A Little Mid-Week Tease

The first draft of the final book of my Fool’s Path Series is coming along. It’s possible I’m still on track for a summer release…

Here’s a little teaser:

Once upon a time, this story wanted to be a graphic novel.

Hamal blamed Porrima. If he’d never let her into his apartment that evening; if he’d never allowed her to open her laptop to display Zibanitu waiting to speak with him, he might never had taken the simple mission of watching some plain girl. Underestimated. Underplayed. Underwhelmed. Underpaid. So many unders he could associate with everything that had happened since that day. Even the girls he’d met, the girls he’d used to distract himself from his growing attraction to the girl that could never be his had been under. Just like this mission. Underplanned. Underscouted. Undermanned. Un-FUBAR-able.”

Hamal is Dee’s first guardian; her mentor. A human among superior beings, he knows Dee will need more than the help he can give. But he can’t help putting his neck out for her, despite knowing that path will only lead to trouble.

Catching Balance is Book 4 of 4.5. Check the series page here.

Are you a fair reviewer? Message me to get copies 🙂

Hell is Figuring Out Chapter One

How Should it Begin

Beginning’s are everything. Sometimes all we have is a sentence to capture a reader. I get it. There are so many books to read, how do we decide which ones are worth our time? The reader need to know their time won’t be wasted…

Five days from my deadline, I’m still working the first ten pages. This isn’t a deadline, like “oh- just give me another day and we’ll squeeze the timeline to make it work.” No. This is a hard “there is no more updates allowed” deadline set by Amazon. Yesterday, I was finished and this wasn’t a problem. Today, I’m freaking out.

See, I had cut these pages.

Since draft one, I’d struggled with the opening of Stumbling. Unable to find a solution (at the time), I scrapped it to start in the middle of the opening sequence. Jumping right into action is always fun, right?

This Really Isn’t Working Out

Then, I was getting feedback of confusion.

So, I put the beginning back in. It made sense to do this. I understood the complaint. After reading my own book eleventy-billion times, I couldn’t recognize there were details the reader needed to have taken away in these deleted pages.

But, these pages hadn’t been polished like the others and it showed. I think I went through twelve edits before I handed the book off to an editor to look at. Twelve edits these first pages were ignored.

Does this look like an edit-free proof?

So, these ten pages were not as ready as the rest. These ten pages were making me re-think this whole idea to let the world have access to my work. These ten pages were making me second-guess if I really was ready… even though I’d already committed to being ready.

Did I mention I was freaking out?

Rinse, repeat then again… and again

I still worry about those first sentences, even after having hit publish. But, this is a process of learning and growing and I know that putting my work out there can only help this process.

Thanks for reading!

  • What’s the best opening line of book like to you? Quote it in the comments 🙂