Category Archives: ROW80

Twiceborn Endgame cover reveal!

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Drum-roll please! It’s finally time to reveal the gorgeous cover for Twiceborn Endgame:

Twiceborn Endgame small

I love it, and I can’t wait to see it sitting side by side with the first two on Amazon. That should only be a couple of weeks away now. It’s still with the editor, but should be back any day now. Hopefully she won’t suggest too many changes, then it’s off to the formatter and we’re into the home stretch. Still have to write the blurb, though. I always put that off until the last minute! Considering how short they are, blurbs are surprisingly difficult to write.

This one will be a doozy, too. There’s so much going on in this book! So many threads to tie off, as it’s the last book in the trilogy. Lots of exciting twists, none of which I want to give away in the blurb, so I’m going to have to give it careful thought. Kate has more hair-raising adventures! And does kick-ass dragon stuff! (Sadly the blurb requires a little more detail than that.)

In other news, the second Fairytale Curse book has a name: The Cauldron’s Gift. It also has a most delicious cover, but I can’t show you that yet, as the book’s not due out for several months yet. I’ve had a stressful but exciting time lately working with the cover designer to come up with something that suited the book and was genre-appropriate. That’s another thing about publishing that’s not as easy as it sounds (though it’s a lot more fun than blurb-writing).

And of course it’s November, that time of year when crazy people all over the world commit to writing a whole novel in just one month. I was still finishing up revisions on Twiceborn Endgame when November started, and then I had a bit of a mental blank for a few days: what on earth would I write about? I was supposed to be writing the third Fairytale Curse book, but the prospect left me unenthused, so I sat down on November 5th and began a random new story instead.

So now I’m pulling my usual November stunt of madly scrambling to dream up enough story to be able to continue writing every day. “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Well, the road is exeptionally foggy, but I’m motoring on, trusting to the process. Hopefully I arrive at the end with a finished draft!

How about you? Are you doing Nanowrimo? How are you going?

Procrastinators of the world, unite … tomorrow

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DSCN2254

What do you do when you have a squillion and one things on your to-do list and deadlines breathing down your neck?

Why, you start crocheting a random shawl, of course. Despite the fact you’ve never worn a shawl in your life. And summer is approaching, and said shawl could not possibly be worn for another six months.

Hello, my name is Marina and I’m a terrible procrastinator. Well, actually I’m a darn good one. It’s my habit of procrastinating that’s terrible, and it seems the more urgent the tasks hanging over my head are, the more likely I am to skive off and do something else completely. It’s as if the weight of everything hanging over my head paralyses me and makes me incapable of doing anything.

I am enjoying crocheting again, though!

And the situation isn’t quite as dire as I’m painting it. I’ve written two scenes in Moonborn since my last post. Should have been more, of course, but two is better than none, and I only have five to go. I’ve finished the read-through of the first draft of Fairytale Curse 2, which is the first step in my revision process. I also finished up a beta read of a friend’s novel, so I haven’t spent all my time crocheting.

Funny thing about that, though. I realised some time ago that all my creative pursuits have fallen by the wayside since I got serious about this writing thing. No more quilting, crochet or scrapbooking. Each of those has been a huge part of my life at one time or another, and I miss the colour. I’m a very visual person. I love playing with fabric, and seeing a piece of art emerge under my hands. It still thrills me when I look over a piece of crochet forming and marvel that this object is taking shape from a single strand of yarn. I miss the tactile nature of practical crafts. Making up worlds and people in your head is a very different kind of creativity, and even though I love that, life has felt like it’s missing something since I started focusing so exclusively on it.

And sometimes, particularly when deadlines are looming, even the most creative enterprise can still feel like work. That’s when a hobby, something you do just for fun, no pressure, can be a wonderful release. Whether it’s baking, woodwork, gardening or crochet, there’s nothing like the feeling of creating something with your hands, and the quiet, contemplative nature of such creation makes a great stress release.

So maybe my shawl wasn’t so random. Maybe it’s my subconscious’s way of telling me to stop and smell the roses a little. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it!

What activities do you turn to when you need to chill out?

What’s that whooshing sound?

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As Douglas Adams once said: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Well, I love deadlines too, for their motivational power. I have eleventy billion things to get done between now and the end of the year, so no whooshing sounds allowed. Writing down my goals helps me get my procrastinating butt into gear, so here are the big ones:

  1. October: Finish drafting Moonborn. Plan the revision of the second Fairytale Curse book and decide on its title. Incorporate beta readers’ feedback into Twiceborn Endgame.
  2. November: Nanowrimo time, yay! Draft a new novel. Incorporate editor’s feedback into Twiceborn Endgame, publish it and organise promo. Liaise with the cover designer for the second Fairytale Curse book.
  3. December: Collapse in a heap once Nano’s over. Revise Moonborn. Possibly even publish it, but most likely Christmas madness will intervene.

To help keep myself accountable, I’m joining in the final Round of Words in 80 Days, the writing challenge that knows you have a life. That will encourage me to blog more than once a month, too.

Lots to do, and we’re running out of year! All the usual end-of-year things will start soon, including Baby Duck’s graduation from primary school. I can’t believe my baby will be in high school next year! It will be the end of an era for our family, with no one left in primary school. Next year will also be Drama Duck’s last year in high school, so more big adventures are on the horizon.

And some kind soul pointed out to me on the weekend that it’s only nine weeks until Christmas. Aargh!

I’m not dead

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Just dropping in quickly to say I’m not dead (though this whooping cough is making me feel pretty dodgy). I’ve been busy—between coughing bouts—working on the revision of The Twiceborn Queen. (Yes, that “sinus infection” I mentioned a couple of posts ago turned out to be whooping cough, which, alas, is also known as “the hundred-day cough”. I’ve had it since mid-January, so I still have a few more weeks of coughing to go.)

I finished the first, most labour-intensive, revision, and am now halfway through the second one. With a bit of luck I’ll get through the rest of that tomorrow. Then it’s on to smaller-level stuff like smoothing out the prose and hunting down and exterminating overused words.

I’ve already sent it to the beta readers, and will continue to work on it while I’m waiting for their feedback. The deadline to get it to the editor is the 1st of April, so I had to get the beta readers started on it before it was as beautiful as I would have liked. Feedback so far is encouraging.

Nearly there now! I’m hoping to publish in late April or early May. Can’t wait to share it with you guys!

Here’s an extract to whet your appetites:

 “Now you’re back you can check if anything’s been taken,” Tanya said. “The police will want to know.”

“Sure.” I turned the mug over in my hands, wondering which was the lesser of the two evils: ignore the police and risk them chasing me up over the supposed burglary, or file a report and draw Det Hartley’s attention to a burglary complete with random blood stains connected to my already-sullied name.

“I had to come in when I saw a strange car in the driveway,” Tanya said. “I wasn’t sure it was you. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back? I could have picked you up at the airport.”

“No, no, it was fine. I had Garth.”

“Have you?”

“What?”

“Had Garth.”

I choked. I hoped he hadn’t heard that. Werewolf ears were pretty sharp. “God, Tanya, don’t you ever stop? He’s just a friend.” And thanks very much for putting that idea in my head. As if my dragon libido needed any encouragement to start thinking inappropriate thoughts about my employees.

She pouted. “You always say that. What about that gorgeous hunk of man flesh you work with? What’s he going to think when he sees you running around with this Garth guy?”

“Actually—” I could feel my cheeks warming as the image of a naked Garth persisted. “Actually, Ben and I are, um … together now.”

The Work in Progress Blog Tour: The Twiceborn Queen

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I’ve been tagged by the fabulous Ceinwen Langley in  “The Work in Progress Blog Tour”. The rules are simple:

  1. Link back to the post of the person who nominated you.
  2. Write a little about and give the first sentence of the first three chapters of your current work-in-progress.
  3. Nominate some other writer(s) to do the same.

Ceinwen sounds very busy with all her projects at the moment! She’s a working scriptwriter (with fifteen Neighbours scripts under her belt) as well as the author of The Edge of the Woods, a YA fantasy which I loved. My review of that is here.

I’m not working on quite so many things at once: basically I have two projects on the go. One is The Twiceborn Queen, the sequel to Twiceborn, which I’m busy revising.

Only … not quite as busy as I should be, because I’ve got distracted planning the revision of the first in a new series. It’s a YA fantasy called The Fairytale Curse, and is a modern take on the fairytale Toads and Diamonds. I’m very excited about it, and OMG you should SEE the beautiful cover it’s going to have—but I’ll tell you about that another time.

Back to The Twiceborn Queen, which I really must get finished very soon. I have eight scenes to go to finish the first (and biggest) round of revision.

There’s no rest for the wicked, they say, and Kate must have been very wicked in a previous life, for no sooner does she achieve her (mainly) happy ending in Twiceborn, but she’s thrown straight back into the fray to face even more difficult challenges. Now she’s not just fighting for survival against the daughters of the dragon queen, but facing the queen herself, with all the might of the empire behind her. Not good odds when you only have a ragtag band of survivors on your side.

And of course, being the sadistic author that I am, I throw all manner of complications in there, just for kicks.

So here’s the beginnings of my first three chapters, still not entirely polished (it’s still a WIP, after all):

Chapter One

They say hindsight is 20:20 vision, but still I can’t help that niggling feeling, the one that whispers that I should have known. Mothers are supposed to have ESP, right? Or at least eyes in the backs of their heads. There must have been some sign that things weren’t right, some little clue to tip me off, if only I’d been paying more attention.

Chapter Two

We spent three more hours at the hospital, answering the questions of every uniform that went past, watching the parade of police and hospital staff coming and going. Photographers and forensics, and whole hordes of other people whose jobs I couldn’t even guess at, made their way into the room, then reappeared, checking me out as they went past as if they couldn’t quite believe what I’d done.

Chapter Three

We headed across the Harbour Bridge, its great steel girders criss-crossing above our heads, their huge size making the cars below look like tiny coloured toys. Five nights ago Valeria had been perched up there like some nightmare bird, even her great size diminished by the mighty bridge.

Up next I’m nominating Pauline M Ross, author of the epic fantasies The Plains of Kallanash and The Fire Mages. I haven’t read The Plains of Kallanash yet, but I plan to remedy that soon. The Fire Mages was great, and I’ll be putting up a review of it shortly.

A boy, a sphinx, and an unanswerable riddle

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I have a new story out! It’s only a short story (quite tiny at 4,000 words), but it makes me feel all accomplished and author-y to have two books to my name—even if they are only ebooks at present. (Don’t ask my why the paperback of Twiceborn isn’t out yet. Sigh.)

So, new story: it’s called “The Family Business”. Here is the cover. Cute, no?

The Family Business small

The blurb is:

“Renardo and his brothers are up to their eyeballs in debt, with one last chance to save their merchant business (and their gonads) from the moneylender. The great city of Tebos is holding its Festival of Song in three days’ time, and they have a wagonload of songbirds to sell.

There’s just one large, man-eating problem: the bored sphinx who guards the city’s gates, and her deadly riddle game. Renardo doesn’t even want to be a merchant, but somehow it falls to him to outwit the sphinx. No pressure. All he has to do is come up with an unanswerable riddle.”

It’s on sale at Amazon for only 99 cents. Grab a copy and fill in a happy fifteen or twenty minutes on your next commute, or while you’re waiting at soccer practice/the doctor’s surgery/whatever.

And speaking of 99 cents: Twiceborn is also on sale at that bargain basement price for the next few days, so if you’ve been meaning to grab a copy of that but haven’t quite gotten around to it, now would be a good time! It was featured on Valentines Day on the Kindle Books and Tips blog. Not exactly your typical Valentines Day fare, unless your idea of romance includes homicidal dragons, but oh well. Not being much of a romantic myself, the significance of the date had slipped my mind when I made the booking!

So, you may be wondering why “The Family Business” has suddenly appeared. Weren’t you supposed to be working furiously on The Twiceborn Queen, Marina? You never mentioned anything about some random short story being published in that big long list of things you were going to achieve that you blogged about recently.

Well yes, that’s true. Life, as they say, is full of surprises, and one that landed in my lap mid-January was a sinus infection that is still ongoing. Surprise! At its worst I was getting maybe three hours’ sleep a night, and let’s just say that the revision schedule fell a little behind.

I decided to call it early on and shift my deadline with the editor from 1 March to 1 April, which meant that it would be four months between releases instead of the three I’d planned. So I decided to put out a short story instead, one that had already been published a couple of years ago in a magazine, so it didn’t need any work from my end apart from organising a cover and the formatting.

I’m still on the first revision of The Twiceborn Queen, a little over halfway. That’s not where I’d like to be, obviously, but all the new scenes I had to add were in the first half, so hopefully progress will be quicker from here.

The Carnivore even took the ducklings out on Valentines Day so I could work without interruptions. To a writer, that’s the best Valentines Day present ever!

When they came home, Drama Duck presented me with a single rose, nicely gift-wrapped.

“It’s from Dad,” she said.

They were both grinning like idiots, and she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“We totally didn’t find that on the train where some guy had left it behind,” she added.

The Carnivore gave me a fond smile. “You’re worth it, honey.”

Hope you enjoyed Valentines Day, if you celebrate it. Did you get anything nice from your significant other (scavenged or otherwise)?

A Round of Words in 80 Days: Goal-setting

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A Round of Words in 80 Days is the writing challenge that knows you have a life. There are four rounds each year. You set your own goals for each 80-day period, announce them on your blog, then track your progress. Your goals can be anything writing-related, as long as they are measurable.

And why do we like writing challenges? Apart from the fun of hanging with other writers who are also beating their words into submission? Because of the Big A: Accountability.

No, it shouldn’t make any difference, and yet, somehow it does. Whatever works, I say. Anything that helps me achieve my goals. And what are those goals?

So glad you asked! This round of ROW80 started on 5th January, and finishes on 26th March. As it happens that fits very neatly into my most immediate goal, which I’ve already been working on: get The Twiceborn Queen published!

The first draft is written, and the revision all planned. Last week I started working my way through the revision. So, by the end of March, I need to:

  • finish first revision, which includes going through the whole manuscript, writing new scenes and revising existing ones, fixing all the big problems;
  • finish second revision, which goes through the manuscript again, focusing on smaller issues, like smoothing out prose, making the voice consistent, adding setting details (which I always forget) and checking facts;
  • finish third revision, which goes through the manuscript again focusing on more sentence-level detail, checking for typos, overused words, repetitions, rewording ugly bits;
  • send to beta readers. While it’s away, fret, write a 1000-word short story, begin planning revision of another novel, fret some more;
  • when it comes back from beta readers, do another pass through manuscript, making suggested changes where applicable;
  • send to editor 1st March;
  • when it comes back, go through editor’s changes, accepting and rejecting as appropriate and rewriting;
  • one more read-through (on the kindle this time) checking for typos, then send to formatter;
  • finally, when the formatter’s finished, upload to Amazon!

Gosh, I feel overwhelmed just thinking of getting through all that. I have to remember it’s like eating an elephant. You do it one bite at a time.

Four scenes done so far out of 33 in the first revision. Yum yum. Love the taste of elephant.