I accidentally wrote a book.

I started a novella on January 1. It was gonna be a quick & dirty little retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and it was gonna be 25-30K and written in a week, and I was gonna slap a cheapie cover on it and fling it up onto the interwebs in a Surprise Novella Drop!

When, at the end of a week’s writing and 23.5 thousand words, I had only just gotten to the Beast, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a novella, and that in fact it had gotten entirely out of hand and maybe it would be worth getting my magnificent cover artist, Tara O’Shea (Fringe-Element.net) to do a proper cover.

At the end of TWO weeks, it was 60,000 words long, a proper (if short) novel, and *finished*.

I sent the dreadfully rough draft off to some beta readers last night and by this morning was convinced I had made the worst mistake in the world, giving it to ANYBODY in that format. But then I had email from one of them, who’d made the mistake of checking her email after midnight when she’d gotten home from an event, and stayed up all night reading it. She said, “It is utterly charming and completely engrossing and very difficult to put down,” and that made me feel better. :)

I’m giving it a week to rest while a few other betas have a go at it, and then it’s going to go through the fastest revision process known to me, and then I’m gonna start the year off with a bang:

ROSES IN AMBER drops on or about February 1!