With a new book coming out at the end of the month and WordPress about to charge me for another year of domain registration, I thought I should pop in and update this blog a bit.
First of all, Enchanted Sleep, book two in the Drosselmeier Industries series, comes out on March 26! You can pre-order here! And here’s book one in case you haven’t read it yet, either! And if you’d prefer to read up a bit on the series before you commit, you can do so here!
Also, isn’t this cover just beautiful?
All thanks go to Les (germancreative on Fiverr) for the design. I was pretty vague with what I wanted, and yet she managed to figure it out and give me something superb!
This novella has been a really good learning experience, in terms of both writing and publishing.
There was a two week period after I finished Draft Two in October last year where I was convinced the story was terrible and I should bin the whole thing. And throw in the whole self-publishing towel.
By the end of that month, I was slowly easing myself back out of that hole, and since then, the story has gone through four more drafts. Shout out here to beta readers Nicole, Leanne and Celia, who read Draft Four and gave me wonderful feedback, making me realise that some of my ideas weren’t expressed clearly, and pulling me up on some inconsistencies in the plot.
Draft 5 was read by another friend, Veronica, who was wonderful enough to not only say “you use this word a lot” (101 instances of the word ‘but’ in 11000 words! đŸ¤£), but also used tracked changes to suggest how to get rid of half those instances. I’m very grateful to her for doing half the work for me!
I set up the pre-order to give myself a deadline, but when I had no choice but to do it, I discovered that Amazon doesn’t like you changing the release date of a book on pre-order. It let me do it once, but had I needed to change it a second time, I would then have been barred from publishing for a year!
But! I am now confident that I’m going to make that deadline with a good story, so we all live happily ever after.
So what’s next?
I set up the Amazon listing for this book in around October last year, but since then, I’ve decided I won’t be publishing anything else in 2022. Or at least, it’s not a priority. If it happens later in the year, great! But I really just want to spend this year writing. I have so many unfinished projects. I want to work on things that are bringing me joy, without the pressure of needing to finish them on a publishing schedule.
There will definitely be a third Drosselmeier Industries book. I’ve written some notes and an opening scene but now I have to figure out what happens next (#PantserProblems). I’ve also got an urban fantasy that I drafted last year but now want to pretty much gut and start again from scratch. And a bunch of short story ideas. The sky’s the limit!
I won’t send out newsletters all that often but I’ll still be pretty active on Instagram and Twitter if you want to hear more about what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Emily Wrayburn 