Mountain Girl

Miscellaneous Monday Wherein I Babble About Random Things THE BOOKS HAVE GONE WIDE! Well, at least two of them have.  The third is still waiting out its term in KU, but as soon as that's done...Woo!  So, Snowed In  and Smoked Out  are both available on multiple platforms now!  Including Kobo SUPER PRETTY LINKS: Snowed In Smoked Out So yeah.  Check them out, if you want.  They're both still available on Amazon, of course, as paperbacks as well. Cherry Update I've washed, pitted, bagged and frozen...40 cups of cherries so far.  Which is approximately 10 L of them.  I'll use about 4cups/batch of whatever it is I'm making (jam or pie filling or whathaveyou), so I'll have a lot of canning to do.  Especially since I've still got another ~10L left to pit. And apples to pick. Speaking of jam, I used the raspberries from the garden and some blueberries from the store to make jam today.  I friggin love the col...

My first one!  Yay!  I did up a little graphic thing and everything.   The Weekly Disclaimer:   Writing, like all art, is a subjective experience.  Stuff that works for me won't necessarily work for you...though I hope it does, since I'd love for everyone to succeed.  Can never have enough books to read!  Either way, take these tips with the giant grain of salt needed to season it to your liking, since I could very well be talking out my ass. My Tip For This Week:   Write.  Just write it out.  Get the bare bones down, and when you come to the end, go back to the start and add in the flesh.  The details and the adjectives and the rewording of awkward sentences.  You get to do as many passes as you want. The other side of this is, of course, that you need to know when to stop obsessing over every phrase.  Otherwise, you'll never move on to the next bit and you'll get stuck fiddling with details tha...

First Things First: Book Three is...almost done!  About 75% done.  Well, at least the writing part.  I'll still need to edit, but I've got some time set aside for that (obviously).  But it feels good to be coming up to the finale of the story and mostly  on schedule too.  I'm excited to publish it.  Hopefully you guys will like it as much as I do :P ARC List! I've set up a sign up form for ARC Readers on my website ; there's also an external link.  As soon as the book is ready, I'll let everyone know so they can go to the hosting site (in this case, BookSprout) and download from there. Ooooo, things are moving along! Misc. Stuff The usual reminders...got stuff if you want stuff, at CafePress and Society6 .  I ordered some stickers from Society6 for the giveaway that's coming up - I'm quite happy with them.  Kinda want to keep them myself...but I won't ;P Also...<spooky ghost voice> BUY MY BOOOOOKS </spooky...

Well, I've fallen a few days behind in my word counts...I haven't stopped writing (except on the weekend, when I took a couple days off as Burnout Prevention), but yesterday was a doozy of a day.  Whole bunch of irritating things happened, one on top of another...and then I almost got hit by a car.  It was one of those "if I hadn't had STOP AND LOOK ingrained in me at a very young age, I'd be dead right now" moments. And, most frustrating, it happened at a crosswalk , in a province where pedestrians have right of way at all times .  And yeah, some unrelated douche canoe had parked too close to my side of the crosswalk, blocking not just my line of sight but the line of sight of the approaching vehicles, but that's why I stop and look.  The guy who just blew through the crosswalk wasn't even looking, was going way too fast (and had deliberately accelerated too, since half a block up the road is a controlled intersection, so he was going way too fast...

I have a new logo!  I'm quite proud of it, since I have the graphic design skills of a dead squid.  It's nice and simple and looks good on a shirt, so I think I'll keep it around for a while. Camp NaNoWriMo 2018: Well, it's now April. This year is going waaaay too fast. Anyway, I decided (somewhat last minute) to use Camp NaNoWriMo this month to write Book Three.  I already had an outline written out, just need to fill in the blank pages of the chapters now.  It's day four and I'm...actually pretty much on track, as long as I make my word goals for today.  If I exceed them, even better. I'm gonna need some tea... But, the story is progressing nicely.  Covers and blurb are actually done and don't suck, so that's nice.  I'll reveal them closer towards the end of the month. Other Things: Once the book is mostly done I'm going to be running an ARC sign up for those that want.  My first one!  Hopefully it'll go smoothly....

So.  Updates.  Yay. The elder two kids are outside, in splash-pants and rain coats.  It's not raining (it's actually supposed to snow later, got a storm warning and everything.  Yay for March in the mountains.), but everything is wet as hell on account of the snow finally melting.  It also smells of camping because there's a fire going near by. ...I want to go camping so bad, you have no idea... Anyway - I started a Cafe Press shop .  It's named after my fantastically non-witty blog because I couldn't think of anything else, It also hasn't got much in there right now (and what there is is kinda cheesy), but I figured...what the hell.  Someday, someone might want a shirt that relates to my books/website/brand thing I'm trying to build for myself.  Or a stainless steel water bottle.  Or an interesting sicker.  Someone like...well, me. And maybe my mum. Or maybe, someday, one of you guys.  One can hope. Plus, I'm thinking o...

Spring is finally in the air... One of the theoretical downsides about living in the Rockies is that spring is usually late - the snow doesn't go completely until it's pretty much May, and even then it doesn't really get warm until the middle of June.  So no garden for me until May 24th weekend at the earliest, and even then I still have to watch out for sudden and random frosts. Even so, it's been above freezing for the past few days.  The snow is melting.  The prescribed burns are...burning, so everything smells of camping and wood smoke, and it's nice.  The goddamn elk will be moving out of the neighbourhood soon (well, not the pregnant ones...those we get the honor of running from until the end of June, when the calving is over). As for myself, I've finally  gotten the better part of an outline for Book Three.  I know I say 'finally' as though everyone's been waiting for years* and years, when it's really only been a month since the las...

Well, I'm down to the last 20k +/- of Book Two.  Sweeet!  I took the last couple days off the writing push - I didn't want to burn myself out.  Burn out doesn't get books finished. So, for this week: Chapters 15, 16, 17 and hopefully 18...if I keep up the 3-4k/day pace then I might get 19 and 20 in there, and then it's just a matter of editing and formatting in Scriviner, cover tweaking and... Book Two will be done. Now, that's barring things like the kiddies getting sick (again), or me.  Or whatever.  But it's possible, and rather exciting, and I can't wait to share it with all of you. Incidentally, if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so I can update everyone at once, click HERE . In the mean time, if you haven't read Snowed In , now's the time!  It's on Amazon, as both ebook and paperback . Book Two's Current Word Count: 66 500/85 000 

Sick kid home from school means word counts are likely to...not be good this week.  They were already kind of sucky last week on account of a sick author not feeling like doing anything, so now I'm worried about my deadlines. Granted, my deadlines are self-imposed, and if I really wanted to I could just move them...but that's not how you teach yourself to follow deadlines.  On the upside, once I get into the editing/formatting stage, I'll show everyone the cover in the hopes that whets everyone's appetite. In other news, my experiments in caffeine reduction have...not worked.  Seems my dependency on it is integral to me not being a complete cranky pants whacko in the mornings.  I did  replace most (some) of my soda intake with tea, though.  Still caffeine, but healthier all around in other ways.  Also took up a martial art again in an effort to get exercise, which means my Saturday's are shot, but also means that - even after two weeks - I'm starti...