This isn’t going to be a long post, in fact, it’s more about me than anything most of you all will be interested in.
Firstly, I wanted to thank my readers and fans for your enthusiastic response to Snow in Her Eyes. It was a whim, writing that, and I wasn’t sure how well something that was both darker than my usual work, and completely unrelated to any ongoing series would work. That doesn’t seem to have stopped you all, and as of this morning it was sitting at #9 and #10 for short reads on Amazon in the Fantasy and Mystery sub-genres respectively. ‘Tis wonderful!
Although I suspect most of you have read it already, my bestselling novel Pixie Noir is going to be free from August 3 to 7. What I’d love you to do is to pass the word on that it’s a free read, and by all accounts, a good one. Give my work away, please! LOL
On the writing end of things, I have wonderful news that means I won’t be racking up the wordcount I have been recently. I’m no longer a trainee in the lab, they are letting me loose to generate real data. I’m excited about this, finally getting to be a contributing member of the team. But it will mean less down time between reactions, and more paperwork (yay?) so I won’t be slipping in some writing. Or I might, but not as much. I’ve gotten The East Witch up to about 15% finished for total wordcount goal. I’ll keep working on that. I’ve been working on some side stuff, including a story about how Amaya lost her hand, and a story that ambushed me and I don’t know where it’s going yet, other than quirky mystery (no magic in that one), and the cozy mystery novel I’ve been working at for years (and which is related to Memories of the Abyss).
Why so much mystery? I have an idea it’s related to the podcast I’ve been listening to recently. True Crime Garage tends to focus on the unsolved mysteries of the world, crimes that happened for no apparent reason, or people that just vanished off the face of the earth. As a writer, this really gets the creative juices flowing. As a (larval) forensic scientist, I sometimes get frustrated as I listen to badly mishandled cases. As a fantasy author, I listen to tales of disappearances and wonder ‘what if?’ Writing fiction, you can have tidy resolutions. Life is rarely so nice to us, and I listen to these and wonder what happened, and my brain spins off onto theories, some wilder than others.
And with that, I’m going to get a training run started. I may be up and running, but I’m still learning, and will be for… well, the rest of my career. The lovely thing about science is that I never stop with the learning and education and excitement of new discoveries and successes. In that way, it’s a bit like my writing.