celebrations, links, and night-time panics

Oct 02, 2012 14:00

Thanks so much to everybody who helped me celebrate A Reckless Magick's book birthday yesterday! (And congratulations again to @BookAddictdGirl , who won the Every kind of magic ring! For anyone else who wanted a copy, I think the rings will be available on Amazon.com in America within a few weeks. Alternately, if you're in the UK, you can contact Emily - a Londoner - directly via her website.)

Patrick and I went into town yesterday to celebrate, and it turned out to be perfect timing. When I walked into my lovely local Waterstones for my planned book-browsing trip, the children's book manager said, "We just got copies in of your book!" So he brought them out straight away for me to sign. This is the first book-birthday I've had where the copies were actually available in store that day, and that was so much fun!

Making the whole process even better, my Waterstones has decided, on an individual store level, to offer the whole trilogy on a special deal - buy one, get one half-off! So if any of you guys are in the South Wales area, you can now find all three books not only signed but also discounted at the Waterstones in Abergavenny right now.

And oh, seeing the lovely display they had made for the books, all lined up and face-out at the top of the 9-12 section...it felt amazing. I really, really love my local Waterstones! They have been just amazingly supportive of me and my books from the very first moment. I only wished I'd brought a camera! Maybe next time I'll remember.

Elsewhere on the web, I wrote a guest blog entry at my UK publishers' blog about the process of writing - and finishing! - the trilogy; and something that meant a lot to me, personally, was the entry written there about the series yesterday, by my wonderful UK editor, Emma Goldhawk.

Wow, have I been lucky with my editors.

And in more news that's pure relief, the second review (that I know of) of A Reckless Magick has also gone up, and it's also a really good one! So I think I am going to start to tentatively relax.

...Well, a bit. Y'know. As much as I ever do.

Last night I lay awake for a looooong time fretting. Why hadn't I already gotten Low Road to a full second draft by now so that I could have sent it to my agent and my editors already? What had I been thinking? Plus: why didn't I already know EXACTLY which book I was going to write next?

What had I even been doing with myself, to be so slow and behind? Honestly, how could I have been so remiss and lazy with my career?

...but then this morning I thought: actually, over the last year, I've written over 120,000 words of freelance work, as well as that first 80,000-word draft of Low Road and a 9,000-word short story for Wilful Impropriety. So...maybe it's not entirely surprising that it's taken me longer than usual to write/revise Low Road? Possibly? And perhaps I can give myself a tiny bit longer than a week after finishing my first rewrites of Low Road to really settle on the next book?

Sigh. Needless to say, my subconscious is not entirely convinced. But I'm going to try to follow my more sensible instincts this time round.

In the meantime, I downloaded the Kindle sample of A Reckless Magick onto our iPad, just so I could see how it looked as an ebook. It looked good! I read the whole sample...and hey, I liked it! So I'm hanging onto that, and I'm keeping my Every kind of magic ring on my finger, as a reminder.

And last night I wrote something oddball and unexpected that grabbed me, just for fun, in my lovely new blank book. I have no idea where it's going - or if it's really going anywhere! - but it was fun to write. And that's what the writing is really all about.

writing, a reckless magick

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