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Deal Announcement – Bigfoot and Nessie!
I’m so excited to finally be able to share this news! I wrote a graphic novel for kids called Bigfoot and Nessie, about, you guessed it, Bigfoot and Nessie. It’s about their friendship, but at its heart, it’s also a story about finding creativity without putting pressure on yourself–something I struggle with a lot. The idea came about after binge watching a lot of We Bare Bears, and I was thinking about Charlie (he’s a bigfoot, if you’re not familiar with the show) and how he doesn’t want to be photographed, and I started thinking what if a bigfoot did want to get photographed? But was also failing at it?…
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Has it been a week already?
Gah, apparently it’s been a week since I posted. The days just slip by! So what have I been doing the past week? What breaking news is there to report from Chelsea Land? Er, not a whole lot. Mostly I’ve been writing. And freaking out and deleting scenes and then deciding I like them and putting them back in again. (With minor tweaks. Remember what I said about minor tweaks being so useful.) I am loving this book a lot, but trying not to push myself too hard when I get frustrated. At this point, it’s less about adhering to a strict word count every day as it is just…
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ARC!!!!
Check this sucker out: From Drop Box That’s my book! It smells like trees–well, newly dead trees, which is a fresh smell for a book–and it has 352 pages. The beginning of each chapter has a black and white silhouette of the city skyline from the cover, and the scene breaks are done with Xs, like this: X X X except in Renegade X font. My favorite part is reading it. I LOVE this book and I love getting to see my words on the page and just see everything I wrote on the computer, back when I was unpublished and it was just words in my head and I…
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Revisions – in which I break down the process and reveal the mysteries
Okay, so, I have to confess that I used to be TERRIFIED of revisions. Just the thought of some editor with a revision quota they had to fill on my book pissed me right the hell off. You hear horror stories, or you make them up in your head, or you just *know* someone’s going to want your main character to have green skin or change genders or go from a bad ass to a wuss. Or even if no ridiculous changes are made, you know they’re going to want to cut your favorite scene or change somebody’s name or have the main character end up with the love interest…
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ARCs – what’s the big deal anyway?
ARCs for those who might not know are Advanced Review Copies (or some variation, same meaning, same letters). Pronounced arc, like in math, or ark, as in the boat. I used to think it was spelled out, A.R.C., but my experience in hearing people in the industry talk about them says otherwise. They’re paperback not-for-sale versions of the real thing, released several months (give or take some months) before the release date. They’re kind of like a dress rehearsal. You get to see how it all comes together–cover, layout, etc.–and it’s the author’s last chance to catch any typos or glaring errors before the real thing. It’s also the first…