Progress!

Hi All!

I've been making some fabulous progress on my manuscript. I'm over halfway done, and over 100k words at this point! I'm also at the most exciting (for me) part of the book. I can't wait to get into the chemistry brewing between my leads! The story has been coming so quickly, my biggest challenge remains time. Finding time to get all my thoughts down. I write on my iphone (which yes, people usually look at me like I'm nuts when I say that!) but it's truly the easiest way for me. Jenna Wolfhart, one of my favorite authors who wrote the fabulous The Mist King series, recommended to me the Scrivener app, and it's been a complete lifesaver! It allows me to write while on break at work on when walking around. It gives me so much more opportunity to fit in a paragraph here or there.

Yet, I still don't have as much time to write as I'd like. I work 40 hours a week plus I have my bookstagram to maintain. That requires me to read and review a certain number of books, so I have to balance between reading and writing when I'm not working. And technically, all of it is work! Even if I don't get paid for anything outside my actual job. haha! At least, not yet. I hold out hope for this series. It would be a dream come true to be a full time author one day. But that day is currently far away. 

So for now, I'm focusing on finishing up this manuscript! I expect to be done within the month. Then I'm going to go back and reread it. I need to make sure everything flows how I want and makes sense. Find any obvious typos. Change any scenes that may not fit how I wanted. And punch up my prose. Sometimes, I get too focused on descriptions or dialogue, moving the scene and plot along, or character moments I need to hit. So, I'll go back and adjust as needed. 

From there, I'll be sending it off to my editor. I have a few right now I'm looking at, one in particular I know I'll have doing a beta read first. Developmental and line edits will come after. I'm saving up to pay for it, so I'll need a bit of time between most likely. I'm also needing to save up for the book cover. I found a great place that will do the book cover for ebook, physical, and audio, plus provide social media images and merchandise. They're cheaper than the original book cover designer I was looking at, so I'm hoping they can do a similar style for less money! 

I definitely didn't realize how expensive it would be to self publish! But I don't regret it at all It's going to be worth every penny once I have a book published and out in the world! I love this story and these characters. I wish I had more time to immerse myself in it and write to my hearts content!

I'll also let you guys in on a little secret...the map of Celesterra, the continent The Star Queen Chronciles takes place on, is almost done! Wooohoo!! I can't wait to share this with you guys. We put a lot of detail into the map. One of the things that most bothered me about some stories I've read is that the kingdoms have like, 1 city. It's a whole ass kingdom! Where do your people live?! So, I made sure there were multiple cities in each kingdom. In fact, as I developed this world according to the concept of balance, there are the same number of cities in each. Everything must be in balance here. So each kingdom has a capital city, plus 6 more cities! Fully developed cities with rulers of their own that are part of the larger courts. Full families of kings and queens. I don't even know if everyone I've put together will come up, but they're there nonetheless!