6/2/14

Coming Soon: My Name Is A'yen

My last post here shared some of the journey I've been on the last five years. This one's going to share some more, and there's a HUGE announcement involved.

I've been dabbling in writing all my life, creating characters, spending thousands of hours playing with them in my head. I created a huge family who lived in the Colorado Rockies, and shared them with a friend and my sister. The friend had characters, too, and my sister made some up. We spent hours playing with these characters whenever we were together, and we'd even write letters to each other as our various fictional friends. It was loads of fun.

For a couple years I wrote fan fiction with my sister and published it online at one of the main hubs for this fandom. Then I started writing fan fiction in another fandom and exploring the backstory of characters whose backgrounds were unknown. Eventually my interest in it petered out. But at the same time I got a new job as a tour guide at a plantation and there was downtime. I needed something to keep me occupied that wouldn't get me in trouble. So I turned to my O'Connor friends, the huge family, to keep me company. I have hundreds of pages of college ruled notebook paper filled front and back with pieces of their lives.

In 2007 I joined my first writers organization and began learning how to structure a novel and be a better writer. We were encouraged to pick one genre, so I settled on historical romance. A few years went by, the events of my last post happened, and I ended up abandoning it for science fiction romance.

I've been on the submission trail with A'yen for two years. He's been sent to four publishers and an agent. All have said no. I tried to go back to my more traditional-friendly series, Slipstream, and couldn't. Though it wasn't for lack of trying!

The HUGE announcement is I've decided it's time to start self-publishing A'yen's Legacy. It's time to send him out into the big wide world and hope readers love him as much as I do. I'm hoping to have the first one, My Name Is A'yen, out in September, with the second and third to follow in January and April of next year. I'm hard at work on number four, and number five is written already.

I'm also starting a newsletter list, since Facebook is being so stingy with how many people it shows Page posts to. If you want to stay up to date and make sure you never miss anything, like my Facebook page and sign up for the newsletter. I promise I won't be emailing all the time, and it's not likely to ever be more than once a month.