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Release day is finally upon us, if you've been following my blog you've gotten some sneak peeks behind the scenes on the good, and bad, days leading up to this. I am beyond excited for it to finally be out in the world and I hope my readers love it as much as I do. Right now it's up on Amazon, but I am working to publish wide for at least the paperback version. Click here to go to Amazon or here to check it out on GoodReads and see what early readers are saying.  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon meets YOU. Every woman has encountered that guy...the one who won’t take no for an answer. Laura’s assistant Jared is obsessed with her, and after being fired he uses his newly free time to learn her routines. No matter how she says no, his advances keep getting bolder. Laura soon realizes that the women she thought were friends are actually team Jared—he’s funny and likable while Laura is reserved. Of course they don’t believe that he is stalking her, and without a tangible threat, the police can’t help either. Now, she has an elaborate plan to fake her death. When everything goes wrong, she finds herself lost in the forest, and her notes tell people not to look for her. But one person is looking for her. Jared’s formed a plan of his own and he is hunting her—to prove they were meant to be. By any means necessary. If you still aren't sure you can get the first three chapters free here. Thanks to all my readers who have picked up my other books, volunteered to leave ARC reviews and who follow me on social media. All of your support makes my day and I do this for you! If you read According to Plan and have any questions about it, or my process send them to me, I will be putting together a special Q&A blog post soon. Happy Reading!
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 This was supposed to be a big excited hype post for According to Plan, since it comes out this week.
To cut to the chase, it IS coming out this week. But, Amazon started off my week with chaos. A canceled pre-order meant rushing around trying to figure out what to do, recreating the ebook, re-linking it with the paperback and getting GoodReads to un-list the never-released version to prevent people getting lost in broken links. So the blog post got put on hold, but now all the major fires are out. GoodReads was great, and Amazon was as good as could be expected. It should not surprise me that a book called According to Plan has been anything but, but adversity builds us up, right? I have learned a lot from this nightmare, though. I will release the paperback at multiple retailers, not just Amazon. I’m still undecided if I will put the book into Kindle Unlimited—if you have strong feelings about this, please let me know. I want to do what readers want, to make it easy for you to find and read my books! Aside from all the drama, ARC reviews are coming in and the early feedback has blown me away. It only makes me more excited to share this book with more people and push it out there no matter how crazy launch week is. I hope you check it out, maybe pick up a copy and give it a shot. I’m really proud of this one. There have been plenty of times I second guessed choices on it, but I think I did right by this story. You can find it on Amazon HERE Or check out early reviews on GoodReads HERE  I was back and forth on this book for quite some time. I liked the characters and could tell there was much more to them, and I love an unreliable narrator. As with most thrillers that promise the ever-magical insane twist, I was skeptical, especially as the blurb seemed to almost directly tell us something that, in some books, would be the totality of that twist. When that ah-ha moment came just after the halfway point, I was... confused and honestly, ready to be disappointed.
Fear not, there is more to come, much more. I won’t say too much, but just about everyone steps up in unexpected ways. I kind of wish there was one more chapter to wrap up at the end, but it was satisfying enough. I damn near* felt bad for our antagonist #1 by the end. *Near—not actually, terrible person through and through, but hey, characters with layers—I love them. Or maybe love to hate them. Either way. Unmissing is a good read, especially if you are slightly more patient (or perhaps read faster) than me. Also being the terrible keeper-upper of authors I like, I hadn’t realized until I made it to the author bio that I have read, and thoroughly enjoyed Minka Kent before. Who knew? Nicely, she has a good bit of a back catalog I can now happily peruse.  When you publish your own book, that means you are in charge of everything. I talked about making the cover a couple weeks ago in the reveal post. Covers are obvious, and pretty easy to fit into any given genre. Something we don't think about as much is in the interior formatting. It is just as genre specific as anything else about publishing and is still fairly new to me.
I purchased Atticus a few months back and am learning the ropes there to make my books look exactly how I want them to. It’s a great program (no, I don’t get anything for saying that) and I am pleased with my progress each time I use it. But there are SO MANY OPTIONS! My first step was the library, the new fiction section, where I scouted out an armful of new thrillers and plopped them on the check-out desk. Each is slightly different inside, and I made pages of nearly nonsensical notes to decipher what was most common and what I liked best. Those didn’t always line up, but I took the fact that everything in my selection was published by one of the big five publishers to mean that any and all were acceptable. Fun things like fonts, chapter titles and drop text, boring things like page numbers and where my name goes and stuff that you can hardly tell is different until you really line it up like line spacing. My brain fried pretty quickly, but I got my ebook version whipped into shape. The paperback took longer as I wanted to play with the customization a bit more where possible and making sure the alignment worked perfectly. Even with a top-notch program, you can’t just click ‘done’ and not re-check and reread it a million times. It’s the little things that make a big difference in how professional a book feels, and I hope that, with all the time I’ve spent molding this baby into its final form, my readers will agree. Here is a little sneak peek inside the paperback version: You can get your copy now - CLICK HERE!  One thing that I found interesting (and difficult) about going through the query process was finding comp titles. I have a fairly unique POV structure in this one and that made it a little difficult to find books that could sum up the vibe and story.
After lots of searching, reading and even watching, I went against the grain and ended up with an older Stephen King title - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as a mood and setting a tone for my protagonist Laura. Laura flees to the forest where she has to battle her mental state as much as anything else. I loved TGWLTG and how mysterious it all was; her hallucinations, the reality of the bear, and how her mental state was always changing. Some of her struggles are those that my Laura faces, the brutal reality of being lost in the forest, and I hope readers will enjoy the same things in my story. On the flip side, I had to figure out how to spotlight my antagonist—Jared is totally deluded and it’s hard to be sure just how dangerous he is. Laura knows, and the reader will soon find out, but on the outside he’s Mr. Nice Guy (TM) this comp was easy to pull, I had binged season one of YOU recently and ran to the library to grab a copy of the book. Joe and Jared could be great friends—as long as their interests never overlapped. That is one dog-fight I’d like to see. Joe would probably win, especially now that I’ve seen him in full action further into his series (which remains a favorite). Jared’s still working the kinks out of his style. I also played with using The Forest (2016 film) as the vibe and creep-factor was perfect for the setting and the locations connection to suicides fit well with Laura’s plan. I, more or less, enjoyed the movie when it first came out for certain moments, but know that mine is not the popular opinion, so I opted to leave it off my official list. The “YOU meets The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” felt both fresh and at the same time safe. It draws a good image, for me at least, and seemed to hook interest in my query as well. I hope that this gives you a hint of insight into According to Plan and that you stay on the lookout for the release date! You can get your copy now, CLICK HERE!  I’m having a hard time reviewing this one as much of the time I'm not really sure what kept me reading. Not to say I didn’t like it, I enjoyed the style quite a lot, so maybe that was it. The quiet neighborhood of The Loop gets turned on its head when a body is found and the man's wife and children are missing.
We follow Andy, a novelist taking care of his father who is succumbing to Alzheimer's. He writes crime fiction and has now found himself the center of something that could be the crazy plot of one of his books. That missing woman, he was having an affair with her, and a mysterious note shows up letting him know that someone knows about them. It’s slow paced, even for domestic suspense, despite lots going on. There is not just one dead body, but three; ranging from what seems like accidental to suspicious causes. [note here - I nearly stopped reading when we prattled on about Mary being killed by her horse - I'm not sure the author has ever met a horse or someone who knows about them, his plot here based on only the flimsiest ‘things people know about horses’ and made me roll my eyes numerous times. Also, he couldn't even get the vocab right. *sigh* I did like the horses' names at least.] There are lots of players to keep Andy, and us guessing, but there just wasn't the tension that I want from a thriller. I'm not one to try to guess the ending as I read, but I had a pretty good grasp on where parts were going regardless. Overall it was well written, and I liked the moments that were a little meta where Andy talked about his writing, but there wasn’t much for me to hold on to and remember, or that makes me want to shout about this book from the rooftops. At the same time I don't regret reading it, so there’s that.  After our successful anthology this spring, we are already plotting round two for next year. Given how tight our deadlines became, we are trying to have our stories ready before we even make a call for general submissions. That means I’ve been writing a lot of romantic flash fiction and trying to add my vibe to it. Which... sometimes works, and other times just freaks out the rest of the team. Oops.
But, it has left me with a set of horror stories with a love story twist. They aren’t technically romances as Happily-Ever-Afters aren’t really in the cards for most of my couples, but they are definitely romantic. So I am releasing them as a mini-collection on my own just in time for Halloween! Haunted Hearts - horror love stories will hit Amazon on October 21st and it’s perfect to get you in the spooky-season spirit! It includes three tiny tales of love in unexpected places and between unexpected... people. If these characters were living, law-abiding citizens, these would be sweet tales of romance to page through over tea. Instead, you may want to turn on the lights, check the basement, and double lock the door before settling down to enjoy. And as a blog follower, you are the first to see the cover, which I will officially reveal tomorrow on my Facebook page. Haunted Hearts is available for pre-order here at just $0.99 Also, if you are potentially interested in submitting an actual romance flash to next year’s anthology, you can find all the information on our website: SandKittensPress.com There you can also find our first anthology which is available to download free! Even before deciding to self publish, I had been playing with cover ideas for According to Plan. I need visuals, even if it’s not character images (which I also have) I like to do a vibe-check while I write. So placeholder covers come in to play before the book is even finished. They were basic, almost more mood-board than anything else, but they helped me set the tone and start setting out ideas for the future. With three designs I was more or less happy with, I braved the Indie Cover Project group over on Facebook for feedback—it wasn’t great. A few comments thought I had a self-help book. Definitely not. Round two I thought I nailed, based on feedback, but again I was met with ‘meh’ comments. Looking back, that one is more movie poster than book cover. Maybe I can fantasize about a call from Netflix. Round three, or cover version #4007, as I think I called it. And I had something people were responding to and that I really liked! A few people urged me to try something completely different, and I did, also creating something I liked. Then the verdict was rather split between the two covers. I headed to my thriller reader and writer groups and, overwhelmingly, they chose the #4007 version, with a few holdouts on the other one. The comments had me thinking—especially the ones that perfectly articulated my struggle between the two. One (#4007) had an intense draw, the other felt very commercial. I went with #4007, it’s the one I would pick up. So without further ado here is the cover and blurb for According to Plan...  Every woman has encountered that guy...
...the one who won’t take no for an answer. Laura’s assistant Jared is obsessed with her, and after being fired he uses his newly free time to learn her routines. No matter how she says no, his advances keep getting bolder. Laura soon realizes that the women she thought were friends are actually team Jared—he’s funny and likable while Laura is reserved. Of course they don’t believe that he is stalking her, and without a tangible threat, the police can’t help either. Laura makes an elaborate plan to fake her death. When everything goes wrong, she finds herself lost in the forest, and her notes tell people not to look for her. But one person is looking for her. Jared’s formed a plan of his own and he is hunting her—to prove they were meant to be. By any means necessary. You can get your copy now - CLICK HERE!  I wanted to like this book. It was really promising, with a cross country road trip, estranged family inheritance and mysterious hitchhiker. While it does have all those things, I found it really hard to like any single character. Cora is a rather vapid fashion influencer (ugh) and had it not been 90% from her POV I suspect she would have been even more unlikable. Her husband is borderline controlling as he is constantly gaslighting her about her ability to make the trip and her friend Adele is ungrateful and jealous. Yes, some of that comes up in the twist—more on that in a moment.
After picking up their hitchhiker Gianna things get dicey and I get more involved, until Gianna disappears and they don’t go for any obvious next steps. Cora has Gianna's fathers phone number, why not call him, if she had many things that would have been avoided. Again some of that dopey oversight was needed for the twist, but it made me hate Cora even more. The trip is really well researched—the author has clearly done a lot of googling or has traveled at least parts of their route, which was fun—to a point. Sometimes it felt a bit like a history lecture when they toured museums. Then there's the twist. Now I love a twist, but I want it to be something that feels reasonable for the story—and this whole set-up is supposed to be: mysterious hitchhiker and bad-guy boyfriend. Out of nowhere we get a set of chapters from another character's POV where all is revealed and Cora’s life goes to hell. Sure, it makes some of the earlier issues I had make sense, but it all felt like quite a reach. Had I not been over 75% through the book I may have just quit there. I was also really thrown, after the seemingly well researched trip, to have the ‘million dollar house’ she inherits be what appeared to be a 2 bedroom ranch. I did like that Cora ended up sticking to her guns in the end and was able to get something from her inheritance other than money, which was a nice move for her, though I wish that depth of personality was shown to us earlier so I would have cared along the way. Overall, I don't think I wasted my time with this one, but I don't think this author will be a repeat read for me.  It’s easy to look at your book and think that once you type THE END, the writing is over. Even after several rounds of readers and editors, the process may not be finished. It may have been the best book you could write at the time, but you are always improving—even if you don't think so—and quite often, if you look away long enough when you do come back, it may be with shock.
That’s what happened to me. I wrote AtP about a year and a half ago, with critique partners, did the edits with awesome betas and revised the crap out of it. I queried it, sent out fulls, the works. I thought it was ready and when I decided to self-publish, all I needed to do was format it. So I started. And it is apparent now, that in that year and a half since finishing AtP (where I wrote/edited/published my romance series) I have learned a lot. I was just browsing AtP to check the formatting as I went and so much jumped out at me that I now know how to improve. So, it’s back to the editing floor as I glean this baby with a new level of polish. On the one hand, I’m thrilled to see how clearly I have improved, on the other—I really thought getting this one to publication day was going to be fairly easy since ‘all the hard work’ was supposedly behind me. Ugh. But also, yay? I haven’t officially set a release date, so I have no formal deadline, but I did imagine one in my head. Let’s see if I can push myself to keep it. Wish me luck! You can get your copy now -- CLICK HERE! |
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