Spooky Season Is Upon Us! 🎃

Greetings and Salutations this Season of the Witch 🧙‍♀️

First up in today’s newsletter, please take a moment to vote for That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story for Best Sapphic Rivals-to-Lovers story

It’s the 29^th book down on the poll (to make it easier to find.) There are only four days left of polling, so please just take a moment right now to click – you don’t have to sign up for anything, just vote and done – and thank you! 🥰

Diving into Spooky Season 👻

You may remember that last newsletter, I was whining that I didn’t book as many events as I’d hoped for the Spooky Season. Well, one of the events I had given up on came through! (Sadly, doing a reading at my local library fell through—I’m really sad about that one, as I have not yet done a reading at a library and I feel like I’ve not really made it as an author until that happy moment in my life occurs.)

The first event of the season is coming up on Saturday September 6^th . That’s the Dark Forest Oddities Expo, and it’s a BIG ONE.

There are over fifty vendors, food and a bar serving themed drinks, a horror themed burlesque show and drag performance, a cosplay contest, and more!

It will be 11am to 6pm at the Boston Marriot Peabody, 8A Centennial Drive, Peabody, MA – Only $10 to get in (tickets available at the door) and FREE parking! More info here.

Eclipse Costumes and I will be vending side-by-side, so come hang out with us, and check out the pirate corsets that will be available in honor of That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story! We will also have a PRIZE WHEEL with some fantastic Halloween-themed prizes!

If you can’t make it to this event, then on Sept 20th I will be vending at Salem Vampire Market!

I would love to give you more information on its hours and such, but they have not been published yet. So just mark it on your calendars and I (hopefully!) will have all the information for you in the next newsletter!

The next event will be the Spooky Geek Faire at Pandemonium Books & Games, on Sunday October 19th. More about that event in the next newsletter as well!

Update on Book IV: Blood Depths ⚓

There is an exciting important character coming up in this book (as well as seeing lots of old friends again, including Sadie the Goat and Gallus Mag!) and I had found a sensitivity reader to help ensure that I got this character right.

However, after sending the first half of payment, the company ceased communicating with me (everyone steer clear of Salt and Sage Books!) and while I have done what is needed to get my money back, I am desperately lacking a Somali-American female sensitivity reader.

When I wrote about my issues with getting the permissions to use the lyrics to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in a previous email, one of you amazing readers stepped up and helped (and again thank you to that fantastic friend!) so I am just putting it out in this newsletter, in case by some incredible coincidence, one of you knows just the right woman for the job. Just hit reply to this newsletter if you do, or have any other information that might be useful—and thank you, all of you, for being the best readers an author could hope for. I know I say it a lot, but I really do cherish you and your support means the world to me 🥰

Anyways, in the absence of that sensitivity reader, I have stopped writing for a bit to go back and do more research so that I have an even deeper understanding of this character, and hopefully, by the time I do find my sensitivity reader, I’ll have done such a good job of writing this character, and there won’t be too many cultural fuck-ups to catch.

So, yes, it’s been another slowdown, which delights neither you nor I. But I have only one more book to basically devour whole before I feel ready to rework what I’ve already written (and honestly, it’s mostly adding some details, and doing a little rewriting, but that part won’t take very long. The stuff I’ve learned is mixing with my existing ideas for the character and it’s all becoming clear and actionable in my mind—which is a relief, I won’t lie 😂 )

This story is definitely not rolling out in linear order anymore, but then, Blood Ex Libris was massively reworked during the years I was trying to place it with an agent or publisher, and Blood Demands had that situation where Orélie the Self-Anointed basically inserted himself into the book against my objections, so really only Blood Eternal has ever been a particularly linearly-written book, and it’s basically a frame story for the origin of the am’r, so I’m not even sure it counts 🙄😁

Excuse this shorter newsletter, my dears. I am overwhelmed with “Spooky Season” prep. The coming few newsletters are going to be as stuffed with goodies as you could hope for, but for today, I’m signing off. As always, be good or be good at it!😘

💭 I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨

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