Well, That Was A Bad Week

Happy Monday, e’erbody!

I hope you’re well, happy, and creatively fulfilled!

Before I get too far into this post, let me just say a huge thank you to the wonderful ladies who stepped in and guest-blogged for me recently. Please, please check out their posts!

KT Daxon
Vania Rheault
RR Willica
Jewel E. Leonard
DA Henneman

Their willingness to contribute helped me tremendously over the last couple of months, giving me time to put the finishing touches on and publish Alabama Rain.

It also gave me some time to create some writer swag—something I’ve wanted to do for a while now:

So, again, I’d like to thank all of my wonderful friends for taking the time and care to bring you all some amazing content. [Insert round of applause here.]

So, where did it all go wrong?

Not long ago, I tweeted that I’d stepped back because it hadn’t been a good week. Fate must have been lurking in my Twitter feed that day and took that tweet as a challenge.

I’m not going to get into all the specifics, but here are the abysmal highlights:

• My deceased nephew would have been 12 on August 27th. I still can’t believe it’s been nine years since he died.
• The majority of the groceries I’d purchased online were loaded into someone else’s car—as I pulled in the space to pick them up.
• My parents had a big fight and I refereed. It has become apparent his vascular dementia is getting worse.
• I shattered my phone screen. Not just a crack. But, it’s missing a dime-sized chunk of glass.
• My husband was last-minute nominated to go to Mexico for a week—so we won’t get to spend our wedding anniversary together.
• Plus, it wasn’t all that stellar at work.

All of this happened within five days of each other. I was, without a doubt, feeling blue.

So, my apologies for anything I missed. I just couldn’t participate in things. It was a really bad week—but I will not let one bad week bleed into another one.

Oh, and thank you all so much for your supportive tweets and sweet, uplifting messages. They helped tremendously. ♥

I have spent a lot of my absence thinking about things. Things I want, things I no longer want, things I need. One of the things I needed was a trip into the mountains. I partly considered it a research trip, since my current WIP takes place there, granted in the mid-late 1800s.

Here’s my working cover for this WIP, by the way:

I’m not yet prepared to give away much of anything about this particular work just yet, but stay tuned.

Back to my trip into the woods.

This particular trip also gave me an idea. (Well, several, actually.) For a while now I’ve wanted this blog to convey more about me and my work as opposed to simply doling out the same writing advice you see across other blogs.

There will still be how-to content and resource suggestions. I am actually storyboarding a mini-series about DIY cover design and I still intend on diving into using InDesign for eBook formatting—seeing as how I couldn’t find the type of content I needed when I was looking for it…which is the kind of how-to content I want to do from here on out: If I can’t find what I’m looking for online and I need to learn to do something on my own, I’ll blog about it.

But this new book is coming at my favorite time of year: Fall. So, expect to see me blogging about my favorite seasonal activities, especially as they relate to the book. There will be travel stories, and research revelations, and quite possibly even an experiment or two as I navigate something called Appalachian Granny Magic.

And something I’ve said I wanted to do but haven’t yet, is blogging about self-care. There’s this prevailing notion that self-care is all about face masks and pedicures, which it can be, but sometimes self-care is much more basic, and can be something as simple as sitting quietly for ten minutes. So, starting this month, there will be an extra blog post from me, on Sundays. I’ll be discussing how I am taking care of myself.

Expect some minor changes on my Thursday posts, as well.

It should be interesting, and I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, let me give you an update on all things Alabama Rain:

Sales have been surprisingly steady! It’s been really nice logging into KDP to see the Kindle sales, and Ingram to see the paperback sales. I am crossing my fingers these readers fall in love with my characters as much as I did.

My Amazon ad sales experiment has been decent. It took forever to start seeing views, but once I did, they began to accumulate. One of the four campaigns I’m running has even seen a sale. So, I need to keep poking around with it and tweaking.

I still don’t know what’s going on with iBooks. It should be there. I checked with IngramSpark and my Apple contract is signed and everything on that end is okay. They did warn me, however, that sometimes it takes up to a month for Apple to make an iBooks page for new titles—for any of you looking to go that route, be sure to keep that in mind.

I’ve already entered the cover for AR into a contest, but I’ve also been persuaded to explore other options for contests. I will absolutely blog about this terrifying process.

In other Alabama Rain news, I’m cooking up another giveaway, so stay tuned for that, too. This will tie-in to my birthday which falls at the end of the month!

That’s all I’ve got for you today, friends. I hope we all have a great week—I know I need one! It would kick off mine if you’ll share with me what you’re up to, writing-related or otherwise! ♥

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