Category Archives: Books
NaNoWriMo Day Two
Today’s Word Count: 1,625
Total Word Count: 4,625
Words to Go: 45,375
The goal was to get 3K words down on the story, but I don’t know if I’m going to make that. I am … I don’t know. Tired, pissed, not in a good headspace to write. Part of it (and this sounds so petty and childish, I know) is due to the fact that JJ is still peeing in his bed. He had a UTI last week, got antibiotics for it, and is definitely feeling much better, but the bedwetting is actually a new symptom that could be related to his urinary tract being irritated or the fact that he’s 21 and well into kitty dementia. Either way it means I have to wash his bed and the cushions it sits on daily because for some reason he always manages to get beyond the pee pad I place under the bed. And the house has a definite odor as a result.
I’m doing my best to stay on top of it and wash everything as necessary, and he will get up and go over to pee on the pee pads in front of the boxes (if they’re clean enough he’ll climb in and pee there, but they have to be immaculate and with four other cats in the house that’s not usually the case). But he still wets his bed regularly which has added significantly to my laundry load.
And then there’s the fact that my Amazon ads aren’t getting a lot of impressions and I’m not sure why, but the result is I’m not getting a lot of KU borrows. Which means I’ll have to go in and tweak the most successful ads and see if I can get Amazon to promote them more. And I have to finish setting up my online bank account because they’ve just rejiggered everything and somehow my login credentials got blown away in the process. And I have to wait for the nurse at the gastroenterologist’s office to call me and schedule my colonoscopy (nothing’s wrong, I do a preventative check every five years). And I have to start prepping for the trip to Vegas for 20Booksto50K™ 2022 in a week and a half, and I still have to switch our two cell phone accounts into one, and cancel the cable, and look around for some contract work to cover the rising costs of *waves at the world*, and worry about the upcoming midterms, and and and.
I would very much like a break where I don’t have to take care of anything, make any decisions, or worry about how things are going to be paid for. But as that’s not likely to happen any time soon, I shall keep calm and carry on. Maybe I can knock out that last 1.5K after treadmill time.
I know — two blog posts in two days?
Who do I think I am, John Scalzi?
Well, there’s a reason why I’m posting today, and that’s to inform everyone that Empress of Storms (Two Thrones Book 1) is free on Amazon all day today. So if you liked A Court of Thorns and Roses or A Deal with the Elf King, or just like royal romance with elemental magic and lots of conniving, you can check out Empress of Storms for the low, low price of free.
Even better, if you like it you can continue on with the series (four books, a novella, and a short story) in KU. Such a deal!
In other news I’m plugging away on “A Theory of Crystal” and should get it off to the antho editors by next week, at which point I get back to work on Crystal Blade. The fact that I’m now getting up around 7 AM and going to bed at 11 PM is making me far more productive (and the house is starting to look like human beings live here), which is a goodness.
Oh, and I have a free book out today on Amazon
My contemporary romcom To My Muse is FREE today on Amazon! If you’re in the mood for a hilarious Hollywood Cinderella story with a nosy but loving family, a ride-or-die BFF, and a hot British actor, check it out!
I’m in a fake relationship with my celebrity crush. How did I wind up in a real-life romance trope?
When too much tequila and an enabling BFF put my newest and oh-so-spicy romance novel into the hands of its inspiration, sexy British actor Tom Morrison, I’m horrified (because hello complete stranger, I thought of you while writing these smexy scenes, now excuse me while I spontaneously combust from embarrassment). I need to get the book back before Tom takes out a restraining order on me—or worse, reads the book out loud on social media.
Except that’s not what happens. Thanks to a strategic lie and an Oscar-winning knight I’m now pretending to be Tom’s girlfriend while we get his dream project made. Somehow, my screwball plan landed me in the middle of my very own Cinderella story, Hollywood style. Even better, I have a shot at a real life HEA with a gorgeous, hilarious man who thinks I’m amazing…
…so why do I get the feeling that disaster is about to strike?
Hello, August
I like it when months begin on a Monday—it feels orderly, somehow. And this is going to be a very busy first week of August pour moi.
1) I have to get ready for Armadillocon this weekend, which means researching the panels I’m on and making sure I have something intelligent to say on panel. It also means I need to get the car tuned up before Ramón and I drive down to Austin. (Don’t worry, our regular cat sitter will be staying here to wait on the J Crew hand and foot as always). I’ll be wearing my SF Writer hat this weekend and talking about TikTok, newsletters, and religion and nationalism in SFF.
2) I have to get Crystal Blade finished this week, and I’d really like to get Shifter Woods: Growl done and published to Amazon as well, seeing as it’s 75% done and I could get it wrapped up with a couple of good days.
3) I have to call up three companies and either cancel certain services or switch to a less expensive plan, plus I have to schedule the HVAC company to come back and install a float valve in the attic. So much fun.
4) I need to keep monitoring the currently running Amazon ads and add some more for the books that I didn’t get to last month. Seriously, I am so glad I took Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad Profit Challenge. It made a huge difference in my July sales, and I can’t wait to see how I do in August.
Learning, learning, learning
Back in April or so I was supposed to participate in Bryan Cohen‘s 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, which would give me tips on how to improve my Amazon Ads game for my books. As you may remember, Bob, that was also the month I had my knee replacement surgery so unfortunately I missed out on the challenge.
To my surprise, I received an email two days ago inviting me to the next challenge. Since I really do want to improve my ad game I signed up, and two days in I’m already learning stuff about Amazon ads that I never knew before (like, you can have an ad target an entire category instead of keywords. That’s a game-changer).
So I’ve been busily creating new ads for Shadow of the Swan to test which ad copy works the best, which category is most profitable, how auto ads might work for it, etc. The nicest thing is that a slew of people complimented the cover, and I just refurbed the blurb last month so I’m hoping I can get some more traction on that book and read-thru to The Crimson and the Black. Plus, anything I learn will be immediately applied to the Paladins of Crystal books since I’ll be running ads on Crystal Shard once Crystal Blade is out and I can de-RH Shard‘s blurb and keywords.
I saw that quizzical eyebrow go up. Amazon won’t let you run ads on anything that promotes an unusual sexual lifestyle (frex, I can’t run ads on Behind the Iron Cross because it got classified as erotica due to the BDSM content). Since the ‘Zon considers reverse harem to be an unusual sexual lifestyle, you can’t run ads on any book that is obviously RH. Which means that once Blade is out, I can de-RH Shard, run ads on it, and heap the RH references on the rest of the books in the series).
I know, you’re fascinated. Not. But earning promotion and effective advertising is just as much a part of being an indie author as writing, and since I would like Ramón to be able to retire at some point I need to step up my selling game.
In other news Crystal Blade is progressing nicely and will be out on July 31st, 2022, so mark your calendars!
Well, this has been a fun weekend
T
he plan for this weekend was to finish up the last of the second draft edits to Crystal Shard so that I could ship it off to the editor tomorrow when she gets back from NYC. Ha. Hahahaha.
Best laid plans and all that. First, we had a GFCI outlet in our garage go out on Friday. This is kinda important because it not only controls all the exterior outlets but all the outlets in the bathrooms (don’t ask me why, I didn’t build this house). Had to go get a new outlet, then reassure Ramón that I wasn’t going to fry myself replacing it, then not try to roast myself with north Texas heat in the replacing of the outlet. Whee.
Saturday morning, we noticed when we woke up that it was rather toasty in our bedroom. It quickly became apparent that the upstairs AC unit had stopped working. This was the last straw on an immense and unwieldy pile of issues I’d been dealing with for the last month or so and I promptly had a meltdown of my own. Ramón, bless him, stopped me from throwing breakable things at other breakable things and got me calmed down (and frankly, I think I needed the meltdown. I felt immensely better, albeit embarrassed as hell, afterwards) and we worked the problem.
As this unit has been known to blow capacitors, we watched videos on how to replace AC unit capacitors, looked up the capacitor rating in our house repair file, located a localish hardware store that sold replacements, made plans to pick one up Sunday morning, and slept in the downstairs guest room which was cool and comfortable. This morning we took out the unit’s capacitor and tested it, discovered that it was indeed an ex-capacitor that had joined the Choir Eternal, drove out to Celina and the ACE Hardware that carried replacements (they had literally just gotten them in this week so we lucked out big time), came home, installed it, hit the test button to make sure that the unit did indeed run…
…and discovered that while it ran if I was holding down the test button, it wasn’t accepting signals from the inside thermostat that would turn it on and cool off the upstairs. While I spent some increasingly hot time outside fiddling with the unit, Ramón did some research and found out that this model of base unit has a safety switch that shuts it off if its coolant drops below a certain level. We haven’t had it serviced since 2019 (I mean, COVID) so that could well be the issue here. Luckily I had already scheduled an A/C tech to come out tomorrow and give the system a tune-up, so I’ll call them in the morning and give them a heads-up that they may need to do some diagnostics as well (if it isn’t the coolant it may be an issue with a control board in the furnace).
Once we buttoned the unit back up I took a long cool shower and slept the sleep of the extremely hot and tired. And now at 5:07 PM I am finally sitting down to continue editing and, please God, get Shard ready to send to the editor tomorrow.
How’s your Father’s Day (or Sunday for everyone outside of the US) been?
Any hate mail I get is going to be TOTALLY justified…
Gentle Reader (yes, I’m totally hearing Julie Andrews’s voice in my head as I write this), I fear that I must bring you some unpleasant news. As many of you know, I have been struggling somewhat this year to get Crystal Shard, the first book in my new reverse harem paranormal romance series, out and into your hands. It seemed like every time I turned around some new life event exploded in my face and I was forced to push the release date back. I mean, this happened three times. I was starting to think that the book was cursed.
The latest life event to cause a delay was my knee surgery. While I knew that recovery would take at least a good month, I didn’t count on the sheer amount of exhaustion I would experience while my body was busily putting my knee back together. I truly thought that I’d be able to work on Shard from the bed, if necessary, and get it ready for a May 24, 2022 release.
Ho, ho, ho. As it turns out, it’s rather hard to write coherently when you’re on opioid painkillers, muscle relaxants, and the other meds necessary to keep you from wanting to cut your brand-new knee joint off. Who knew? By the time I reached the second week of May I only had about 30,000 words done out of a projected 80,000 words, and I would have to have the file ready for upload to Amazon by 6:00 PM CST on May 20th.
That’s today, by the way.
I did my best to finish the book, I swear to God I did. And when it became very clear that there was no way I’d hit 80K and be able to get it edited in time for the release date I took a good look at the plot and figured that, well, I could cut it in half around the midway point of 45,000 words, release the completed part as a Japanese-style light novel on May 24, then finish the second half and release that as a second book in July.
Yeah. Except that I finally reached that 45,000 point last night at 10 PM. Needless to say, the manuscript is bleeding ink from the margins and is in desperate need of the Editorial Machete, a good scrubbing by the beta readers, and a whole lot of polishing. So as much as I hate to do this, I’m letting the pre-order lapse so that I can give the story all the editing love and attention that it deserves (and possibly bumping it up to 60K in the process) with an eye towards releasing it in early June.
I’m sorry. I am so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am because I loathe disappointing people and I know there were readers who really, really wanted to read this. But I’m not about to serve you crap, and right now this book … is crap. It needs to be bathed, shampooed, conditioned, blown dry, trimmed, and have its wee toesies painted before it loses the stench it currently emits, and for that I need about two more weeks.
Please forgive me. I will make the wait worth your while, I promise.
Shaking Things Up a Bit
So I decided to stripe my bangs last night with Overtone semi-permanent colors for brown hair because I’m Gen X, I no longer care about people’s opinions, and I’ve always wanted to try a multicolored striped look.
Yes, I know it’s kind of hard to see but you can’t get really obvious tints with brown hair unless you bleach it first. I suppose I could go into the dining room where the light is super bright and take another pic there but every joint in my body is complaining about the oncoming bad weather tomorrow so I’m not in the mood.
I used purple, blue, red, and green, and basically just slathered the color onto various sections before letting them sit for about two hours. You can see the purple on the left and the red on the right in this pic, with hints of the green and blue at the top. It’s subtle, but I like it. I may hit the sideburns up with a bit of purple tomorrow night because my wisdom sprinkles are becoming really obvious there and I’d like to see how they look if they’re covered with purple.
Ramón hasn’t seen it yet. It will be interesting to see how long it takes him to notice. I may put this into permanent rotation, who knows, or I may try doing all of my hair in two colors (the blue is actually really flattering so I think doing half of my head red and half blue would be fun).
I also love Overtone because they use mint in their ingredients and my hair is soft and smells bloody marvelous for days afterwards. Jasmine, the mint fiend in the house, keeps following me around and trying to chew on my bangs, bless her fuzzy little heart.
Oh, and I worked on Crystal Shard today. So there’s that.
Varia
I have a subfolder folder on my email inbox that’s called Varia. It’s where I put the email that I want to keep for some reason but doesn’t fit anywhere else. It’s why I’m titling this blog post Varia, because it contains stuff that’s important to me but doesn’t really fit anywhere else. So without further ado:
I have to do the taxes today. And by do the taxes, I mean collate all the numbers that we then submit to our accountant (yes, we have an accountant. What with Ramón’s former 1099 contractor status and me with my multiple streams of income, I’d much rather pay a professional to find any tax breaks we may be eligible for than swear my way through TurboTax, plus their fee is a write-off on next year’s taxes). It’s a task I never look forward to and always feel immensely relieved about once it’s done. Writing this blog post is a way of putting it off for another couple of minutes, but once I hit Publish it’s time to take the laptop upstairs and do battle with the paperwork.
WRT The Slap: it’s a complicated situation that contains many layers to parse, some of which I am not qualified to do so because I am not Black. So I’ll leave that to people better suited to do so. Nonetheless, I’m happy that Will Smith won his Oscar.
I’m struggling to find joy in writing. I don’t know if this is due to the pandemic, the fact that I’m still having problems with Crystal Shard (I really wish I could jump to Crystal Blade, but that’s simply not an option), various hormonal problems that are still plaguing me, or what. But when I think about my schedule for the rest of the year it’s not bringing any pleasure. Rather, I can’t help but think that I’m rushing through time without stopping to enjoy anything and I’m going to regret it at the end. I need to find some way to pause and find some happy moments.
To that end, I’ve just learned that Florence + The Machine will be touring North America this summer and one appearance will be in Irving. Seeing as I use a lot of F+TM tracks in my writing soundtracks I think I’m going to get tickets for Ramón and myself, especially since I’ve already pre-ordered Dance Fever and I’m loving the three tracks that have been released (“My Love” is especially delicious).
I just finished bingeing Bridgerton S2, and while I may catch flack for this I think it was better than the book (the MacGuffin that led to the marriage was period-appropriate, yes, but still awfully contrived. Plus there had already been a hasty marriage to avoid scandal in Book 1 so something different would have been nice).
I need to vacuum the living room, but JJ is asleep and I don’t want to disturb him because he’s twenty years old and has earned his rest. Maybe later when he’s up and eating.
Okay, that’s it for me. Time to head off and wrassle with the taxes. Think good thoughts for me, please.
Crystal Shard has been delayed to April 26, 2022
So I’ve made an executive decision. I’ve moved the release date for Crystal Shard out to April 26th. An explanation:
The initial plan was to have finished the book in February so that I could get it edited and up in time for March 15th, the original release date (which meant that I would have to upload it to Amazon by 6 PM my time on Friday, March 11th).
This fell by the wayside for a complicated set of Reasons, some of which were beyond my control. So I pushed the release date two weeks out to March 29th. Which was, in retrospect, stupid. It still didn’t give me a lot of time to finish the book, and every time I sat down at the keyboard all I could feel was pressure and the looming knowledge that I would have to knock out multiple 10K days.
I can do a 10K day when necessary. Multiples in a row, however, would not have a good effect on my health. For me, a deadline is usually good, but this time it was more suffocating than inspiring. Plus I’ve only just found the RH groups on Facebook and it’s nice to establish yourself as a reasonable individual before you start posting ads for your book.
TL;dr—last night, I decided enough was enough and pushed the deadline back a second time to a full month (and I apologize to my twelve pre-orders, but trust me, you’ll be much happier with the book you’ll get in April). The immediate sense of relief I felt was astounding, and I sat down at the keyboard and knocked out 1K of a smoking hot love scene.
So, yeah, clearly this was the right choice. The rapid release schedule will now be adjusted to April through August, which means that RH fans will have a new series to look forward to over the summer, and I’ll have enough time to write a really spicy reader magnet before Shard gets out there.
Who knows, I may even have time to finish the final novella in my Esposito County Shifters series, whee!
Nicola Cameron Writes 