excited

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!

The thing about being the worst, it’s only up from there!

/ melaradark / 2 Comments

Hey everyone, and welcome to 2024!

I am the literal *worst* it seems about updating the blog posts here and keeping you appraised of what’s what. You may have noticed, especially if you’re a beta of mine, that although I had three stories on my works in progress to finish in 2023, every single none of them actually got completed.

So yeah, about that…

I did quite a lot of work this year. Had a couple of firsts. And by firsts, I mean drafts of course!

*crickets*

Ahem. So, anyway, once I start writing a first draft, I’ve never wiped it and started over from scratch. I’ve certainly never wiped it *twice* and started over…but that’s exactly what I did with The Tree Y’Edenel. I got about 90k into the first draft and realized I wasn’t even a third of the way through. I like a big meaty book, but a 500k word MS was probably a *bit* much. I was also waffling over the direction it was going, so I set that original draft aside and began fresh.

Then, about 60k into that version, I stopped again. Though I liked a few nuggets of this new draft, for the most part it felt even more wrong footed then the first and wasn’t going to be any shorter unless I completely rushed the characters through it. That wouldn’t serve the characters, the book, or my readers.

I read back over the original 90k, approaching it with a bit of a fresh perspective, and ultimately decided to merge the two. I also realized that no matter which approach I took, this story was going to be much too long for just a singular book.

So I made the hard choice to split one book into a duology. The first draft for part 1 now stands at 105k and I am within spitting distance of wrapping it up. I’m also launching directly into part 2, which I expect will round out the first draft at about a similar word count.

Of course this means I had to rearrange a few things. The Rose of Fire, the next book in this same saga, has been bumped now to next year to make room for the duology, which bumped every subsequent book back a year as well. But I’d rather take more time and give you, dear friends, a better quality read.

I haven’t been idle on the other two stories that were slated for 2023 either. I have made good and rather satisfying progress on both So My Grandma Summoned a Demon, and Ferry Tail, and I will continue to work on these even as I start to tackle 2024’s first draft list. I’ve also rearranged (again) and added to (also again) my WIP list. There are also some title changes, most notably to the Willem series that I am starting this year.

And good news! The first draft of one of the stories slated for this year, the Human Heart, is already done! I need to give it some edits, of course, and rearrange the ending a little bit, but it should be up and about and ready to toddle to beta readers here in a month or two.

Even better news: the finishing line for Reboot is now in sight! I’m doing a few more quick edits now based on beta feedback, and then Reboot will be going to the editor. I’m nearly done with the cover as well, just need to give it a final spit and polish. As of this writing, I am bound and determined to at least have ARCs out and a firm launch date set by the beginning of May this year, just in time for BookNetFest!

So exciting! At least, I’m excited, and I hope that a few out there are a little tiny bit excited as well.

Happy New Year, and may yours be filled with joy, love, and wonderful books to read!

2nd Round of Beta Reads!

/ melaradark / 1 Comment

Finally!

After gathering all the feedback from the first round of beta reads and making edits, I’m happy (and relieved!) to say that I am ready for the second round.

Vhantalya will be going back to several of my first beta readers as well as a couple of new ones looking at the story fresh. I have put in an alternate beginning, fleshed out the ending quite a bit (no, Caro, I did not change the ending! Don’t kill me!), and added a couple of scenes among the other more general feedback.

Beta readers, you should expect to see the updated manuscript in your post box. Right now I am hoping to get everything back by New Years, but with the holidays I know this might be problematic with some. Please let me know if you can’t make that timeframe and we’ll figure something out.

Now, on to the less pleasant news.

After a lot of frustration I have decided to put my draft of Scarlett on hold. As you might know I lost the original last year and I am struggling mightily trying to rewrite it. I find myself trying to force the story and continuing to do this will only do a disservice to the book and my readers. Its a story I want to tell, but I want to tell it well and do it justice, not try and hammer it into the box of the first draft until I make it fit.

Instead I will concentrate on getting Reboot’s first edits done and get it heading to beta readers.

I am still planning on starting 2023’s stories – So My Grandma Summoned a Demon, Ferry Tail, and As You Witch – as scheduled on New Year’s Day. I will probably come back and revisit Scarlett where I have time between them, but I for now I’m letting it lie. As we come closer to the New Year I’ll update the front page with 2023’s works in progress, and move Vhan and Reboot to a new page of ‘Pending Publication’ (fingers crossed).

Oh! Speaking of page updates, some of the feedback I received about Vhantalya was in regards to the book cover. So if you sneak over to the front page you will see I have replaced the old cover with a new one I hope works much better. Take a peek and let me know what you think!

Thank you everyone!

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 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!