is the PURFECT (sorry, couldn’t resist) place for them to take a nap. Or, they’ll want to be on the driver’s lap and just touch their face. Side note: our girl cat is a face touch-er. She just loves to sit on your lap and look at you adoringly, and then touch your face. It’s cute, but probably not the best thing while driving. So the cat’s will remain contained, and they will continue their diatribe of anguished meowing in the car and in the hotels, and my dog will look at us and say—with his eyes, of course—“Why you do this? Why you no love me?”

And of course, once we arrive in California our stuff won’t be with us. It’ll be on a truck arriving sometime later. I’ll have my laptop, but not my main computer or my desk, and we’ll be crashing at my parent’s house until our things arrive and we can move into our new digs. Which means, dear, dear friends, that I won’t be doing a ton of work during that time.

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I’m neurotic. I need my familiar things to be truly productive. Plus, whenever I’m home my mom tends to go back to treating me like I’m in high school—please tell me I’m not the only one whose parents do this?—so I get interrupted a lot and end up with a sort of curfew again. Me and my husband, thirty year-old grown-ass adults, will once again have a curfew. But hey, at least I get to eat for free, right?

That’s not to say there isn’t a bunch of new stuff coming. Book 3 in The Monster of Selkirk series is due back from the new editor any day now! Once that’s back in my hands, regardless of where I am, I will go through that bad boy like no one’s business to ensure it gets into your hands sooner. In other good news, books 4 and 5 are pretty much in the final stages of “doneness” as well, so I swear there won’t be such a long wait for those as there was for book 3.

In terms of new stories and projects, my short horror story “The Cautionary Tale of Bertrand Allary” has been published! You can get yourself a copy here along with short stories from 33 other talented authors. If you’ve seen the newsletter, you saw that the secret Pinterest board for the new fantasy series I'm working on is no longer a secret, so be sure to give that a gander. I’m about 70k words into the new project so it’s coming along rather nicely. It’s one of those world’s that I’ve made so robust, that it could very well have several spinoff novels all within the same universe, which I’m pretty excited about. Once you’ve looked at the board, I’d love to hear what you think that book may be about, but I can’t promise to confirm much at this stage due to serious spoilers, and that stuff may change. This is a first draft, after all.

Yay for giveaways!

The last project I have in the works is a contemporary fiction. I know, it’s quite the departure from my normal genre, but it’s an important story. It was inspired by true events and, as many of you know, I love making characters that deal with tough things and normalizing those feelings or situations so that others, perhaps, don’t feel so alone. This book is very much in that camp. But because it was inspired by actual events in my life, it’s something that’s even closer to my heart, and makes me feel incredibly vulnerable to share with you all. That being said, I am happy to share that I’ve just gotten that book back from my first critique partner, and once I go through their suggestions, it will go through a few more hands and then revisions and… you get the idea. Even though the book is “done” in terms of writing, it still has a lot of kinks to work out so I don’t have a deadline or timeline of when you'll have that in your hands, as I’m taking it through different channels then The Monster of Selkirk. But rest assured, you will see it.

If you’ve made it this far in the blog post, I applaud you, and shall reward your efforts! You see my friends, I’ll be running another giveaway starting Monday, April 30th. Want to enter? Be sure you’ve signed up for my newsletter! This giveaway will be exclusive to subscribers, and they’ll get a signed copy of book 2 headed their way before I move!

See? I told you I was working hard on fun stuff for you all! I hope that makes up for the weird “break” I’ll be taking as I transport my life. Again.

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