Book Review: Secret Storm by Amelia James

Purchase Secret Storm for $2.99 here.

Sara and Jack have a strong attraction, but for years they’ve never found each other at the right time. Finally they are both single—but secrets in Jack’s past may ruin their love before it can bloom.

I started reading this novel on Saturday and finished it on Sunday. It was an entertaining read. As an erotic romance, Secret Storm certainly delivers. It’s a sexy story, and the descriptions of sex are well done.

I do have some concerns:

From the perspective of someone who has worked with survivors of domestic violence, Jack’s behavior threw up some red flags—I think the author ultimately handled it so that I was not left feeling uncomfortable, but it’s worth mentioning.

I understand the need to draw out the satisfaction of finding out what Jack’s secret is, but I think this became artificial after a while—more external obstacles would have helped, although when he finally decides to tell Sara, an external obstacle does come up, and it seems too much by then. Also, the scene from his past is awkward—better choreography would have justified the events in a more believable way.

However, these are small parts of the story and overall I enjoyed this novel a lot. I found the characters likable and I wanted to see them overcome their challenges. The recurring imagery of storms added a poetry that I appreciated.

I would recommend this novel to any mature reader who enjoys erotic romance.

Weekly Update on the ePub journey

No new sales, unless you count one free download to a reviewer. But the good news is, I'm starting to get the books reviewed, and the reviews are positive! The very latest was 5 stars (well, "ratties" by this blogger's system) for The River and the Roses. She said she couldn't put it down! Yay! That sort of thing is SO GOOD to hear, because I do get discouraged. I worry that I have an unrealistic sense of how good my writing is. I don't think it's the best ever, you understand--but I do think it's just as good and sometimes better than a lot of what's already bestselling. But it's like that verse in Desiderata says,

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Not to mention the Fate Factor, as Nathan Bradsford recently put it. How much luck do I need to make this writing-as-my-day-job thing happen? Quite a bit, I suppose. Oh, for a blog post that literally made me laugh until tears streamed down my face, on the topic of whether you're ready to be a professional writer, go here.

But anyway, marketing helps. And I haven't really been doing a ton of that lately--not for a little over a week, other than to tweet links to my recent reviews. I'm holding back, because I figure I need to accumulate more followers... but I do think I'll be making some announcements about the sequel to River coming out: The Fire and the Veil. You, my beautiful blog readers, are the first to know. The question is, when? I need to get it beta read and to put it through its paces on my writing forum. This whole process will probably take a minimum of two months. So I think announcements about it probably need to wait until the launch date is a good deal closer.

A Reminder: to myself and others

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

by Langston Hughes

Book Review: Dorothea's Song, by Ron Vitale

Purchase Dorothea’s Song for $3.99 on Amazon, here.

Some weeks ago I sent out a tweet asking if anyone wanted their book reviewed, as a way of generating blog material. One person who responded was Ron Vitale, and he agreed to read and review Broken Ones in exchange.

He sent me Dorothea’s Song, and I had no idea what I was getting. I had just bought a Kindle, so this was my very first Kindlebook. I hoped it wouldn’t disappoint—and it didn’t! Right away, Dorothea’s Song captured my attention, so much so that I abandoned the novel I had been reading (a traditionally published novel so full of “to be” verbs and bad phrasing, incidentally, that it made my hair stand on end—and people insist that epublishing means the demise of quality—please).

Anyway, Dorothea’s Song struck me immediately because not only was it cleanly formatted and edited, but because it combined two very different stories. The premise of Dorothea’s Song is that a 16 year old student at a private school is writing a fantasy adventure story for his French class—translating portions of the story into French for the assignment. He has a wonderful French teacher, who he cares for, and he writes about his main character, Dorothea, as a tribute to her. The majority of the novel is the fantasy story, but the young man’s story interrupts every so often. I found both stories to be compelling, and it struck me that the voice of the young man was very authentic. I teach high school English, and it sounded very much like what a sensitive, articulate student might write. I found out after finishing the novel that Ron actually wrote it as a teenager—so my feeling was confirmed!

The choice to include the young man’s voice was a brilliant move, because it gave me a reason to forgive the flaws in the writing. Some phrasing is awkward and the dialogue is fairly wooden. But keeping in mind that this is meant to be a story written by a sixteen-year-old, I found it didn’t bother me. I think it wouldn’t bother the average reader anyway, even without the teen protagonist.

My only complaint comes at the end of the narrator’s story. An interaction with the teacher left me feeling disappointed and I didn’t really understand what she said to him. I wish this could have been better resolved.

Overall, however, I enjoyed Dorothea’s Song. I recommend it to older teenagers and fans of YA fantasy.

Visit Ron's website, here.

Weekly Update on Sales (or lack thereof)

This week, I sold two books, and that was on Sunday. Since then, crickets have been chirping.

I have given this some thought, and here's my theory as to why.

1. I reformatted two of the books at the beginning of the week, and sent out a lot of tweets about that. So I figure, I probably lost some customers because they were concerned about my formatting, even though the point of the tweets was to let people know that an existing problem was fixed, and that I'd comp a new copy to anyone who had an old, flawed version.
2. I raised my prices on two books: the two full-length novels. They went from $0.99 to $2.99. Although Amazon is still discounting one of them to $0.99, at least last time I checked. I did this after doing some research on prices, and I think it's the right choice. And I expected sales to slow a little but then recover. At this point, sales are beyond slow and show no signs of recovering, so we'll see. Also, the price change doesn't explain the halt in sales of "Veronica in Paris," which remains at $0.99.
3. It's possible the pre-programmed tweets I sent out were in some way unappealing. I've been puzzling over this. I know a little bit about sales, and what little I know I've been applying to the tweets. For one thing, don't ask a rhetorical question, because a person's internal response may be "I don't care." As in, "Will Veronica find out who the murder is in time to save her friend?" My own response to such tag lines is often "Who cares?" so I don't want to make that mistake. And then if you do ask a question, make it one people will say yes to. So I had a couple of tweets going out with a question at the beginning, "Got a Kindle?" figuring some people would say yes. The next thing I asked was, "Like stories about ghosts, psychics, and strong women?" figuring that after the first yes they'd be more inclined to say yes again and click the associated link. However, that seems not to be the case. So I want to go back to my drawing board and figure out a different formula for my book tweets. I had a couple of others going out with just a summary tag, like "Veronica must accept her psychic ability or someone she loves will be the next to die." Those were generally more successful, if you believe my sales of the first two weeks were in any way correlated to them, and I think they were. But they didn't work this week. So maybe people got bored of them.
4. It's possible that I've reached all the potential buyers I can within the first two weeks, among the population of followers I had on Twitter and Facebook. I've gotten new ones, but I have decided to wait at least a few days before putting out any more advertising. I figure if my tweets were in any way annoying, I'd better give people a break before starting up again.

Anyway, so this has been discouraging, but of course I'm not giving up. I'm focusing on the fact that 24 people have bought the books and presumably are reading and enjoying them. That's pretty cool. Also, on other blogs chronicling eBook sales, it seems typical to have bad weeks. I've got all three books out to reviewers, so I'm hoping those reviews will be good, and that once they are posted on Amazon and the rest, I'll see a return to regular sales. I've been getting mixed messages about the value of tagging, and in any case I can't seem to convince anyone to tag my books, so I'm not going to obsess about that. I may join the Independent Author Network, but they do charge a fee ($19.95), so I'm not sure yet. I probably will.

If you have any ideas for me about marketing, please let me know! Have you had to deal with any writing setbacks this week?

Why losing All My Children and One Life makes me a sad panda

Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Really, Sophia? Soaps?" Well, I love soaps. I'll proudly admit it. Here's why.

1. I was raised on them. My mother used to have them on while she painted. I'd watch them sometimes with her.
2. When I moved to Paris as a teenager, the soap Santa Barbara had made it across the Atlantic and was one of the few American tv shows. I loved it, and I discovered one of my favorite actors on it: Robin Wright. Oh, also, A. Martinez.
3. I love the way soaps work. I love their internal logic (if a character gets pregnant, the paternity WILL be in question at some point, regardless of any other consideration, and there's an 85% chance the baby born will be separated from its rightful--not necessarily biological--parents within an hour of its birth--this goes up 1% with each passing hour) and their consistent morality. I'm not saying they're highly moral, just that their morality is consistent. You have characters you can always count on to be good, characters you can always count on to be evil, and characters who move in a more gray area--but there are clear cues as to which hat they are wearing in any given storyline.
4. I love the extraordinary weirdness they get away with. Plastic surgery: not only is it possible to completely pass for someone else, but all the people who have known and loved the original will be fooled, even after the imposter makes monstrously huge mistakes. And don't get me started on the surprise family relations--only in Victorian classics do people turn out to be related coincidentally as often. And some soaps took this to an extreme. Ever heard of Passions? They had storylines with animated dolls, trips to hell, and witches.
5. I love that they are on every day of the week and are seemingly endless. It's consistent and reassuring. So I've had a crap day at work? I can turn on my soap and watch the characters make horrible decisions with their lives and feel like, yes, I, at least, am not about to sleep with my sister's new boyfriend because we got stuck in an abandoned mine shaft together.
6. I love that they take a topic and try to educate their audience with it--to me, watching a soap is a way of gauging what people are thinking about things going on in the world. Which brings me to the next reason:
7. Soaps can be cutting edge. No, seriously. They can! Anyone who is interested in how gays are represented in the media has probably heard of All My Children. They had the first lesbian kiss on daytime television. They also had a whole storyline around a transgendered character. One Life to Live had a storyline about a male gay couple struggling to adopt a child. This is very cool stuff, people, and it's reaching out into the homes of average Americans. An exciting new show about food is not going to do that.

So I am sad to see AMC and OLTL go. I realize there's no sense in fighting it--people who fight the inevitable baffle me. But what I'm going to hope is that ABC will lose lots and lots of money with this decision. And when, as a result, they realize what a stupid thing they've done, they'll either bring back these two shows or start new ones. Because while soaps may rightfully be known as low brow, they are also immensely valuable.

Do you agree? Or do you think of soaps as trash, and think, "Good riddance"?

fixing the formatting

So I finally got to the bottom (more or less) of the weird formatting problem. As far as I know, it only turned up in Broken Ones (although I ended up reformatting The River and the Roses, just to be safe). Some em-dashes, for no apparent reason, were different from the rest, and as such, unreadable to most ereaders. They would instead show up as 3/4 signs. Just figuring that out took me a while. Then fixing it was a real pain, because I'd copy the bad em-dash and try to do a Find/Replace, only to have Word inform me that there were no such symbols to be found in the document. And I'd be staring at a page with four of them. Argh.

So for the benefit of those who are reading and thinking, how do I avoid this happening to me? I'm going to tell you the best way I've worked out to format a clean copy, free of bizarro em-dashes or other glitches.

First off, read the Smashwords Guide on how to get rid of things like text boxes and inconsistent indents--I never do these even in first drafts so they are not a problem for me. And let me say, if you use tab to indent your paragraphs, it's time to break that habit. The Smashwords Guide gives excellent instructions on the proper way to indent, and I won't go into that here.

The following instructions are based on Guido Henkel's guide to formatting, although I have made several alterations to deal with my em-dash issue and also some other problems I ran into with it. Also, his guide is long and can be intimidating to get through, although I recommend reading it if you want a more thorough explanation of why you're doing each step than you're going to get here.

Download JEdit and Calibre. These are both free programs and you'll need them to make your clean, glitch-free formatted ebook. There are other similar programs out there--if you're confident using them, do so. I know virtually nothing about them and can't adapt my instructions--I can only tell you how I did my formatting, and I used those two programs.

Before you start these steps, go into your word processing document and make sure you have all curly quotation marks. You may choose to do Find/Replace on each type, to be sure: there are “double” quotation marks and ‘single’ quotation marks. Make sure all of these are curly. You also need to Find/Replace all typed out ellipses to a symbol representing ellipses. That is, you probably have three periods in a row, like this: ... but what you need is a single ellipses symbol, like this …  . They look pretty much the same, right? But if you use the arrow keys to go over them, in the first instance you have three separate characters, and in the second, just one. You can copy and paste from this page into your Find/Replace boxes, if you like.

Okay, now that those preliminary steps are out of the way, we're ready for the process that will kill glitches in your formatting. Take a deep breath. There's some code coming up, and it can look scary. It's okay, though--you're just copying and pasting, and finding and replacing. You can do this.

Steps to Clean Formatting

In your Word doc:

1. Find/Replace: In Find box, type Ctr + i and in Replace box, put <i>^&</i>  . Replace all. (This preserves any italics you've got in your document for later--if you don't do this step, you'll lose all italic formatting.)
2. Ctr + A   Ctr + C   (Selects your whole document and copies it.)

3. Open Notepad (NOT WordPad), then Ctr + P  (Pastes your whole document in Notepad, killing all weird hidden Word formatting that is destined to mess you up later. Also known as the "Nuclear Option" in the Smashwords Guide.)

Now working in Notepad.

4. Find/Replace all em-dashes with --

Select an em-dash from your document and copy it, paste it in the Find box, then manually type the two hyphens in the Replace box. These will be replaced with real em-dashes later in JEdit, in such a way as to prevent weird 3/4 characters and the like from turning up. You might want to scroll through your document and make sure you don't spot any lingering em-dashes; but chances are, you got them. Also, while you're scrolling, look for empty box characters--just little squares. These are nasty symbols that cause glitches. If you find one, highlight it and copy it. Determine what it was supposed to be (in my case, an em-dash), and do a Find pasting in the box, Replace for what it was supposed to be.
5. Ctr + A    Ctr + C     Open JEdit, then   Ctr + P

Now working in JEdit.

6. F/R    ^(.+)$   with   <p>$1</p>    (This will put <p> and </p> symbols around each line)
7. F/R   …   with   &hellip;   (Copy that code from this page, including the semicolon.  DO NOT do this until you have replaced all three-dot ellipses with a single ellipses symbol--otherwise very weird stuff happens.)
8. F/R   --    with   &mdash; 
9. F/R  curly right  “  with  &ldquo;  and left  ”  with &rdquo;
10. F/R curly right  ‘  and left  ’  single quotes with  &lsquo;  and  &rsquo;

11. Save with an .html file extension. You will have to manually type .html after the file name.

12. Copy and paste the following at the top of the file, before any text:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <head>
    <style type="text/css">
      html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0em; }
           p
{
  text-indent: 1.5em;
  margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}

p.chapter
{
  text-indent: 0.1em;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 1.5em; 
  page-break-before: always;
  margin-top: 5em;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
}

p.centered
{
 text-indent: 0em;
 font-weight: bold;
 font-size: 1.2em;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
 text-align: center;
}
span.centered
{
  text-indent: 0em;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  font-weight: bold;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
}
  </style>
  </head>
  <body>

13. Put </body> at the end, after all text.
14. F/R  <p>Chapter    with    <p class="chapter">Chapter    (Unless you have not named your chapters, "Chapter 1" etc.--in that case you probably can't use Find/Replace and will have to go through and manually replace the <p> in front of your chapter heading with <p class="chapter"> . <p class="chapter"> still should have the word chapter in it, even if you don't use the word in your chapter headings--in the code, it refers to a style.)
15. Put <p class="chapter"> in place of <p> in front of any chapter-like heading. You may want to do this for About the Author, for instance. Note that this heading style is not centered, though, so it's probably not the best choice for your title page.
16. F/R <p>section break symbols</p> with <p class="centered"><span class="centered">section break symbols</span></p>   (Except replace the phrase "section break symbols" with whatever you use as section break symbols, such as *** or ~~~, so it would look like <p>***</p> and <p class="centered"><span class="centered">***</p></span>)

Note that you must have both the p class="centered" and the span class="center" and corresponding closing code </p> and </span> to properly center text. Guido explains this if you want to know why.
17. Through your computer's start menu, open Documents and double-click the .html document you're working on to check how it looks as a webpage. It will automatically open as a new tab on the web, also long as your browser is capable of making tabs.
18. Apply heading formatting wherever else it needs to go, like the title page.

I've created additional p class="centered" + span class="centered" formats with different names (eg. p class="centeredsmall" + span class="centeredsmall") in order to have some additional options for centered text in various sizes, etc. Copy the original ones, paste after the originals, and change the names. You must make sure both the p style and the span style have identical codes and don't contradict each other. To mess with sizes, simply alter the number by font-size, for instance. I like to mess around with this, saving and then reloading the webpage that corresponds to the file, to see how it looks.

Once you're satisfied with all of that, you have your basic .html document. You can use this to upload to Amazon. ALWAYS look at the preview they offer, and be sure you like what you see.

In order to use this document on Smashwords and B&N:

Smashwords

Highlight the entire webpage of your document and copy it (Ctr + C). Paste that into a Word document. Make sure your Word document doesn't have any weird spacing or other default formatting that will annoy Smashwords. Use their guide if you aren't sure.
Save in .doc format. That's what you upload to Smashwords.

B&N

This is why you need Calibre.

1. Open Calibre.

There is a row of buttons at the top--we'll be using several of these.

2. Open your .html document in Calibre by clicking "Add Books."

3. Select your .html document in the book list, and click on "Edit Metadata."

Fill in the information (Title, Author, ISBN if you have one, etc.) and upload your cover.

4. Making sure your book is still selected, click on "Convert Books."

In the upper right hand corner, there's a drop down menu of format options.

You can convert to MOBI here if you want, and upload that to Amazon instead of the .html, and it will be faster--also, if Amazon throws up an error when you try to upload your .html, doing this can fix that.

For B&N, convert to EPUB.

5. Click on "Save to Disk" and select a folder in your documents you'll have no trouble finding later. Calibre will create a new folder within the one selected, most likely titled after your author name. Your book document is in there.

6. On B&N when you upload your book, browse into that author folder and choose the EPUB file of your book, and upload that.

Their preview will even show your cover, as long as you chose one when you were doing metadata. It's very cool.

ALWAYS CHECK THE PREVIEW.

You're done. I'll let you know if I run into any more problems, but it's my conviction that going through these steps will give you a properly formatted, glitch-free eBook.

If you have more complicated formatting, such as images to include, PLEASE read Guido Henkel's guide. I in no way have his expertise--I'm merely posting what I figured out after hours of trial and error, AND with his help. I emailed him twice with questions, which he graciously answered. So I owe almost all my formatting to him, and the rest to Smashwords.

Weekly eBook Sales Update.

Things are moving along!

The only fly in the ointment? Two readers have reported some formatting issues in two different Kindlebooks. I suspect it's the em-dashes, which some ereaders don't translate correctly. I am, at the moment, pretty stumped about how to fix this. The two readers both got their books from Smashwords (right Kathryn?) so I have no way of uploading the html version Guido Henkel teaches you how to make which is the only one that would address this, as far as I know. Smashwords only takes .doc files. So mostly at this point I'm crossing my fingers that the formatting won't be bad on most ereaders. On my laptop, using Amazon's Kindle for PC app, I am unable to reproduce the formatting bug. And I'm also unable to bring it up on my actual Kindle.

Another possibility would be to find/replace all my em-dashes and make them into "--" instead. I'm reluctant to do this without more of a sense of how pervasive the problem is, though. The "--" just doesn't look as professional to me. It's probably just me being anal. What do you all think?

Anyway, to the numbers!

Smashwords, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 5
Veronica in Paris = 2
The River and the Roses = 4

Amazon, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 4
Veronica in Paris = 4
The River and the Roses = 2

B&N, total sales by title:*
Broken Ones = 0
Veronica in Paris = 1
The River and the Roses = 0

*Keeping in mind that B&N has a reputation for being slow to report sales.

Total sales of all titles, just this last week: 14

Total sales since the beginning: 22

My sales have almost doubled since the first week. This is very encouraging! I've been submitting my books for bloggers to review. I'm hoping once the books get reviewed, they'll really start selling.

By the way, if you have a minute, something you can do for me is go to the sites of each book and select some of the tags associated with each. For instance, The River and the Roses has the tags: psychic, ghost, mystery, etc. The more times people click on these tags (signifying that they agree with them) the higher up in certain lists the books go.

For Amazon, US, go here. That should bring up my three ebooks. Select one and scroll down the page until you get to the tags. Click on a few of those. That simple!

For Amazon, UK, go here.

For B&N, go here. Edited to add: I can't seem to find tags on B&N--did you? I think maybe they don't do them. Please let me know--sometimes I don't see the same stuff because I published the book.

Smashwords doesn't do tags the same way.

Anyway, THANK YOU whether you have a chance to do that or not--just that fact that you are here, reading this blog, shows me that you are supporting me.

Please comment and let me know how your own pursuits are going!

the aftermath of my week long writing binge...?

I have these ambitions.

I decided that spring break would be filled to the brim with writing, editing, and publishing... and that happened. I published three books (although I'm going to have to upload a new copy of the third, because I rushed it and then realized I needed to still fix a few things). I finished the first draft of the WiP. I came up with a new story idea. I pretty much drove myself nonstop for ten days (we had a snow day added to the break). It was wildly productive.

And now I'm tired.

I don't regret it. At all. But there's a part of me that's really dissatified with the fact that I can't keep that pace up ALL. THE. TIME.

I decided to make April my personal NaNoWriMo. I planned to come home every day after work and write, like I did in November. That hasn't really happened. Yesterday I came home and took a nap on the couch. Today the hubby took me out to eat, and I'm dreaming of just going to bed right now--and it's 7:30pm.

And I know I'm genuinely tired, because even though I have that whip-cracking inner voice going off about it, it's a very faint voice, and the rest of me can't muster up any energy to care.

I've done the rewrites on the third book. I could take it down from the sites and put the new version up right now. It probably wouldn't take me more than fifteen minutes to do. And then, I could find all the reviewer-blogs I've been collecting and start submitting my books to them like I've been intending. This would be a good marketing step. But it's probably not going to happen tonight.

Tomorrow, with any luck, I will make it home earlier from work, and I'll have time for a nap if I need it, and then I'll find the energy to do the new uploads and write some more for ApriNoWriMo.

I think, actually, with ApriNoWriMo, two things are slowing me down. 1) Definitely my fatigue. 2) The story idea. It's not a bad story idea, but it's a new one, totally outside my Veronica series, and as such, I'm not bought in to it yet. I takes me a while to get bought in, which is why I like the NaNo format--I'm in such a rush to get words down by the deadline that by the time the month is over, I've bought in at some point without even noticing. So what I may need to do is come up with Veronica Barry: book 3. One of the lovely things about writing VB: book 2 was that I slipped right in--no initial struggle to form an attachment. That was way cool. So maybe I don't need a break from it, as I had decided when I finished the first draft of book 2 during spring break. Maybe I need a little breather and then to dive right back into Veronica's story...

Something to ponder.

My question to you is, how do you deal with fatigue? Do you ever push yourself very hard and then pay the consequences? How do you handle that, if you do, or avoid that, if you don't? Do you write in series? If so, do you take breaks between each book to write something else, or remain immersed in your series' world?

quick numbers update

For those who are interested in my experience so far with epublishing, here's the update for week 1.

Sales by title:
Broken Ones
Smashwords 2, Amazon 2, B&N 0*
Veronica in Paris
Smashwords 2, Amazon 2, B&N 0*

Total sales this week: 8

*I've read that B&N can take a while to report sales, so there may be some that I don't know about.

So... eight! Several bought by people I don't know. In fact, the first purchase was by someone on twitter. SO. COOL. I about died and became one of my own ghosts, people. And every time I check my numbers and one's been added, it's like, JOY!

Even if my books never take off, this experience has been worth it. It's so worth it to know that people out there are reading my books. And from what one person has told me in direct twitter messages--enjoying them! And it's not even the same twitter person. Ha.

This week has been amazingly productive. It was spring break, and I used just about every waking moment (minus showers, meals, and dog walks. Oh and sleep. But not a lot of that--I'm too manic at the moment)doing something writing-related. Here's what I did:

• Finished the WiP, The Fire and the Veil.
• Finished the RiP, The River and the Roses.
• Created 3 finished covers and started collecting possible images for The Fire and the Veil.
• Published 3 ebooks, Broken Ones, Veronica in Paris, and The River and the Roses.

And I also did a bit of critiquing. And I intend, now, to do some more of that. I've gotten so much help from fellow writers. It would be gratifying to give back a little!

And I've got some ideas percolating... short stories? Novellas? Novels? All I know is I'm going to try to do ApriNoWriMo. So whatever happens happens.

What about you? What successes have you had recently? What goals do you have for April?