A Round of Words in Eighty Days

is set up to allow us to define our own writing goals. The main rule is that it must be something measurable. Word count, hours, chapters or pages are all easily accounted for.

This past week, I haven’t been able to measure something. Like last week, I was sick. The main difference is I now have antibiotics and cranberry juice (draw your own conclusions.) Much time has been spent, moreso yesterday and today, playing catch-up now that I’m starting to feel better. Catching up on things like this weekly update post, which I would usually do on Tuesday night, but it’s now the wee hours of Thursday morning. I know my fellow ROWers will forgive me.

The other main difference between last week and now is that Grands is out! The latest story from The Cities of Luna is about a couple of centenarians whose birthday coincides with the founding of the lunar colonies. Kellan and Moriel are pretty darn frisky, in spite of the wheelchair and cane. I had fun writing them!

I’m pretty sure there was NO writing taking place this week. That’s a bad thing, even while I’m sick. But I have been working hard in spite of feeling terrible, doing promo for Grands and all the organizational stuff that goes along with that, such as waiting several days for the book to be up on Apple and B&N and then updating the links when the finally started working.

This past week I also touched base with the publisher who is considering my Kingdom Come stories. I was thrilled and cautiously optimistic to hear that they are still considering the stories, and haven’t made a decision yet. That’s very good news! It is much easier for them to send a rejection letter. They haven’t done that. Yet.

The other new thing that came up is the Steampunk Festival in Springfield, Vermont. Although my Steampunk series, Victoria Pontifex, is still in development (Tying the five books together with an overall arc and making sure the tone of each is in line with the others,) I’m going to read an excerpt from Give Me Your Answer Do. This was my first Steampunk book, although it’s not the first in the series. It began on a twitter dare to write a story with a Steampunk mermaid, an Emo pirate, and a Metrosexual naval officer.

Come to think of it… Steamship Troopers also started on a dare. Sort of. I was participating in a discussion on John DeChancie’s facebook page, and Starship Troopers came up. I don’t remember the details, but I made some comment like ‘Now I want to write a book called Steamship Troopers‘ and another of Mr. DeChancie’s friends named Pournelle told me ‘go write it.’ So I did. I logged off facebook and started it that same hour.

Siren’s Web was sort-of a dare… I wrote it during the 3-Day-Novel competition in 2013.

Lastly, congrats to former ROW80 sponsors Susan Bischoff and Lauralynn Elliott on The Forge: Affordable Book Finishing! I’m sure this will be a great resource for many authors.

Anyone else juggling genres?

Anyone else write something just because someone dared you?

Where to purchase Grands:

Amazon
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
OmniLit
Smashwords