The first book of my new vampire series is now available for sale on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com! It’s out as an e-book for $3.99 but you don’t have to have a Kindle or Nook to read it, they have free downloadable apps so you can read it on your PC, or even your phone. It’ll be available in print as well in a couple of weeks through Amazon.

I wrote this one during November for NaNoWriMo and I’m super happy about how it came out and how the characters evolved. You know me and taking breaks are non-mixy things, so I’m currently working on the outline for Mercy for the Damned, due out next spring. My Vampire Diaries fanfic idea fell flat after I got the first chapter done, so I’ve decided to put that on hold and wait for better inspiration while I continue to work on Mercy and the Push fanfic (which doesn’t have many readers, but I’m loving the characters there!).

In the meantime, Happy Holidays to everyone who celebrates them, and don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon to those of you who don’t.

I just finished the final update of my Vampire Diaries Fanfic, Dark Side of the Moon and that always gets me to thinking about starting something new. I can’t wait to start the next one, but it’ll have to wait a few weeks I think until the novel is edited and ready to go. I might even take a break and get to some reading I’ve been looking forward to (Got Storm Chaser by Mark R. Hunter already downloaded to my Nook and ready to go!) before I start the next book in The Fallen series.

I’m looking forward to some turkey with family and friends this week. I always make the same delicious recipe with lemons, rosemary and dijon mustard. (I know it sounds a little weird, but it makes the best gravy!) I’ve just about got my holiday shopping done too except for some online purchases, how about you guys? Are you going to brave the Black Friday deals or settle in with some cocoa and hit the online sales?

Day ten of NaNoWriMo and I’m going strong! Up to 32,626 words so far, and it’s going well. I thought I’d give you guys a little taste. Here is our heroine Anja who has just woken up in the hospital morgue, to the surprise of the guys about to transfer her to the Medical Examiner’s office.

(I should preface this by saying in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month, this is an extremely rough draft. Punctuation and such is bound to be way off.)

A millisecond before the sheet came off, my eyes popped open and a high, keening cry leaked out of me like the air out of a balloon; my only available version of a scream, I suppose. The effect was electrifying. Both men screamed, and like a switch was flipped, I felt the energy rush back into my limbs. Filling my lungs with air, I screamed right back at them, and we stared at each other, all of us screaming for a good ten seconds before the room got really quiet.

“You’re… you’re…” The guy dropped his clipboard as he backed up a few feet. The other man, the one who came to get me I assumed, continued to stare at me like I had just risen from the dead, which was understandable.

“W-where am I?” My voice sounded shrill to my ears and I couldn’t help but wince, doing my best to swallow back my fear. I felt… wrong somehow, but I couldn’t quite identify why, finding myself in such strange surroundings was too distracting.

“Shoreline Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. You’re um, you’re supposed to be dead.”

“I’m sorry…” slipped out reflexively, though what I had to be sorry about, I couldn’t imagine. Shoreline was the same hospital Bridget worked at, and I wondered if she knew I was there. I was tired of lying down and I might have said something to that effect as I pushed myself up to a seated position, but I was too busy looking at my surroundings to be sure if I’d spoken out loud. It wasn’t my own bedroom, or a hospital room as I’d assumed until they started talking about death, but what looked like a morgue, based on my experience with tv and movies.

I was still half lying on a gurney, but a large stainless steel table stood in the center of the room, with holes drilled through it for drainage of various… ugh, I didn’t want to go there. “I feel…” dizzy, confused, itchy, nauseous, sore, tired…wrong… “…different.” My tongue finally supplied and I again marveled at the sound of my own voice. Was it my ears or the timbre of my voice that had changed? It was impossible to tell.

“That’s understandable, you’ve been dead for over an hour,” the morgue attendant replied distractedly, bending to pick up the clipboard.

“Oh come on, Dave, there’s obviously been some kind of a mistake. She’s no more dead than you or me. I know some folks that are going to be glad to see you’re okay.” The other guy gave me an encouraging smile.

Walking around didn’t sound like too bad of an option, more than anything I wanted out of the morgue with its strange smells and disturbing tables. Despite the dizziness, I launched myself to my feet, throwing myself off balance as my muscles propelled me farther than I had intended. I careened into the icky metal table, sending a tray of tools crashing to the ground. The sound was deafening, and I clamped my hands over my ears as I waited for it to end.

“Whoa, are you sure you should be up and walking around?” Smiley guy reached out to steady me, catching hold of my elbows.

That’s when I noticed the front of my dress had been cut and gaped open, showing more of my natural assets than I cared to outside of a beach. When I say my dress, I don’t mean my dress. I’d never seen the thing before in my life. No wonder they reported I’d been wearing a costume; I would have made the same assumption. The dress, made of a coarse, homespun material, was held up just below the shoulders by two heavy, round broaches, with three running horses, their legs intertwined. It was hard for me to gauge the whole effect just in looking down. Wherever it came from, they’d never get the deposit back. Besides the long cut down the chest, it was also soaked through with blood on the left side of my body.

“I don’t belong here,” I murmured, pulling myself free from his grasp and doing my best to hold the dress closed. Overcorrecting, I nearly fell over the other way. Trying to muster a modicum of dignity, I swallowed again, clearing my throat in search of my normal tone of voice. “Can either of you tell me what’s going on?”

“I’m… not sure. This almost never happens,” Dave replied, losing some of the stunned look from his face, I saw his eyes dip to my chest and I shot him a look.

“But it does sometimes?” That was disturbing to hear on many levels.

Dave’s face flushed when he saw that I noticed him looking and he turned away, coughing into his hand as he approached a desk set in the far corner of the room. “Well no, not down here. Usually they catch that sort of thing up on the main floors. Um, let’s see what I can find out here.” He tapped on the computer and the other man followed him to look over his shoulder. “You were brought in a little over an hour ago… and died enroute to the hospital. They tried to revive you but…”

He’d already said that before, but it was like it had happened to someone else. “I don’t remember any of this,” I shook my head miserably; it was starting to pound something fierce.

Smiley guy took pity on me, fixing me with that same reassuring smile. “You’ve been through quite a trauma, Ma’am. Maybe you should sit down?” Nodding, I moved away from the creepy tables and slid into a plastic molded chair by the swinging door. “I’m Mike Turley, I work for the medical examiner’s office with SFPD, and I’m glad to find you alive and breathing.”

“Anja Evans,” I stuck out my hand by force of habit and after a moment’s hesitation, he shook it. I was struck by how warm his hand was, but I didn’t feel uncomfortably cold. Any difference in temperature was probably from my lying in the chilly morgue for an hour without my socks on.

“Nice to meet you, Anja.” He pronounced my name correctly that time. “Sit tight, I’m sure there are a lot of people who want to talk to you.” Straightening, he turned back to where Dave sat at the computer. “I’m going to need to make some calls and my signal’s for shit, do you have a phone I can use?”

“Oh yeah, there’s never any signal down here. Feel free to use this line here, dial nine to get out. I should really get a doctor down here to examine her, or I wonder if I should take her up to the ED myself…”

A lot of people who wanted to talk to me. Cool beans. And lots of doctors poking and prodding me as well. Even better. My eyes flicked to the swinging door beside me, the urge to flee growing stronger and stronger until I lurched out of the chair and out the door with a soft rush of air.

Once again, I’ve signed up for the crazy breakneck pace of National Novel Writing Month. This year I’ll be working on my new vampire series, and hope to have the first draft done my month’s end. I’m stealing the name from one of my fanfics, Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down. Apart from some similarities that are bound to come up in the transformation process, it’ll be a completely different story though. I was thrown for a bit of a loop at the end of last week’s Vampire Diaries when I saw they were making the Originals be Viking in nature, but I’ve decided to go ahead with my idea anyway. I guess great minds think alike!

I don’t have a formal synopsis written up yet, but the basic premise is this:

This series is about a girl in San Francisco who is turned by an ancient race of natural born vampires that are very reclusive. She remembers very little about being turned, the circumstances necessitated her maker leaving without explaining who he is or anything about the fact that she’s becoming a vampire, so it’s partly a mystery for her to figure out what’s going on. It’s set in a world where vampire society is very strictly controlled, and you need permission/papers before you can turn a human. There is an order of vampires set to uphold the laws and police them, keeping their presence a secret from humans and my MC is a little surprised when The Order shows up at her door, demanding to see her papers. Through a series of events, the fella who’s supposed to put her down for being an unlicensed vampire ends up helping her, forging documents and helping her be accepted.

She’s still clinging to her human life, so she’s trying to keep anyone from knowing she’s been turned and struggles with keeping her humanity in the face of how she has to live now. Because she was turned by such an old vamp, she is much, much stronger than typical newbie vampires, which leads people to believe she’s a few hundred years older than she is, and she has to pretend to be someone she isn’t in vampire society as well.

Out there somewhere is the vamp that turned her, his own reasons and motivations shrouded in mystery, and there are ties between all of them.

I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with mythos for the origins of vampires in this one, blending norse mythology with vampire lore, and I can’t wait to get started!

We Have A Winner!

Congratulations to Amanda McLain-Young who won a free copy of Angel of Mercy! Thanks to everyone who voted on the cover art for Pretty Witches All in a Row. It looks like the blue cover won by a landslide, and I have to admit, it’s my favorite as well. I was worried it would look a little busy shrunk down small, so it’s nice to know you guys thought it looks good too. Pretty Witches was the second book I wrote, and I’m so excited about finally getting it polished and published! I have a soft spot in my heart for Nick and the witches.

And now Pretty Witches All in a Row is now available for sale as an eBook on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com! It’s out as an e-book for $3.99 but you don’t have to have a Kindle or Nook to read it, they have free downloadable apps so you can read it on your PC, or even your phone. It’ll be available in print as well in a couple of weeks through Amazon.

So I’m taking the month of October off of writing (apart from fanfic, I can’t go cold turkey!) to gear up for NaNoWriMo, recharge my batteries and focus a little on marketing. But… I’m in research mode for my new vampire series which I hope to have out in December or early January. It’s a big project because it involves a lot of research and world building, but I’ve been looking forward to getting some of it down on paper for a while now. After that it’ll be Mercy for the Damned and then… anything could happen, I have sequel ideas for all of the books or I might focus on getting Moonsong cleaned up to be published.

The number one piece of advice I can give is to write every day, I suppose that applies to either.  Unless there’s some kind of cataclysmic event that prevents you, even a few hundred words per day will help you keep connected to your story and keep your momentum going. 

For novels, I always make sure I have an outline before I start so I know how the beginning, middle and end are going to turn out, and hopefully plenty of bits in between.  When you think you’re ready to start writing, don’t.  Take another couple of days to revisit that outline, adding to it and fleshing it out (I even add bits of dialogue that come to me along the way).  When you get stuck on the novel later you’ll be glad for the pre-work you’ve done to get you back on track.

Also, don’t stop writing if you get stuck on a scene.  It’s okay to keep going even if you know a scene isn’t working just right.  You can always go back and fix a scene later but you can’t fix what you never write in the first place.  This I learned from NaNoWriMo which encourages you to just write like crazy for a month with absolutely no editing until you’re done with the first draft.  Before I started writing this way I was always a victim of my inner editor and I’d never get past a few chapters.

Also, also, I find it helpful to set a daily quota for myself when working on a book.  Even if it’s self imposed and no one else will ever know if I make that quota or not, it keeps me on track.  I’ve done it with a 3k a day quota and written a 100k book in 30 days (which is rough with a full time job I admit, but can be done) and I’ve done it with 1500 words per day (which is easier on the schedule but doesn’t quite move things along as well as I’d like) and the one I’m working on now is coming in at about 2k words per day.  This seems to work well, and I can still enjoy some evening time with the family and I should be done in just over a month’s time if I get a little extra in on weekends. But of course YMMV.   

Also, also, also, you’ll want to keep your first book in the 80k to 90k range at the most or publishers won’t take a chance on it. 

In other thoughts, who else is excited that Vampire Diaries is coming back on the air soon?!?

New episode this week on Vampire Diaries, yay!  I can’t wait to watch it, the promo looks amazing!  It’ll be good to get back to those episode recaps here too. 

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday for those of you who celebrate it.  We had a nice day with family and food and I’m say to say the turkey leftovers are all gone now.  Gearing up for Christmas now, the tree is up and presents all wrapped. 

In other news, I was just contacted by an editor of a local publishing house who wants to work with me on editing Pretty Witches All in a Row!  No guarantee of a book deal as of yet, but I’m glad of the interest and his generous offer to work with me.  Fingers crossed this ends up with a publishing deal!

I’ve been watching a lot of Firefly lately and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to write me a one-shot that takes place between the series and the movie I’m thinking.  Yeah yeah, I know I need another story idea like I need a bullet in the brainpan, but I’m still toying with it.  My three fanfics are still going strong with no sign of any of them wrapping up just yet, so I’ll have plenty of writing to keep me busy in the near future.

I have to admit that my fingers have been itching to start on some original work too, but I haven’t even gotten to a synopsis for Angel of Mercy yet, so I’m leery of taking on another novel just yet.  I think instead I’ll just enjoy the holidays (Already got the tree up!  I know, I’m one of those…) and see what happens when I come to the other side of them.

Of course the holidays are almost upon us, which means a busier time at work as the weather turns worse, but I’m hopeful I can still get plenty of time to write in.  Is it weird that I’ve already got all of my holiday shopping done for the immediate family?  What can I say, I’m a planner, I like to be prepared. 

Will be turkey shopping this weekend, I have a killer recipe with lemons, herbs and dijon mustard that I’ve made for the past… wow fifteen years now?  Boy how time flies…  What are some of your favorite holiday recipes?

But on the plus side, it’s gratifying to have people see the results right away.  And I’m normally a pretty ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ kind of writer when it comes to fanfic, so that’s okay. And there’s less pressure to come up with something super awesome that I have to then figure out a way to market because my fanfic is just for fun and for the fans.  With things so stressful at work, I’m glad I went this route even if I won’t end up with a book to publish at the end of the month.

I wanted to give a heartfelt thanks to everyone for all the support and feedback on fanfic.net! I had over 55,000 hits for my fics last month alone, that is amazing! You guys are the reason I write there, and I’m so touched to have so many people reading.

In other news, I heard back from a publisher today who’s about halfway through reading Pretty Witches All in a Row.  He emailed me to let me know that he’s really enjoying it so far and with a little editing he thinks I’ve got the makings of a great book.  How cool is that?