magpie’s fall | Heart of the Dreaming

Tag Archives: magpie’s fall

May

The World Spins Madly On

Posted in blog | Tagged chaos is madness, edits, health stuff, Lucy, magpie's fall, random | Leave a comment

So I guess I’m just never destined to blog on a regular basis at this point, but I’ll continue to try. As far as book news goes – the edits for Magpie’s Fall were finally completed a few weeks ago – I’ve gone through them and turned them back over to my editor and it’s currently out for a cold read with a few people. I should have that back shortly and failing any other setbacks, I will have it formatted and ready to go for publication at some point in June (once I know the exact date and the pre-order info and all that I’ll post it ASAP.) Print will most likely follow a short time after that, but my goal here is to get the ebook out as quickly as I can. It’s been a long road and I’m sorry for that, but circumstances were beyond my control… Read more

Dec

Schrodinger’s Genre

Posted in blog | Tagged a dream most ancient and alone, crystal lake publishing, edits, magpie's fall, magpie's flight, magpie's song, mermaid, short story | Leave a comment

So I sold a short story last week. It’s a mermaid story. Or, more to the point, a lake mermaid story. Where the mermaid eats children. I had actually written this particular story several years ago while waiting for my son’s Science Fair project to be judged (parents weren’t allowed in and it took several hours.) So I cranked this little nugget out and subbed it to an anthology, where it made it to the top 20 out of 500 or so entries…and then was rejected. Alas. So I tried off and on again over the last few years, but as is my usual problem, it doesn’t really fit a specific genre. It takes place in the modern world, but it’s not an Urban Fantasy. It definitely isn’t a romance. It’s a bit dark for fantasy maybe, but not dark enough for your usual horror. I don’t know what you’d… Read more

Oct

Breathing Room

Posted in blog | Tagged breaktime, editing, magpie's fall | 1 Comment

*thuds* Apologies for the longer radio silence, things have been rather hectic. And it’s not officially done, but here’s a sneak peek at part of the cover for Magpie’s Fall – I’ll be giving my newsletter peeps a more complete version in a bit once it’s done, but it’s exciting to have things moving on it. That said, part of my lack of posts and whatnot is because I’ve been busy editing and rewriting the aforementioned book. I was actually fairly unsatisfied with my original draft and after I got my notes back from my editor I ended up reworking the first 150 pages or so and then adding an additional 50. Word count ended up increasing by about 20k initially, but I’ve pared it down some by getting rid of a lot extraneous filler sentences. I always end up with a particular phrase or word and use it to… Read more

Aug

The Cost of Doing Business

Posted in blog | Tagged magpie's fall, magpie's song, money, pirating, ranty mcrantypants | 7 Comments

Just a quick PSA rant on book piracy and how it affects indie authors: It sucks. Actually it sucks for traditionally published authors too – the main difference is that with my traditionally published books, I got paid up front, so at least I got SOMETHING out of it. Plus most of the larger publishers now have nice and handy take-down portal sites where I can simply upload an offending link and let them do the grunt work. In other words, it still sucks but it’s way less time and money out of my pocket. This is my first go round with the whole indie-pub thing so I’m sure I’m going to make some mistakes and whatnot, especially when it comes to marketing and publicity and just overall trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Which means everything comes out of my pocket and I don’t get paid… Read more

Aug

Die Historic…

Posted in blog | Tagged editing, magpie's fall, magpie's song, moab, this website, travel, traveling, wtf | Leave a comment

So in about 6 hours I’ll be on a plane headed out west for a short getaway to Moab. It’s a family thing – Jeeping and hiking and probably melting into a canyon somewhere along the way. It’s an awesome bit of planning on my part really – what better way to celebrate the release of Magpie’s Song than to ensure I’m in the middle of nowhere with limited internet? *ahem* Well anyway, yes. Tuesday is the date – I am hoping to at least get a couple of posts and social media things scheduled but to be honest, the way things have gone this week, I have my doubts. I sort of envision the next few days will be less Fury Road and something closer to the peyote scene from Young Guns. You know. This one: Yeah. One can hope, maybe. Eh. I’ll post some pictures up on Instagram… Read more