Whilst I was being celebratory about 50 published books, one of my friends asked how many words that was, anyway. Anybody wanna take a guess? (You can put it in the comments BEFORE you finish reading this post. I’ll put some spoiler space in, or something. :)) The thing is, I used to have a pretty good idea, actually. I’d kinda kept track up through the end of the publication of the Walker Papers, but that was…a while ago now. So I had to go add it up. And I…
Today is the release day for DEATH BY IRISH WHISKEY! Do you know what’s special about this book? (Go on, guess, I’ll wait.) (No, I won’t, never mind, I’m impatient.) It is my FIFTIETH PUBLISHED NOVEL. FIFTY. PUBLISHED. NOVELS. That’s a lot! A LOT a lot! One of the two items I remember on my bucket list* that I wrote when I was about 17 was “have 50 books published by the time I’m 50.” I admit that in that scenario, I was thinking of book #50 coming out before…
There was a discussion going on over on Bluesky about dealing with edit letters, and this truth came up: “Editors aren’t always right about the solutions, but they’re nearly always right about the problems.” That thread went on to discuss how the person quoting it, who happens to be KJ Charles whose books I read all of last year and who is also an editor, approaches edit letters; her approach involves suggesting ideas to fix the problems, because it opens the writer’s mind to the possiblity that the book could…
Not very much, and not going to stick, but very pretty in the moment!
The difference between the blog (this) and the newsletter (over here, and you should sign up for it if you haven’t bc…bc I said so… o.o): The blog is just that. It’s whatever’s on my mind today (or possibly last week, depending on whether I’ve scheduled a post ahead of time or not). Daily life, nothing necessarily news-oriented. It has movie and book reviews which, despite the name ‘picoreview’ for movies, can go on at some length, and it has me flailing about stuff, and, you know, good stuff like…