update

Reboot is live!

/ melaradark / 1 Comment

Hey everyone! Hope you had a great weekend!

I didn’t post this yesterday because we were out at my Dad’s house all day, but Reboot successfully went live yesterday, and is now available for purchase!

Until September 15th, the ebook is exclusive through Amazon KS/KU. After the 15th the ebook will be launching on pretty much every platform ebooks can be purchased (Kobo+, Apple, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, etc).

Paperback and hardcovers are also on sale through Amazon. Check out the new ‘Available Now’ page for a free preview, share, and purchase link.

Next Saturday is the launch party!

In the mean time I’m still hard at work on several new books and *fingers crossed* hope to have at least one published in 2025, fingers crossed for more! Most likely Vhantalya will be going out in 2025, but not sure yet which of the others is going to make the cut to join her out in the wild. We’ll have to see!

I did learn a lot from this process and hopefully the next launch will be far smoother. Until then, stay wonderful everyone!

It’s the final countdown….

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One thing I don’t think people tell you about when it comes to publishing a book is that there are a trillion and one little details that need seeing to. Not the least of which is updating your blog to keep people appraised of your mad spins as you chase your own tail!

My website is going to be going through some small growing pains in the next week or two to prepare for launch.

So, amazing news first! Reboot has been doing fantastic in ARCs, with an overall rating (out of 11 so far) of 4.25 stars! I still can’t believe it!

Reboot is officially up on Goodreads (with some reviews already there), and I’m working on Storygraph. It’s is up for ebook preorder through Amazon KU/Select here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4KHP81W.

It will be up exclusively on Amazon through KU/Select until September 15th, when the ebook version will no longer be exclusive through Amazon (though still there through KDP) but available pretty much everywhere you can get an ebook: Kobo+, Smashwords, Apple, etc. I will have direct links where you can purchase up on this site by launch.

It will also be available in paperback and hardcover June 16th! I’m debating whether I’m going to leave the physical copies exclusively on Amazon or if I’m going to also have them available through Ingram Spark. More to come on that!

So little to do and so much time!

Wait…strike that. Reverse it.

You may have also noticed that my ‘works in progress’ page has disappeared. That’s because I’ve been shuffling things around so much its getting to the point I almost need to update it once a week. So its been scrapped. Right now, I’m working very hard on getting Vhantalya publish ready, and finishing up my first drafts of Ink in a Black Sea, So My Grandma Summoned a Demon, the new Tree Y’Edenel duology, and The Human Heart.

I also seem to be over the frustration and heartbreak of losing my entire manuscript of Scarlett and having to start over from scratch, and I may just pull that back out to finish earlier than I expected.

More, as always, to come! Thank you to everyone, and Happy Pride!

Writer’s Workshop!

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Hello everyone!

So this past weekend I attended my first writing workshop and I have to say, it was a lot of fun! I learned a lot, had a few nice chats with some lovely writers, got the first ten pages of Reboot critiqued (it’s a thumbs up!) and had an all around good time!

As some of you know, I have more than a few WIPs and many of them I need to Indie publish due to having burned my first publication rights years ago. However I have been very strongly considering seeing if I can’t get some of my newer fiction, such as Reboot, published traditionally.

I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of both Indie and Trad publishing and just finding myself in kind of a ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ back and forth that has gone on an embarrassing amount of time.

However after attending the workshop I find myself leaning very strongly one direction over the other, and I have finally come to a decision.

I’m going to make a serious go at Indie publishing my works. All of them. Including Reboot.

That’s not to say in the future on some wacky unreal day if my stuff is doing well enough and I get approached by an agent I won’t consider transferring some works into trad publishing (hey, it worked for Andy Weir, right?) but for now, this is my path.

So now all my professional research time is going to go into that, making sure I have the whyfors and the wheretos in place.

Along those lines my writing schedule hadn’t changed so far as my new projects list, however the *publishing* schedule is going to alter a bit. For Vhantalya, I want to wait until I have a few of the sequels done before I release it, that way I can put them out at a decent pace and people won’t have to wait forever for the sequels to be done. So though Vhan is a gnat’s wing away from being ready to go up and in print, as soon as I finish this last polish it’s going into my Dark Vault (I just now decided to make this a thing LOL) until its younger siblings catch up. So, bad news, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that but good news! Once its here you won’t have to wait an eternity for the sequels!

Which is a natural seqway into my next note: the second book in the Immortal Elements series, the Tree Y’Edenel, I have been chipping away at and working diligently on the book cover. I had a not-insignificant portion of the first draft done before I realized it was going to end up an unwieldy monster and not the best written as I was trying to pigeonhole myself into an outline. As a consummate pantser (no offense to plotters!) my creative mojo just doesn’t work that way, and I end up grinding to a halt and struggling to put words on the page *just* to put words on the page. This doesn’t make for a happy writer, a happy book, or happy readers in the end.

About eighty thousand words in I did the computer equivalent of dramatically tearing off a notebook sheet, balling it up, and throwing it into my ‘save but don’t use’ folder, and started again. I am now 25,000 words in and things are not entirely smooth yet but definitely going far more smoothly than before.

“But Mel!” you might say, eyeballing the date. “You said you’d have it ready for betas by now!”

Why yes. Yes I did. Apologies for that, clearly that won’t happen. The best I can say at this moment is that it will get to betas sometime this year. As promised, I am starting my official first draft of So My Grandma Summoned a Demon today, and I will be writing both. I expect SMGSAD will be on time for beta reads but the goal of my schedule is not necessarily to write, polish, and put out a finished work in that time frame (that would be insane, and anyone actually writing a book from scratch and putting it out so quickly likely is not putting out well-written or professional level content) but to get three of my books written (first draft, start to end) done each year. And I’m still confident all three of 2023’s projects will accomplish that by the time 2024 rings the bell.

And though I am not yet ready to commit to a release date, it’s looking pretty good that Reboot will at least be have a release date, if not be released, by the time that happens as well. So far the reception has been excellent, beta edits are underway, and I am tweaking the cover now that I am 100% sure it *will* be the cover since I am going the Indie route now. So watch for more news on that!

Let’s see, what else. Ah!

On the reading front! I found an awesome series called ‘Liches Get Stitches’ by H.J. Tolson that I am having just a lot of fun reading. I’m on the third book of four, ‘Lich, Please’, and for any humor fantasy lovers out there I highly suggest it. It’s light, it’s fun, it’ll give you a few giggles, it won’t weigh you down, and I identify with the main character, Maud, on a *visceral* level, especially in book 1.

I am also reading Deathborne (Dragon Seer #1) by S. Kay Lanphear. Lanphear is an Indie author and this is their debut. If you like fantasy that isn’t slapped in just a rehash of medieval England, and a book you can sink your teeth into, this might be your poison. This was just released so there isn’t a ton yet in the way of reviews, and I’m currently only 20% of the way through it, but so far I am quite enjoying the setting, characters, and the world that Lanphear has built for us. Check it out, and support Indie authors!

I think that’s it for now! If you have any thoughts or comments or Indie books you really enjoyed and want to support the author, please let me know!

Where has the time gone?

/ melaradark / 1 Comment

Edit: So a big part of the reason I did this update is because I revamped my book order yet again, then totally forgot to mention it in the update. Apologies for that. I’ve revisited my book order and my projects and did a bit of shuffling around again. Nothing major, and nothing that will affect my writing the remainder of this year or for 2023.  Thank you.

Hello everyone! Sorry I’ve been a bit incognito for a while. Lots of things going on!

I have gotten all beta reader feedback from this first round with Vhantalya and am deep in edits on my final draft based on the feedback. Thank you so much to everyone who participated!

Overall, the feedback was excellent though there were some constructive, actionable points that I am taking into consideration. Almost universally, there were issues with the beginning of the story so I am rewriting the beginning (again!), adding a bit more of a fleshed out ending, and an additional scene in the body of the work. Other than that, most of it is just polishing up typos, grammar, and revamping an occasional sentence to flow better. After my edits are done there are a couple of new beta readers (and at least one old one) this will go to in order to wheedle out any final pain points that might come up.

I’m very pleased so far and extremely excited to get this finally finished and start querying agents!

For Reboot: the edits and second draft are ticking along well. I’m hoping to have it to beta readers by end of October. If you are interested in beta reading Reboot please remember to send me an email with the subject heading ‘Reboot Beta’ and I’ll get you on my list.

For Scarlett: the rewrite continues to go slowly. I’ve broken 50,000 words and I am hoping that by the middle of October I am back up to 90,000 (which is where I was when I lost the original copy). Even with the slow pace its looking good that the first draft will be finished by the end of the year as I’d planned.

Lastly, I hope everyone out there is doing well and thank you so much for checking out my tiny corner of the interwebz. Stop in for tea any time!

I artify as well!

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Hello all you crazy cats and kittens!

So I don’t only write, I do art as well. I’ve been doing digital paintings for years (as well as photography). I have been getting back into it more lately to do my book covers, and figured why not do some illustrations of my original works as well?

I have created an ArtStation account to post my works, including my book covers and some fan art, as well as these illustrations. This is a WIP, but I will be slowly adding my past art as well as the two book covers I’ve done so far (For Vhan and Scarlett). Some of it may eventually go up for sale but for now I’m going one step at a time.

If you like what you see, feel free to favorite and comment! Heck, if you hate it too…why not?

Still ticking along on Reboot, and as soon as I get the end of the first draft in sight I’ll be doing a cover for that as well and posting it up. I have to say, so far I am loving this story!

Till next time!

Cover is up!

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Finally! So it took a lot longer than I was expecting. Clearly I have a lost a bit of the old speed that I had (breaks out the walker and hacks a few coughs in geriatric), and this cover has a lot of little fiddly details that took a lot of time. Still, here we are!

I’m about halfway through my reread of Vhantalya, highlighting areas that I need to quickly neaten up, and then we’ll be to the beta readers. If I have talked to you about being a beta reader, or if you are interested in being one, please email me and include in the subject header which story you are interested in beta reading. I only need about four per story, and I believe Scarlett is full. Also, don’t limit yourself to just what’s on the front page! Look at my future project timelines and if you see any there you’d be interested in trying your hand at, give me a shout. Just keep in mind the timelines those will be finished.

For those that I select for beta reads, there will be a deadline to get it back to me, as well as a form that will ask particular questions or what kind of specific feedback I may be looking for, in addition to the usual general feedback. Mostly, looking for plot holes, inconsistencies, good pacing, things like that.

So that’s where I am with Vhantalya. I’m on schedule with Reboot as well, knocking out a nice ten thousand words plus a week. At this rate I should be finishing on schedule for June/July with the first draft. I might be a bit biased, but so far I think it’s some of the best writing I have ever done. After that, it’s off to find an agent!

Lastly, I’m also working on my artwork, not just book covers. I used to have my work on Deviant Art a long time ago, but l looked at it recently to see if I wanted to revive it and I don’t think I want to keep on with that site. Instead, I will be building a website and portfolio for my art on ArtStation. Once that website is up and running, I will be linking it to this page. I specialize in digital photorealistic/semi-photorealistic paintings but I want to expand my hand into more cartoon/animation/comic styles as well.

Love you peeps!

Here we go…

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Reboot is now at 3 chapters, 24 pages, and sailing along. Some of my best work, if I do say so myself.

As far as Vhantalya, the cover is almost done, and the final once over and polish before she toddles off to beta readers begins…now.

I Dudditz!

/ melaradark / 2 Comments

Hello everyone!

I was going to wait to post this until I had finished the book cover as well, but it’s looking like that’s going to take several more days worth of work to get it where I want it to be, so look for that to be up soon!

Exciting news to share! Yesterday at 2:22 pm I finished the second draft of Vhantalya! Yes, that means on Twos-day, 2/22/22 at 2:22 pm I finished draft 2. I laughed when I saw that. Hopefully it’s a sign of good fortune ahead!

Vhantalya, the first book in my Immortal Elements series, has been a passion project of mine for well over a decade. I wrote the first draft in just about two weeks, flat out. Over the next several years (longer than I’d like to admit), I changed the beginning a hundred times, added some here, took away a little there, tweaked this and that, and started writing even more stories in my fictional world of Kaloran. Intended at first to be just a little stand-alone one-shot, this story has blossomed and bloomed and inspired what is now a ten book series that will continue with The Tree Y’Edenel, due to be done in 2024.

This project has been especially near and dear to my heart, and I’m beyond excited to get it finished up and out there.

Next steps? Well, I’m not even going to look at the story for at least a week. I am using this time to finish up the cover and get started on my next book, which I’m aiming to have finished around June/July of this year. In a week I will do a start to finish re-read of Vhantalya, making notes and tweaking little edits here and there. Then, it will be ready to go to the beta readers. Once I have feedback returned from them, hopefully there is only one last spit-and-polish, and then it’s off to find an agent!

More to come, stay tuned!