Chasing the Skies and Conquering the Skies - Available Now!

 

IT IS DONE.

I started my blog post of July 13, 2022, with that same exact sentence. (Yes, I actually looked something up!) A smidge over a year ago, I had finished up the actual writing of the Searching the Skies series and sent it off. Now, after editing and cover design and whatnot, the entire series has now been published. PHEW.

I'll get to the blurbs in a moment, but since this feels like a pretty big achievement, I'm going to take this opportunity to recap the history of this series, especially since I've picked up some new readers along the way. If we're going allllll the way back to the beginning, I might as well start in late 2010, which is when I got laid off from my then-job and got back into writing fanfic.

Fanfic was fun enough, but in time, I wanted to see if I could write something 100% original. E-readers and indie publishers were on the rise, and I thought I had a halfway decent shot at getting something published. By this point, I don't even remember where the original idea for Geneva's space adventures with her two doting men came from, but I wrote it in the fall of 2011. I submitted it to a publisher I had in mind...and was rejected. Not terribly surprising, actually. But I kept at it and eventually got a "yes."

And then I started learning how much I really didn't know, and I will forever be grateful to that first kind editor who started gently whipping me into shape.

The first edition of Searching the Skies released in 2012. I'd started working on my next book by then, since everything I'd read said the best way to sell your first book is to write a second. Even though I was focusing on other projects, my mind kept wandering back to Geneva & Co. When I plotted out the first book, one of my big concerns was how to make it realistic that Ash and Marcus would be willing to engage in this threesome. I had some ideas for a dramatic rescue mission, but since Searching the Skies was my very first book, I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew, so I abandoned that plot line and kept it simple.

Then I thought about revisiting the characters and making the throuple more "equal" - as in instead of Geneva always being in the middle, the two men engaging in intimate activities with each other. I combined that with the aforementioned plans for a dramatic rescue mission, and Defying the Skies was born. I admit that when I wrote my very first book, I had zero plans for a sequel, yet once I had the plot fleshed out in my head, I wanted to write it. The first edition of Defying the Skies released in 2013.

Back then, I did sort of have a rough outline for a third book, but a lot of other things were going on. First, I had other shiny new book ideas that I wanted to write. Second, I finished up my coursework for my career change and went back to work, leaving me with a lot less free time. Lastly, while the original publisher I was working with wouldn't shut down for another few years, by that time, I kind of saw the writing on the wall and had concerns about its future even then. I sent one more sequel to them (The Fall of the Midnight Scorpions, the sequel to Disintegration) and decided that would be it.

Time passed. I wrote other things. I had two kids! (At the same time, but still!) As the years went by, somewhere in the back of my head, I vaguely remembered the rights reversion clauses in the contracts and knew I was approaching the point where I could request that. Again, though, I was working on other books, and while it was an interesting idea, it wasn't a priority. 

Then...the decision was made for me. The publisher was shutting down/being absorbed by another company, and unless we wanted our books relisted with the new company, all rights reverted back to us. Well, that turned out to be easier than expected, I guess. I was glad to have my books back with me, but I needed to figure out what to actually *do* with them.

I focused on rereleasing the Disintegration series first before revisiting Searching the Skies. And what I found...oof. OOF. Don't get me wrong, there was still a lot of good stuff going on in there, and I guess it's nice to see how much you've grown as a writer, but I was cringing all over the place. Like, a tiny part of me wanted to reach out to everyone who read the first version and apologize to them. It was painful. But, I sat down and got out the electronic red pen. It was tough at times, and I did consider giving up once or twice, but I wound up with a better version of my original book baby. Thankfully, Defying the Skies didn't need *as* much work.

The rest of this saga has already been documented more recently, but to wrap up this recap: I did write that third book, decided it wasn't a satisfying ending to an entire series, plotted out two more books, and offered the whole thing to Decadent Publishing, who I'd always enjoyed working with. (Really, they're great! I highly recommend them to anyone who's looking for a smaller romance publisher.) They accepted it, contracts were signed, and my first book and its sequel found a new home.

So, here we are. This has been a journey of almost twelve years. That's older than my kids. That's older than this website! It's kind of crazy and surreal to think about, but anyone who knows me will tell you I rarely give up on projects and I like to finish what I start. And today, the Searching the Skies series is officially finished.

Thank you for indulging me in that bit of rambling. As promised, here are the short blurbs for the last two books in the series!

Chasing the Skies:

Geneva’s new job as a private investigator leads Marcus to contact her when Adele witnesses some potential illegal activity at her office. She reluctantly agrees to look into the matter, all while fighting her lingering attraction to him and missing Ash, who has been deployed on a dangerous mission with the military. Can she keep her loved ones safe while navigating her new roles?

Conquering the Skies:

Big changes threaten to disrupt Geneva’s comfortable routines, forcing her to make significant decisions about the future she wants. Throughout weddings, new jobs, and travels to distant planets, will she finally find a place in the galaxy to call home?

All five books of the Searching the Skies series are now available on Kindle Unlimited!

Sonata for Springtime and Surrendering the Skies - Available Now!

 

Phew! June was such a busy month with THREE book releases, I forgot to post here about the second two. (But you're all subscribed to my newsletter and following me on social media, so you knew about them, right? Right??) At least I remembered to update all my tabs and buy links here, so we'll call that half a win.

Sonata for Springtime, my slow-burn contemporary romance, was released on June 16th, and Surrendering the Skies, Book 3 of the Searching the Skies series, was released on June 30th. And after all that, we still have two more books of the Skies series to go! Double phew!

 

Short blurbs for consistency's sake:

Sonata for Springtime:

Jonathan falls in love with aspiring concert pianist Natalie when she tries to teach him how to play, but she’s engaged to someone else. After she reveals his feelings are reciprocated, she becomes distraught and cuts off contact with him. Can Jonathan find a way to discover his inner passion, with or without her?

Surrendering the Skies:

Harrowing job assignments, Ash’s personal tragedy, and Marcus’s new relationship with another woman leave Geneva feeling lost in the universe. Can she find a path back to where she was, or is it time for significant change in her life?

Chasing the Skies releases on July 15th!

Conquering the Skies (the grand finale) releases on July 29th!

Character Names, Part Wherever We Left Off

Edits are underway for A Flame Among the Stars, and I've also seen a mockup of the cover, which is AMAZING. As soon as I'm allowed to share it, I will, because it's seriously gorgeous. I don't want to spoil anything, but: DRAGON. Also, as soon as I have a firm release date, I'll be sure to share that, too. (Reminder: I've been using my newsletter more than my blog lately, so make sure you're signed up for the latest news!)

More on the topic of exciting news! I believe I mentioned I'm rebooting the Geneva Greyson/Searching the Skies series, and now I can announce I've signed contracts for the first three books. (The first two were previously published, #3 is new.) I'm currently plugging away on Book 4, which is about two thirds of the way done.

That brings me to the topic of the day: character names! I've written posts about the various aspects of naming characters in the past, such as when to name characters and my thought processes for doing so. Book 4 has a lot of secondary characters in it, and those characters needed names. A lot of said characters are female, and finding enough distinctive names that still fit their personalities was a little bit of a challenge.

I'm not opposed to alliteration, or having more than one name in a book start with the same letter. As I wrote in one of those previous posts, for me, I sometimes think it's more important to vary the ending sounds of names. For women, this can get tricky because a lot—a LOT—of names end in A. Y might be the next most popular letter/sound, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

All right, so we've got our main character Geneva, the star of the show. Her mother, Dahlia, also has an -a name, but the other sounds plus the syllable count make them different enough for me. (In my accent/voice, anyway. If you want to stress every single sound and call her Dah-lee-ah instead of sort of smearing together the last vowels, I certainly won't stop you.) Out of all the other female characters, I only have one more who has an -a name—Freya—and she doesn't show up too often, anyway. And luckily, Geneva, Dahlia, and Freya are never all in the same scene together.

Book 3 introduces us to a new significant character, Adele. Here, I really wanted a big contrast to Geneva. Longtime readers will remember one of the [male] main characters of the series is named Ash. I did devote some thought to having two A- names, but ultimately decided Ash and Adele were different enough to not be distracting. Again, in my accent, the initial vowel sounds in Adele and Ash don't even sound the same. (Fun fact! Adele was very close to being named Katharine, but I thought Adele fit her better.)

Back to Book 4, there are three other female characters who needed names. Renae was one of those characters who kind of named herself. Hey, sometimes you just can't fight what was meant to be. From the very beginning of starting to plot this book, she was Renae in my mind. I guess if I was really concerned about the way repeated letters look, I could have gone with the more traditional spelling of Renée, but 1) I admit I didn't want to deal with the accent marks, and 2) I think the Renae spelling is cooler anyway, and this Renae is a badass.

Okay, two more to go. For one of them, I really wanted to set her apart from Geneva and the others for various reasons (she's not quite a villain or antagonist, but let's just say her morality scale differs from that of our heroine). I chose Lorelei, as I like the name well enough, I thought it fit the character, AND it had the added bonus of having a unique ending. Perfect! For the last of the minor characters (Lorelei's friend, who shows up on screen once and is mentioned one subsequent time), I originally went with Tamara, but thought it was too similar to some of the other names, so I did a find 'n' replace and changed it to Taryn. Yay for yet another ending letter/sound!

Phew, that's a lot of names. There are a couple new male characters of varying significance in Book 4 as well, and I did spend some time making sure they were different enough both from each other and existing characters. I don't know, though—for some reason, I've always found female names to be a lot more fun. And regardless, I'm more than happy to feature a lot of interesting women in this book!

Multitasking

I'm pleased to say I've reached the home stretch of Surrendering the Skies. I have one more chapter to go, plus an epilogue. And honestly, I'm not crazy about where my word count is right now, so I might wind up going back and adding in a few more things, but we'll see where I wind up. Still, exciting!

As I started inching closer to the end, I also started thinking about what else I want to accomplish this year writing-wise. Regular readers will remember I have more older books that came back to me following a publisher shutting its doors, and I have to figure out what to do with them. It finally hit me that if I want to re-release any of them on my own, these things take time, and I should probably start making some sort of plan. (I know, it's obvious. Big derp on my part.) As I've been saying this past year or so, now that my kids are a little bit older, some of the brain fog is clearing, and I've been feeling more like my writerly self. So, let's attempt some multitasking!

I revisited my beloved Disintegration series to check out where it is now and how much work it would need. You know what? My love is not misplaced; those books are still fucking awesome, if I do say so myself. Really, some of my best writing is in there. They will need some editing, and I will probably sob to myself as I slash all the "thats" and "justs" and a whole bunch of adverbs, but otherwise, I don't think it'll be too painful.

Next, I realized if I want to do right by these books I love so much, I should invest in some kick-ass cover art. I've got tax return money coming. I've got stimulus money. LET'S STIMULATE THE ECONOMY AND SUPPORT ARTISTS! I put a call out on Twitter, reached out to some artists, and found someone I think will be a great match. Since I wasn't crazy about the original covers back in the day, I'm super excited about this part.

After/during cover art will come editing, which, again, I don't think will be too strenuous. And then after that...formatting. I've done e-books before, so I'm not too concerned there. It falls under the category of "time-consuming, but not terribly difficult." But I haven't done a paperback on my own yet, so I need to start doing research on that. I know there are ways to outsource this work, but since I'm spending money on the covers, I'll most likely handle the formatting myself.

So far, my plan is to finish up Surrendering the Skies, shop that series around, and then get to work on editing. As of right this second, I'm planning a release date for the first Disintegration book for September 1st of this year. It might be a wild ride, but I think it's doable. I'm also going to release the set of prequel short stories at the same time, but—BUT!—newsletter subscribers will get those for free, so make sure you're all signed up for that.

I'm voluntarily putting a lot on my plate, but as of right now, it's making me happy and motivated and all of that good stuff. Fingers crossed these plans work out (says the pantser)!

A Series of Questions

I've been saying to myself "oh, I really should write a blog post" for about the past week or so. Honestly, I don't have a whole lot to report. Progress on Surrendering the Skies, Book 3 of the series I'm rebooting, is coming along nicely. I would estimate I'm somewhere between a third and halfway through, and I've got a pretty good outline for the whole thing. (As well I should, as this has been floating around in my head for years.)

As I've been writing, I've been thinking of how this book will fit into the series as a whole, and various issues relating to doing a series in general. First, I should preface this by saying I admit I have not read a series in a long time. Free time for hobbies is limited these days, and I try to spread it around evenly. Due to that, I've definitely had a preference for standalone books the past few years. I know, I know, good readers make good writers, blah blah blah. But there are only so many hours in the day, you know.

One big issue I've been thinking about whether or not it's important for each book of a series to be able to stand on its own. As always, there's no one right answer. I read a lot of the Anita Blake series in high school and college, and I started with Book 9, Obsidian Butterfly, because I got it as a birthday gift from a friend who worked at Barnes & Noble when it came out and he liked the cover. (Hey, there are worse reasons!) Interestingly enough, Obsidian Butterfly is kind of the "side quest" of the series, in which Anita takes a vacation from all the drama in her life. So, that kind of answers the standalone question and actually made it a decent book to start with. I continued on with #10, Narcissus in Chains, liked that too, and then went allllll the way back to the beginning.

(Then I quit after #12, Incubus Dreams, and learned a few years later that I was not alone in stopping at that exact point, but THAT is another topic for another day.)

Then the other full series I've read in recent years is The Hunger Games trilogy. (I have not gotten to the new fourth book yet, but that's a prequel anyway.) I started at the beginning, and I can't think of a single person who has started anywhere other than with Book 1. I'm sure they exist, but I can't imagine reading that series out of order. Also, I did read the first Outlander book a few years ago but didn't continue with the rest of them, and that seems like another one where people tend to start at the beginning.

So, my Skies series. I've said before that back when I wrote the first one, I never had any plans for it being a series, which I guess fits in with me being more of a pantser than a plotter anyway. When I wrote Book 2, Defying the Skies, I did make an effort to make it accessible to readers who hadn't read the first one. Now, with Book 3...eh, not so much. I mean, since it's not really a complex world, I guess readers could start here and figure out the context quickly, but it's not a priority for me this time around. And unless someone whose opinion I value tells me otherwise, I'm sure I will be at the point of barely caring at all about this issue by the time I get to #4 out of the planned five.

Which reminds me, I will eventually need a better outline for #5 than I have now, but I don't need to worry about that yet, right? (Pantsers unite!)

To the Skies!

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past months that the first publisher I worked with has shut down, all the rights to my books have reverted back to me, and I had to figure out what to do with them. I took my planned writing break following the completion of A Flame Among the Stars, but then it was time to decide what to start next. As always, I had a number of ideas to choose from, but one possibility called to me the loudest: I wanted to finish off the Skies series.

To recap: Searching the Skies was my very first published book, featuring Commander Geneva Greyson and her attempts to balance her career goals with her family life, along with having to choose between two men who show a romantic interest in her. (Spoiler alert! She chooses both, and the three of them live happily ever after.) As this was my first major writing project that wasn't fanfic, I didn't really think too far ahead beyond "can I get something published?" I don't even remember what made me want to write a sequel, but I did, and it came out a year and a half after the first one. I did have plans to write a third book and had a pretty solid outline for it, but for a whole long list of reasons, it never happened.

So, here we are. Before starting the shiny new book, I wanted to go through and edit the first two. I'd skimmed through them back when the rights first reverted back to me, and I knew I had some work to do. As I wrote in a previous post, Searching the Skies was...ARGH. Ergh. Bleh. I guess if nothing else, it's nice to be able to say I've so obviously improved as a writer? Some of it was downright painful to reread, to the point where I almost want to track down everyone who read it and apologize to them. Honestly, there were points where I considered scrapping the whole thing, but if this were easy, everyone would do it, right?

I believed a good story lay hidden in there somewhere and slogged through to the end. Next up: Defying the Skies. While not flawless, I'm pleased to report this one held up considerably better. Sure, there were some errors that had been missed the first time around, and a few instances of lazy writing and awkward phrasing, but there were a few points that made me say "oh, damn, there's some really good shit in here". Us writers are often known for doubting ourselves, so those moments where the opposite happens are quite nice, I must say.

Okay, so the first two books are edited. Time to start the third! I started a new file two nights ago and I'm easing back into writing these characters I first created almost ten (!!!) years ago. But wait, there's more! As I said, I'd outlined the third book (and even titled it!), and it had a clear beginning, middle, and end...but then I realized that the ending I'd planned wasn't the most satisfactory, especially considering the series as a whole and comparing it to the previous two. I mean, it's an ending, in that it concludes the story the book tells, but I don't think I can leave off there. To make a long story short, I've decided this trilogy is now going to be five books long, and everything will be finished off with a pretty little bow on top by the end.

It sounds like a lot, and I definitely have my work cut out for me. I also have to decide on the best route for publication, and while I have some ideas/strategies, I need to get a bit more actual writing done first. For now, though, this is what I want to focus on, and I'm looking to more fun, sexy space adventures. Because I firmly believe the world can always use more of those.