It’s hard to believe that 2013 is almost over! Every year for the past few years I’ve been honored to be included in the Band of Thebes queer book roundup where a bunch of queer authors get the chance to say what our favorite book of the last year was! This year my choice was Ragdoll House – click to see why and what books other queer authors selected! it’s really overwhelming for me to think about what an incredible 12 months I was so excited this week to see the 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards having been included in the Slate Queer Event year in review – I know that accepting the Berzon Emerging Writer Award was THE highlight of my queer year! I’ve been a little behind in my regular blog updates here, something I hope to get back into the habit of now that my writing schedule has calmed down a bit – yes writing schedule. This year in addition to my solid focus on getting the word out about Roving Pack and Leather Ever After (and of course Kicked Out still) I’ve been writing a LOT.
In the last few months I was working on preparing Roving Pack for publication the plot ideas for my next book, Lost Boi began to really solidify for me. Starting on January 1st I started writing with the intention of having a completed first draft by this New Years Eve. Much to my own excitement things fell into place more smoothly than I anticipated they would and By October I had a completed first draft. I made the decision to spend a month working on editing the draft not with the intention of going in and fixing
everything, but cleaning up some of the glairing issues with structure, pronoun and name inconsistency, and other basic readability issues with the draft. I spent the month of November doing that first round of touchups and then December 1st sent the book off to a close group of beta readers
is my favorite time of year, it’s the most sacred of reclaimed holidays for me, a time for recharging and recentering and so
mostly I’m taking the month of December off from novel writing concentrating on relaxing a little since this year has been so much writing, but also working on some shorter form pieces for anthologies – more exciting news about that coming soon, along with news about some other literary projects I have in the works! As you might have noticed, I’m not all that great at taking time off so it hasn’t *just * been Christmas trees and playing in the snow with my dogs. I’m also starting to really make some plans about Lost Boi’s future which included an exciting dinner meeting last week with the incredible illustrator Katie Diamond who did the cover art for Roving Pack, and will be not only be doing the same for Lost Boi, but will also be doing a series of illustrations that will appear within the novel! Here’s some quick doodles she did at the restaurant as I quickly walked her through all the main plot points in the book and we brainstormed about illustrations.
I’m so excited to be getting my beta reader’s feedback on this initial draft of Lost Boi and to spend next year getting myself back to work polishing and reworking this new novel!