One Month In

So it's February already and another half term school holiday is rushing toward me. Having missed my stint over at Spacefreighters Lounge this week due to illness - the first time I haven't posted there this year as part of my New Year's pledge to blog more - I thought a quick catch up post on January might be a good idea.

What I've done

The edits for my scifi romance novella Tethered came back from my lovely editor Dani, and after following her suggestions, it's now out on submission. Expected turnaround time for a response is 12-16 weeks. Fingers crossed!

The edits for Gethyon came...and went. Blink and you'd have missed it! Nice to know that my writing has improved enough not to need the depth of editing that poor Keir required, plus it being half the length at just 50K compared to 100.

My test results all came back with the conclusion that I'm chronically anaemic. While that's nothing to be ignored, it certainly isn't as terminal as I feared.

I've taken on a couple more admin responsibilities with the SFR Brigade on the Facebook group and fanpage. This week sees the first of The SFR Brigade Presents feature with up to 20 Brigaders posting snippets in a style along the lines of the now ended Six Sentence Sunday. This is currently replacing the Amazon tagging parties since Amazon is removing tagging.

My long overdue website finally went live, with me having mastered the art of hosting and domain names (and boy! was that a mental challenge!). The website itself had actually been constructed way back in August 2012 along with the purchase of my own domain - www.pippajay.co.uk. Nifty, huh? But aside from the technical issues, I felt it was never quite ready to go. I realized that, like a lot of my writing, I was never going to think of it as finished and I should just do it.

30th January - Samaritan, a scifi short and one of Quin's adventures before those set down in Keir, went to my editor. I'd intended to publish this story a year ago, but feedback on CritiqueCircle at the time convinced me it wasn't ready. Now it's under my editor's critical eye for sculpting into shape.

31st January - I completed the remake of a book trailer for my YA scifi novel coming out in June with Champagne Books - Gethyon.



What's been happening

I received notification that Keir had scored a 2nd place win in the You Gotta Read Reviews Cover Contest. Yay! A huge thank you to its creator - cover designer and owner of Lyrical Press Inc. Renee Rocco - and to everyone who voted. Keir is most grateful for the love shown!

31st January - and to finish the month on a high, Keir won Best May to December Romance in the first SFR Galaxy Awards! Thank you! And congrats to all the other winners, some in multiple categories. You can check them all out here.

Where am I?

I'm visiting the lovely Cassandra Page here with three other authors, talking about what music we like to listen to while writing, and why lyrics are the bane of our existence. :-P

It's feature week for Keir over on the Indie Books R Us blog here, with a book spotlight, review, interview and giveaway to come. Find out which of my bad guys would win and which secondary characters might be scoring their own book.

Still to come

I'm still waiting to hear back about my submission to the SFR Brigade anthology. In the meantime, I've just completed the rough draft for a scifi short Flaming Angel in response to an in-house call by Champagne. At the moment I'm struggling to edit it, but I have another three months to work on it still.The sequel...is still hanging around in my Documents file, awaiting a home. But with one novel and potentially three short stories to come out this year, I feel justified in not rushing with anything else just yet. I still have two novellas from last year I'd like to work on and have at least one ready for submission by the end of 2013.

From today, it's the first of The SFR Brigade Presents feature, with 20 sfr authors presenting snippets of their work to read and enjoy!

It's the Great Steampunk Romance Airship tour at Spacefreighters Lounge from the 4th-13th February!