NEWS!

There’s so much going on right now, I feel like I’m one of the spiny bits in an old school egg beater. Here we go:

The good news: Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon is available for sale. Yes, you read that right! I got the rights to my book back, and it’s currently for sale on Amazon. I have not pushed it out to other platforms, and it’s not looking like I’m going to anytime soon. Turns out, I don’t have any time to figure out anything else right now (long story), so for the foreseeable future, my book is on Amazon as an ebook. I have some paperbacks left, but it’s a diminishing supply (don’t buy the fifty dollar copy from that crazy person who thinks my book being rare drives up the price). In a few months, I should be uploading to Create Space for those of you who like books you can touch.

More good news: Prom, Magic, And Other Man-Made Disasters will be up soon. How soon, you ask? Sometime this week, ebooks should become available. I’ll post when things are settled out (it takes Amazon some time to link editions, and I’m trying not to lose my reviews, those are hard to come by!).

The BEST NEWS: The sequel to Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon is coming out! That’s right, it’s really really happening. GROUNDED, NO PHONE, AND OTHER SIGNS YOUR MOM IS A FIRE BREATHING MONSTER is in production!

What does this mean? I won’t have a release date for a while yet, but I’m very excited to share the much anticipated sequel to Acne. If you loved Acne, you’re in for a real treat as the gang is back at it, but now things are bigger, more dangerous, and even more family secrets are unearthed. It’s going to be a wild ride, and I can’t wait to unleash it on the world! 

Sometimes things go Sideways

If you’ve been to my buy pages recently, you’ll probably notice that they don’t work. My three novels have been taken down by my publisher, Curiosity Quills. The publisher is in the process of reorganizing their business, and we are currently in the process of rights reversion.

So what does this mean for me and my books?

Right now this means you can’t buy my books. (Sorry!) It means I am taking a crash course in self publishing because I have an irrational need to finish things. Acne has a sequel. It has two, possible three, and I want to make sure the whole story gets told. This means drafting, editing, formatting, cover art and marketing plan. This is not minor. On the plus side, the first sequel has already been written, but there’s a lot of production even when a book is 100% ready to go, and it isn’t there yet.

But Rena, you say, What about Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon? I haven’t bought my copy of that book yet! And I want it!

Yeah, for the books that were already finished, there’s a different problem. There are some paperback copies going out into the world still, but that’s a limited supply. There are no e copies. There were never audio copies.

As of right now, it’s going to be a while before ebooks are available again, and they will be. My plan is to re-release Acne and Prom as soon as I solve the problem of formatting, cover art, and final typo fixes (an issue we had with the previous books).

So I have a lot of work on my plate, and much sooner than I’d planned!

On the plus side, this gives me the opportunity to have more control of the direction these books take. I have loved being a Literary Marauder, but now I get to shred the skies with my own flag—just as soon as I figure out how to rig this spinnaker so it doesn’t flip my ship.

One Year Later

It's sort of insane to write this, but one year ago, my first book was unleashed on the world.

Like Wow. I don't even have words. That statement feels simultaneously long ago in a galaxy far away, and like it happened just a couple days ago. And it's still such an honor to have my work out in the world, and supported by the amazing people at Curiosity Quills. I am amazed and humbled by the reception my book has received. Fan mail and reviews, all of it has been amazing, and I count myself lucky to have connected with some many wonderful people along the way.


The thing I get asked the most is: "When is the sequel coming out?" Coincidentally, this is the biggest compliment anyone can give a writer, to express excitement about future work. Thank you all for making the last year unbelievable!

(And yes, there is a sequel in the works!)







(Also, you can buy the book here or here if you don't already have a copy!)

P is for picking your path: A to Z challenge

The Home Stretch: the Road to Published

If you’ve been following parts I, II, III, and IV, you’ve probably guessed that this book took a long time to become a book, and boy, you’d be right.

I had given up on my book not once, but twice, and I’d started querying another book. It’s complicated because when you start querying one book you have to make a choice ―agents or publishers. You don’t do both. So I started sending my new novel out into the world of agents, and things were different. I got partials and fulls and my book did well in contests. It was all very exciting.

That is, things were very exciting up until the point when they were painfully “not right for our needs at this time.”

Yeah, rejection sucks, but it’s part of the process. For this new novel, I started getting personalized feedback, concrete bits I could actually work with. Unsure how to apply them to my current novel, I practiced that feedback on my old novel, the one in the trunk. Then, I saw a contest―if there’s one thing you should know, it’s that I have a weak spot for contests. But this contest wasn’t the usual query contest for agents, it was aimed at publishers only. My current query bait was already out in the world with agents, and I didn’t want to query both agents and editors with my book. That would be rude. But I did have that other novel and thanks to the feedback, I had a good idea what might be wrong with my novel. I edited Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon and put it in the contest.

And something happened that hadn’t happened before: someone from the publishing world, an editor, loved my book. It was such a moment of validation to have someone other than close friends and family say they loved my work. They were enthusiastic and hopeful.

And then I got a second offer.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to make up your mind, but it ain’t easy. I talked to all the people I knew who had published with small publishers and with the publishers I was considering. To be truthful, I had already researched one of the publishers, Curiosity Quills, and they were the reason I had entered the contest in the first place. I had been hoping they would notice me, and they did. I was over the moon.

And that, as they say is that.

I know it’s pretty normal to talk about these things, but if you saw something about my path to publishing that you’re curious about, feel free to ask. From my rather longwinded story here, it should be obvious I love talking about myself and my process.

Good Bye to another year

Another year has passed, and things have been...

I honestly don't know where to start. Some of the best moments of my life, some pretty crappy moments, and some moments I don't even know how to take yet.

I guess, like all things, a year is a hard thing to judge in the dark of the long nights that cluster around the solstice. It's too complicated to say "this year sucked" or "This year was great!" To be honest, choices I made this year have yet to bear fruit. I could be sitting on even bigger changes (plus or minus) than all the years previous.

Officially, with regards to 2014, I feel I'm still too close to make a judgement. It's been sublime. I have more friends than last year. I have more opportunities than I had last year. I learned things. I grew--sometimes forcibly--and I have a wild suspicion that life is changing in a positive direction. It wasn't easy, by any means.

Was 2014 a bad year? No, not really.

Was it a good year? Meh, some years are perfectly serviceable, and someday I'll look back at this time and wonder why I didn't shout from the rooftops how incredible the past year was. I lived. I basked in the glory of the universe.

On the other hand, life is always so fragile. We dance the knife's edge between triumph and ruin, and they both lurk behind closed doors we didn't even know were there. I'm glad to be moving forward, but not because I'd like to cast the last year aside. Good things are coming--some obvious, some that seem like inconveniences now, and some I have no idea are hiding in my future.

While I might not know what to think of 2014, I do know what to think of 2015:

Bring it.

News, the Good Kind

So this thing happened over the summer.

Summer is for making pumpkins.

I saw a contest being held on the Aussie Owned and Read site. It looked pretty cool. Pitch your novel directly to editors from small presses.

I was ecstatic, except, I knew from reading Dahlia, that you HAVE to choose which way you’re pitching a book: agents OR editors. My current query bait was having a pretty good run, so I wasn’t ready to jump into editor land, since a no from a publisher is a burned bridge, and I didn’t want to have a bunch of those on a book I was querying. Agents might not be all that enthusiastic at having their stories head hunted by small presses (who usually offer small money, and agents have to eat, too).

But I had another story (news flash, if you’re a writer, you write: the longer you’re in the more manuscripts will haunt you from the trunk), a story I’d written back in 2011, entered into the 2012 Writer’s Voice. Stuff was going on in my life, so I put that book away, and hadn’t really chased all the rabbits down the holes―I was REALLY Busy. But it was collecting electrons on my hard drive. I had this vision of just dusting it off and entering it.

Ah, Naïveté, thy name is writer.

Some time between when I’d put that story away and when I opened it for the Pitcharama contest, the fairies had failed to clean it up and make it ready for the eyes of others (faeries don’t follow orders well, I tell you). I busted buns, cleaned up the manuscript, fixed up my pitch and posted it on the blog.

Then I waited.

And waited.

And then I saw that the other participants were getting picked to teams, and I had a sad face.

Sad face… until Stacy Nash posted on my pitch that she wanted me for her team!

Everything went live. Pretty quickly, I got requests from two editors at different presses. I gave my first three chapters one more read through, and sent them off.

I’d like to say that at this point, I happily went about my complicated and well adjusted life, but who am I kidding? I’m a research scientist by training. I looked up every scrap of information I could about the presses. I maybe wore out the refresh key on my computer hoping to get an email.

Then the editor from Curiosity Quills got back to me and said she loved it. Please send the rest.

Loved it? My book? I was pretty much in a state of shock.

I did the happy dance, then tried to talk some reason into my brain. I’ve had full requests before.

I’ve had full requests from publishers before. It’s a guarantee of exactly nothing, so I settled in to wait the long wait. The “Please love my book” wait.

After a month, she got back to me with a contract.**

!!!!!!!

That’s right, I sold my first book, ACNE, ASTHMA, AND OTHER SIGNS YOU MIGHT BE HALF DRAGON, a YA urban fantasy to Curiosity Quills!

Me, signing at the desk of awesome.

I’m so excited!

Thanks to Stacy for picking me for your team!

Thanks to Aussie Owned and Read for hosting Pitcharama. ALL THE FEELS.

And thanks to Kathleen for loving my book (like really, I’m still in shock!), and I'm super excited to be joining Curiosity Quills!

Okay, now back to work.

**Turns out, I have an odd response to too much emotion, good or bad: the part that feels shuts off. It goes into overload, and only the cold, logic remains. It’s the weirdest thing. It’s sort of like in that Star Trek movie where Data tells the Captain that he’s scared and he’d like permission to turn off his emotion chip. Apparently, that’s my default happy mode.