I’m so excited! Having a great day and it’s only 5a.m. I started off by getting a message from a reader saying she absolutely loved my book, Force of Corruption. She says she’s going to post reviews for me this week. So sweet! I love hearing from readers, they always have such interesting things to say and I love to hear about who they enjoyed most in my story.
If that wasn’t enough, I heard from my Beta Readers! They read my newest book, Force Majeure in its raw, unedited form. They liked it!! They offered some excellent insights and suggestions; I’m looking forward to working on it to improve it as I work with my editor. They pointed out things I thought too, and liked things I wasn’t sure about. It’s a huge relief. You never know how your story will be received by readers and its nerve wracking to send it out into the world and wait.
Lastly, today is my wedding anniversary. My husband and I are high school sweethearts, we’ve been together since we were sixteen. We got married at nineteen and it’s been a lot of years since then. We’ve been through some crazy things. See, you think I’m writing fiction, but all I have to do is write down my life. Okay, I’m kidding, but some parts of our life together could put a soap opera to shame.
I read my first duel in the writing battle competition I entered. It was a different genre than my story, it’s how they keep everything fair. It was quite interesting to read what other people submitted after working on my story for the four days allowed. I’m able to share my genre, but not my other prompts or title to make sure nobody who’s judging can find out what story I wrote for an unfair advantage. My genre was Enemies to Lovers. It’s a genre I enjoy reading but I never considered writing it before. I thought about redrawing for another genre, you can redraw one time, but a story came to me so I stuck with it. I’m happy with my submission, I’m very curious about the feedback I’ll receive. I will share the outcome.
For the first two stories I read, there was a clear winner, you have to choose one over the other. They’re in the Culinary Catastrophe genre, I’ll have four more duels to judge over the next couple weeks. You’re required to write something you like about the story and then in the next section you can write constructive criticism. They don’t allow bashing an author or their story, which I think is good. Trolls come out of the woodwork when there’s a chance to trash someone.
One of the stories was written in a poetry style. I’m not into poetry to begin with and this was very confusing and had many grammar mistakes. It was easy to choose the other story as the winner, but it was difficult to write things I liked about the story. If you don’t complete your judging of the duels, your story will be disqualified. The results will be out March 10th, I’m expecting to hear about another story competition I entered back in November by the end of February. I should also find out about the twenty-four-hour story competition around the same time. The hardest part of the competition is the waiting.
I also got my submission for the anthology sent off. I won’t know if it’s accepted until the end of April, unless there’s a huge number of submissions which could extend the date. There’s only three people on the acceptance committee. They’re only accepting seven submissions for inclusion in the anthology. I have no clue if my story is what they’re looking for. The criteria require fifteen to twenty thousand words, must have a senior character over sixty-five years old, and it must be in the romance genre.
I wrote my story specifically for this submission, but they’re willing to accept previously published stories, as well as stories that are part of an ongoing series by the author. I considered writing a story about the older character in my book Force of Corruption, but I ultimately decided to tell a different tale. It’s just under the twenty thousand word mark, for comparison, my published short story, Haunted Hunting Camp, is just over seventeen thousand.
This is a summary of what I wrote, the novella is called Devil's Affair:
When Katerina Grimaldi, known as Kat to her friends, gets a frantic call from her mother, she drops everything to rush to her aid. It seems Kat’s stepfather is not such a good guy and Kat’s mom wants a divorce. At any age, it’s a difficult process, at sixty-seven, Kat doesn’t know if her mom is up for it. Especially when she considers his narcissistic personality.
Detective Lincoln Vann becomes involved after an innocent, random inquiry, and he thinks Kat’s stepfather might be much worse than anyone suspects. Once he meets Kat, he has a lot more at stake when all he wants to do is protect her and maybe kiss her. Linc finds instant chemistry with Kat, he wonders if she’ll even notice while she deals with her family crisis.
Despite the mix of tragedy, mayhem, and downright evil, if Kat and Linc can survive the devil, they may have a chance at happily ever after.
***
I’m probably going to publish it if it’s not accepted in the anthology. I may eventually do my own anthology of my competition entries. Or I might consider putting them on Vellum or a similar platform. I have my books on the same platform as this blog, Payhip, so I may just put them here. Whatever I decide, you’ll be the first to know.
I have one more thing to tell you. I ordered a case of my book, Force of Corruption, from IngramSpark. I thought for some unknown reason, it would be a good idea. After my quality comparison, you’d think I would’ve learned, and ordered from Amazon since they were by far the winner of my test. Nope, I chose to order from IS. A box of my books comes with thirty copies. Ten of them came with a crease in the cover!
I was so disappointed. Thankfully, they were fairly easy to deal with and they refunded my cost for ten books. I’m okay with this outcome. I think I’m going to either offer them for shipping cost only on my website or gift them to readers or the library. It’s a minor crease, but definitely enough to annoy someone expecting a new book. Note to self, order author copies from Amazon!
As always, thank you for reading! Have a great week.