A few days ago, former pastor Joshua Feuerstein posted a video announcing a campaign against Starbucks due to their switch from festive holiday cups in previous years to a new plain red look for the 2015 holiday season. In the video, Feuerstein claims that Starbucks wanted to “take Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups” because, […]
Tag: Holidays
Celebrating July
It’s July. Ready or Not will be out this month (depending how horrible some of my mistakes are between here and the end of the book — a few days to another week or two!) and my birthday all in the same month!
To celebrate this Love or Lust is free, everywhere I can set it to free, all month. Amazon should set itself to free automatically sooner or later (I don’t have control of the price below 99¢); Nook doesn’t like the word free unless it’s a public domain or I personally strike a deal with their marketing division or something that would involve buying a really nice dress I can’t afford and speaking businessese. Everyone else ought to be reflecting a 100% discount as of yesterday.
Hope everyone is enjoying the summer.
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Ready or Not getting even closer!
At the extraordinary risk of causing fate to set my editor’s computer on fire I will say that the final editing is going phenomenally!
I’d love to say ‘as of <dd’ Month> you can pre-order and it’ll launch on <dd” Month>, but I can’t. Not yet.
Thing is, if the book continues to need nothing more than repairing my lovely typographical errors and tidying up my idiosyncratic approach to punctuation and capitalisation then the book could potentially be through with editing by the end of this month, meaning I could announce the opening of pre-orders for 01 April, and release on Easter. How cool is that?!
However it is entirely too early to have strict confidence in that possibility. I won’t have the necessary certainty, I imagine, until I see what date the book is at its half-way point.
All told I don’t think (barring Murphy’s Law invoking itself and a meteor falling on my editor and her computer, landing her in a comatose state for several months in hospital …) there’ll be much reason to doubt a May release with an April start to pre-orders. Cross fingers, pray, offer sacrifices (fruits, nuts, bread/cakes, whiskey, a portion of an animal you already planned to dine upon not the other sort please!!), wear your lucky socks … whatever works for you.
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Happy Christmas …
Happy holidays. I don’t care what you celebrate, I hope it’s very merry.
In celebration of Christmas, the winter solstice, the new year, and anything else that might be worth celebrating between the 20th of December, and the 1st of January I’ve made Love or Lust only 99¢ (US — 45p UK, and upwards of 50 other values around the world).
Yes, I mean the eBook. As I’ve said before, I can’t make the print edition much cheaper or what I make would actually be a negative number (yes, as in I’d actually owe the printer more for them than I sold it for).
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Status update
Well, I’m still in queue for my editor’s attention on Ready or Not. The final two chapters I’m waiting for input from her before I start rewriting, because I’m not sure if I ought to totally throw them out or just parts.
Færie Patrol is still waiting for me to finish with Now & Forever. At least, for the time being. It’d be one thing if I paused the latter to work on the former, but in this case I’m not stuck because of burnout or brain freeze, I’m stuck simply because I need a clean ending to book 2 before I can really get book 3 kicked off properly.
Book 3 has no name yet, but it has a concept. I know what’s going to be happening in it. It, like Love or Lust, and unlike Ready or Not will have a more of an actual A plot throughout. I’ll have a page for it with a proper blurb once I’ve thought of a properly witty title for it.
Love or Lust continues to sell. No longer at the spectacular numbers of July — sadly — but selling. At no point was it threatening to pay all my bills so I could quit my day job, but Christmas is pretty fair covered. Thank you, everyone, again, for all the support. Those of you still waiting to buy it, I understand — I’ve been there; in this economy one must prioritise one’s new novel allowance. That said, maybe I should buy a few print copies and seed them to local used bookstores … one mustn’t prioritise one’s used book allowance — that’s a perfectly preposterous notion 😉
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Wow more word count than I’d thought!
Just finished typing the bits of Ready or Not I’d written during NaNoWriMo and discovered that the actual final tally is 56,598 words!
That’s very inspiring. I’m still not sure how much the experiment can be dubbed a success — I feel rather strongly that this story is going to wind up needing far more intensive editorial work than Love or Lust did, but we’ll see. With luck I’m just being too hard on myself. I did, after all, think rather poorly of Book 1 until I’d given it two or three read throughs, my editor had seen it and made her comments, and a few friends had taken a look at it.
Well, wish me luck. I now embark on the grand adventure of figuring out what happens in Chapter 20 and how far it is to the end of this one.
Status of Love or Lust, by the by, is that my editor is about to do her final proofread on it. Depending how fast that goes (read just how terrible my spelling and grammar wound up being) I could, conceivably, publish it by Valentine’s day (a rather lovely date to start since that would be approximately the 1yr anniversary of me starting to write it, though I think that actual date was 8 February), otherwise we’re looking around Early march barring any major catastrophes.
Holiday: bad for word count
I had hoped to, by tonight, have built up a word count surplus to carry me through the next three days of Thanksgiving time off. This did not happen. I swear I can actually hear the progress screeching to a halt.
Last couple of days have been busy at work, coupled with a case of the blahs – one day’s being accidentally self inflicted. Who knew Nestle puts Sucralose in their hot chocolate? Drank some at work, and I’m essentially allergic in that I eat it and I get a headache at best and a migraine so bad I’m begging for a sweet reprieve in Hell. Luckily this one managed to be low enough dose to be the former.
In any event, instead of a week’s word count in a few days, I’ve gotten a single day’s count in a few days. Tomorrow is going to be spent cooking and eating, Thursday is going to be spent doing the dishes. Friday will be spent in bed, telling the universe to go away.
With luck I can get some few hundred words or so on each day to keep from falling too far behind, then get some miraculous boost Saturday and Sunday.
In any case, it’s only 15000 words in 10 days. I’m sure I’ll manage.
Good night, Happy Thanksgiving.
Love
Jaye
Lessons and discoveries
It’s rather amazing to be an author. You really get to discover a lot about life, the world, Humanity, and so forth by seeing it through various different eyes, and by living so many different lives.
Take Christmas. America exports its “traditions” all over the world, corrupting things that really are old traditions. Bringing commercialism into it and all that. Here’s a fun thing though: ever thought about what Christmas might be like through the eyes of someone who only sees the commercial Hallowthangivimas trappings, but always heads across the Atlantic before mid December has come to a close?
I’ve really been learning how strange our Christmases must look to one whose frame of reference for the holiday is Italian, German, Austrian, and French (mostly Italian). In Ready or Not Salencia is staying in America for the Christmas holiday for the first time in her whole life. It’s the first time she’s seeing the things that she only actually knows from movies, television, and whatever gear up her friends’ families might engage in on the last stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year. Another first, ringing in a new year in the states, but one that’s pretty much universal for western society.
It’s a really great thing fiction. Reading it as well as writing; either way we find ourselves experiencing things, thinking things, discovering, learning, growing all because a little voice in our own or someone else started whispering little things, and then before long it has a name, and a story, and a following. Stories really are remarkably like the gods one meets delving into the fantastic Small Gods by Pratchett.
Anyhow, I wish you all bon nuit!
Love
Jaye
Progress continues
Now & Forever is doing very well. Editor still has to reach Love or Lust in her pipeline and to do that whole vacation thing people do from time to time, but Book II is coming along nicely. For those who care it’s called Ready or Not. I hope, if it keeps its current pace, to be done with writing it by between Halloween and Christmas.
The blog, as you see, has had its look updated. I think it looks much prettier and … interesting this way. Hopefully you agree.
Finally, I’ve decide that, yes, my next project will be a superhero novel or series that I’ve been toying with thoughts of. No details or word count yet, but when I have have the free brain cycles for it that’s near the top of my to-do list.
Well, back to the pen.
Love to all.
Jaye Em Edgecliff 