I’ve added another reward tier to the Kickstarter.
One lucky person can get an annotated hardback copy of The Betrayal of Renegade X, with my handwritten behind-the-scenes notes and drawings all over it. There will be something on every page, and this will obviously be a one-of-a-kind item!
If you’ve read The Trials of Renegade X, then you probably saw all those awesome names of superheroes and supervillains in the back, and maybe you thought, “Who are these people? I’m a superhero or villain, and I live in Golden City–why isn’t MY name in here???”
Well, maybe you didn’t think that exactly, but if you wanted to be on that list, you’ve got a second chance, because the Kickstarter for The Betrayal of Renegade X is now live!
Kitten’s name is not in here. He is not amused.
The Kickstarter is the ONLYÂ way to pre-order the book, AND you also get to read it a couple weeks before it goes on sale.
You can get ebooks, signed and embossed paperbacks, or signed and embossed hardbacks of any/all of the Renegade X books. (If you’ve never seen a signed book from me, I have embossing stamps based on if you’re a hero, a villain, or something else…)
There’s also a very limited reward tier where you get to name a character in book 3. These go fast (it’s day two and there are only 2 out of 3 spots left), so if you want to be in a Renegade X book, get it before it’s gone.
It’s been awhile since I talked about book 3, so I figured I’d update you guys on where I’m at.
Damien thinks he has the whole hero thing figured out—he’s getting good grades at Heroesworth and acing all his missions—at least until he zaps an unarmed bad guy he believes tortured and murdered children. It turns out the “bad guy†was actually a superhero working with the school. The mission was staged, and Damien blew it.
Now his best friend refuses to work with him, his dad is considering getting him professional help, and everyone’s questioning whether or not he has a future as a hero—including his grandpa, who will do anything to ensure Damien’s future lies in villainy. His grandpa creates a villain organization called the Truth, intent on exposing the way heroes really treat villains. But when the Truth launches its plan and the whole city erupts in chaos, Damien is caught between the opposing sides, and his future is anything but certain.
With heroes and villains bent on destroying each other, it’s up to him to do whatever it takes to stop the fighting, even if it means betraying the people closest to him.
Starlight is part of the Blazing Indie Collective’s Romance Giveaway! You could win a copy from me, plus a bunch of ebooks from other authors. Click the image to go to the Rafflecopter link and enter.
Chelsea Campbell’s FIRE & CHASM, a dark fantasy in which a teen boy with no memory of his childhood puts his murderous impulses to work assassinating wizards in the war between adherents of the church and practitioners of magic, until he discovers one of his targets holds the key to unlocking his forgotten past, pitched as Dexter meets THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND, to Miriam Juskowicz at Skyscape by Holly Root at Waxman Leavell Literary Agency (World).Â
A million years ago–or maybe it was more like eight–I wrote a book. I freaking loved that book and I put everything I had into it, and I really thought it was The One. (For those of you keeping track, I’ve talked about this book before.) It wasn’t my first book, or the first book I’d sent out–not by a longshot–but it was noticeably better than anything else I’d written. (Little known fact: I actually participated in Miss Snark’s first critique thingy where you sent in your first page and she told you what for. She actually liked mine. My hopes skyrocketed.) I sent it out to agents. I got my first ever request for a partial. Then another request for a partial that later turned into request for a full.
I honestly thought I’d made it, that this was it and life was going to be good from here on out because I was going to get an agent, get published, and have my dream career. (Ha! Life so isn’t like that, and publishing even less so, but it certainly felt comforting to think so at the time.)
But this book I’m talking about, this was not Renegade X. And Renegade X was my first book that got me an agent and got published, so you can probably guess where this is going.
The agents who were reading it rejected it. I never got any more requests. I tweaked my query letter endlessly and kept sending it out, even though I kind of suspected at this point that it wasn’t going to make it. And it didn’t. And I was kind of heartbroken about it for awhile. (Okay, really heartbroken.)
I was mad at myself for believing in that book, for loving those characters and that story so freaking much. I felt like the book had betrayed me by getting my hopes up and then not being good enough. IÂ forced myself to keep writing, even though my heart kind of wasn’t in it right then, and had a couple false starts with new books that only made me more stressed and frustrated.
This period of disappointment and frustration was in the spring and summer that year. It messed me up a lot. I joined a writing group during Nano, wrote another book over fall and winter, and was starting to get some confidence back, if not enthusiasm. Then that next summer, I wrote Renegade X, which ended up being The One, though it has its own long story of how it got published, or how it almost didn’t get published, and then how it was unpublished and republished by me.
But anyway. Back to the book that broke my heart.
Cut to five years and many books later. I started up in the distance program (online) at Syracuse University, getting my master’s in library science. During the week-long residency we had to do in the beginning, I learned a lot about innovation and the importance of failure and how giving yourself room to fail is a  necessary part of making or doing something great, not the end of things. (I didn’t end up getting the degree in the long run, but I learned an awful lot from my teachers and classmates, about innovation and life and bringing the hot sauce.) I started to rethink how I felt about failure that summer, and so I started to think about that old book that had failed me. I’d spent years trying to “live it down” in my mind, not wanting to talk about it, and whenever I did mention it, I had to also mention how horrible I thought it was. But now I started thinking about it again, and about how even if it had some problems, it had a lot of good things about it, too. There was a reason I’d loved it so much. There was a reason it had gotten some requests, even though the writing really wasn’t there yet. If anything, I was the one who had let it down, not the other way around.
I got an idea for the opening and started writing. I kept characters and concepts I’d loved from the first one and rethought the world and plot and how everything could go together. The first version had been my sixth book. This reboot was my twelfth. And it was so much better this time around, and I loved it again, and my beta readers loved it, too. It was finally the amazing book I’d wanted so hard for it to be in the past.
This book is Fire and Chasm. And I’m pleased to announce that it’s coming out next February from Skyscape.
I’m so excited to reveal the cover for my upcoming middle grade release, Growing Up Dead, a comedy about a vampire in junior high.  I’ve been a fan of Annie Rodrigue‘s art style for a while now and am happy to have worked with her on this.  She did a perfect job, and the colors make me want to eat it.
For Nox, being a vampire in junior high wouldn’t be so bad if a) vampires still had super strength, b) his mom would let him play his guitar in the house, and c) the werewolf girl of his dreams would notice he’s alive.
Nox’s life is over when Chug the Thug, a troll who can smell fear and lunch money from three miles away, gets his hands on a picture of Nox’s crush. The same picture Nox drew hearts all over and wrote “Nox and Lila forever” on. If Nox can’t cough up fifty bucks by Friday, Chug’s going public.
Worse, when the Battle of the Bands venue says they won’t allow vampires, due to recent unsolved vamp-related violence, Nox discovers his “friends” have no problem replacing him… with his crush. Now Nox has less than a week to thwart Chug, solve a mystery, and get back in the band. But when reclaiming his role as rock-star-to-be means hurting the girl he loves, what’s a teenage vamp to do?
…then you already saw THIS:
Both The Rise of Renegade X and The Trials of Renegade XÂ are the Kindle Daily Deals for the Sci-fi and Fantasy category, which is majorly cool. Â I’d gotten an email from Amazon back in December saying it was a possibility–I had to agree to being included in the promotion if I got chosen–but I didn’t really think it was going to happen. Â Then yesterday I found out that they were going to be part of the Daily Deal today. Â Which was pretty amazing.
10 years ago, I was working at Burger King (a really, really crappy Burger King where the fries were cold and the pop was uncarbonated, or at least the flavors anybody cared about were–it shut down just after New Year’s that year) and thinking I was really close to finding an agent and getting published. Â LOL. Â (I was nowhere near it.) Â At some point that fall, I’d gotten a slightly personalized rejection letter from an agent whose name I can’t even remember now. Â Looking back, it was obviously a form letter, but it had my name on it and was on the agency letterhead. Â Slightly thicker paper, cream colored. Â Not the thin, run-of-the-mill printer paper rejections I’d been getting. Â It basically said I wasn’t ready yet, but that they’d like to see my work again after I’d written another book or three. Â I was querying my 4th book at the time, if I remember right.
5 years ago, I was working at the ribbon shop (I made award ribbons, mostly for cat shows) and was actually on the verge of getting a publishing contract for the first time.  That was The Rise of Renegade X, and it was my 8th or 9th book, depending on how you count them. (The book I’d started before it I would later finish, so technically RRX was my 8th finished book, but if you lined them up in chronological order, it would be the 9th.)  I’d finished it about a year and a half before that, had recently fired my first agent, and was getting interest from a publisher on my own.  In the next few months, I’d have a new, way better agent, and two offers.
If you’d told me 10 years ago that it would be another 5 years before I got published, I would have been devastated. Â If you’d told me 5 years ago that at the end of 2013, I still wouldn’t have gotten another publishing contract, again, I would have been devastated. Â Probably even more devastated than the first one, because at least then something good was coming, I just had to wait for it. Â (Or work really hard for it. Â Whatever.) Â And if you added on the fact that I wasn’t just contractless, but self-publishing–and, okay, not just self-publishing, but republishing my only traditionally published book because it had gone out of print and I’d taken the rights back–I would have been more than devastated. Â Probably absolutely crushed.
I would have had no idea how happy I was going to be.
To be fair, self-publishing has changed a lot in the past 5 years. Â But, from where I sit now, Â it seems ridiculous to me how upset I would have been about the supposed “failures” to come. Â It’s funny how our expectations of how things “should” go can get in the way of seeing opportunities. Â 2013 has been my best year in publishing, period. Â Not that there weren’t exciting moments along my traditional publishing journey, and everything I learned along that journey made me a better writer and publisher. Â But it wasn’t the only way to be happy, and it certainly wasn’t the only way to be successful.
This year, I got to write what I wanted.  Which means Renegade X fans (and me) finally got to have a sequel.  This year, I didn’t second guess what editors might buy from me or base what I wrote on what I might be able to sell to them.  I wrote for myself, and for my readers.  I had more fun writing than I have in a long time (though at least part of that has to do with getting better thyroid meds and not feeling like I was dying all the time, but that’s a different story), I ran a successful kickstarter campaign, and I published two books, which, in the past three months that they’ve been out, have sold more copies than I ever did as a traditionally published author.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’ve sold more copies of The Rise of Renegade X in the past 3 months than my publisher did in the past 3 years.
So, yeah. Â I guess the point of this post is that we don’t always know what will make us happy. Â I always knew I wanted a career writing books. Â That hasn’t changed, and it’s just as satisfying as I’d thought it would be. Â But how I got here, to a point where I even feel comfortable saying I have a writing “career” as opposed to just “a book,” was completely unexpected.
I’ve been getting this question a lot as people finish up The Trials of Renegade X.  Everyone wants to know if there’s going to be another sequel.
And my answer to that is YES, definitely!  I’m still in the planning stages, so I don’t have a title for you yet or a description, but know that it is coming.  I’ve added it to Goodreads and set the release date as September 1st, 2014, and you can add it here.
I got my copy of The Trials of Renegade X in hardcover this morning! Â It’s awesome and quite large (and, of course, in charge) and is bound in blue cloth under the dust jacket.
Front cover:
Back cover:
Spine:
Innards:
