I haven’t done much writing lately, and I haven’t blogged much either. I gave myself a pass last week because I flew from MN to FL on Friday to go to my sister’s wedding, and I just got back last night (Monday) pretty late. I had a great weekend, though, and I spent a lot of time at the ocean, which was fantastic! I love going to the beach and looking for shells. There’s something calming about seeing the ocean and realizing how small we are in comparison.

But I’m back now, and this summer is going to be all about writing. This is what I’m going to be doing in the next little while:

Editing

An editing project came my way, and she was lovely enough to run it through CreateSpace for me so I can work on it at work. I don’t have computer access there, so having the paperback will be a big help. I’m looking forward to helping this author and reading her book. I hope she can get it out this summer.

Summer Secrets

My own editor is coming back with my edits for Summer Secrets. I’ll be putting them in and doing all the rest so I, too, can publish these novellas this summer.  The things I need to before release:

• Put in all the edits
• Write the front and back matter
• Ask @DRWillisBooks (David Willis) to redo improve my map for the book
• Create the cover
• Format it for both CS and Kindle. (I will also be going wide with these, and I’ve chosen Draft2Digital to help me with that. I’ll blog about my experience with them at a later date.)
• After editing the proofs and fixing anything that needs to be fixed, I’ll be seeing if any of the bloggers who had approached me earlier are still interested. These took a lot more time than I had anticipated simply because I added a 6th novella to the series and editing always takes me a lot longer than I anticipate.

I am hoping for an August release. I’m hoping. My plans have been shot to hell before, but I’ll do my best.

A Writer’s Conference in June!

I’ll be going to Santa Barabara in June for a writer’s conference. It’s my first big one and my first time in California! I’m so excited I could die! I have everything paid for . . . I’m just waiting to go! I’ll have to see how much Summer Secrets I can get done before then.

Don’t Run Away

This is my new working title for my Nano project from two years ago (formerly known as Running to Love). I’m letting this one breathe as I have ripped it apart a couple of times now, but I’m thinking as soon as I take the bandages off, it’s going to be all healed to perfection! Maybe not, but I do plan to release it in the fall after editing it a few more times. This is the first book in my Tower City Romance series. I’ll have the second one finished soon, and I plan two more books after that.

#SmutChat

And of course, I’ll be doing #smutchat, the Twitter chat I started last month. Or was it two months ago now?  Anyway, I think that people are enjoying it, and it’s going in a direction that I didn’t think it would. I always give away a non-fiction writing resource book in conjunction with the topic of the chat, but other authors have approached me and asked if I could give away their books too. So I will be pairing these books with the non-fiction writing resource I’ll be giving away and even interviewing the author for my blog if they are willing and able. My first foray into this is during one of my weeks when we talk about settings. I have the book picked out already and Jewel E. Leonard is going to be giving away Rays of Sunshine. The writing resource book of the week for that one is @AngelaAckerman‘s book on settings.  It’s something interesting, but I won’t be doing this for every chat simply because planning the blog interview takes time, and quite honestly, I haven’t seen a lot of interest in the giveaways. I was hoping making the giveaway a writing resource would help spark interest, I mean, who doesn’t want to add to their collection to help them write better, but still, no. The last chat I hosted I had only 5 people enter the giveaway. It’s too bad.

Anyway, so that’s what I’ll be doing this summer. I do have a solid publication schedule down though, so you can watch for these:

Summer Secrets, August 2017

Don’t Run Away, (A Tower City Romance) November 2017

Chasing You, (A Tower City Romance) March 2018

After that, I hope to have books three and four of the series completed and ready to go.

I have a busy summer ahead of me, and I hope you do too! What are your summer writing plans?