Breaking News!!

headerI’ve been sitting on this news for a couple of weeks, so I’m SUPER EXCITED to finally get it off my chest!

You all know how I am – not much for keeping interesting news to myself. Ask me to keep a secret and I’ll carry it to my grave. But fun, exciting news like this, that I just have to hold onto until a Specific Day? Gah!

So, what? You haven’t skimmed ahead yet? You have. I know you have.

Okay, okay.

Fabulous Piece of News #1

The amazing Agent Pam has announced today that she and Laurie McLean have left Larsen-Pomada and are forming their own agency!!

FOREWORD LITERARY

When Pam called a couple of weeks ago to tell me their plan, I didn’t hesitate to tell her I would go with her. I have great faith in Pam and Laurie’s abilities and ambitions. They have exciting plans and I’m thrilled to be part of them. I feel so lucky to have signed with Pam when I did and privileged to be part of this grand, new adventure.

Also, now that the agency-thing has been settled and is public and all….

Fabulous Piece of News #2

With Pam’s assistance, I’ve agreed to a two-book deal with Carina Press for the next Covenant of Thorns books!!! Yes, all you Rogue fans – this means two more books to round out the trilogy! Yay! Looks like Rogue’s Possession will come out around the beginning of October. I know, I know – it’s a long time from the first book. 🙁 BUT, the plus side is that book 3 should come out about six months after that! Whee!!!

All very exciting, isn’t it?

I think so, too.

Upping the Wordcount and Keeping the Faith

2_27_13Jackson, in a post-breakfast stupor. Not that any of us can relate to this.

Regular readers know I’ve been plugging away on the Phantom e-Serial. I’ve got another month to finish it, which sounds like a lot that way, but when you realize that’s 31 days, it sounds much worse. Still, I have it in hand, I believe. I’ve been working fairly steadily at about 1,675 words/day. That puts me finishing around March 24 – with a week to spare for revising. Fortunately the CPs all took a look at the first half – while I took a week-long break and wrote a new Facets of Passion story for a Christmas anthology (I hope) – and they all liked it! They really liked it!! (Cue Sally Fields Oscar gif.)

For you math whizzes out there, that rate is, yes, around NaNoWriMo levels. A while back, I never thought I could steadily produce at that rate while working full time. Amazing how things change! Last month – ooh, on February 1, even! it’s like a recurring THEME – I posted my cumulative wordcount numbers. I’ve been tracking my weekly and monthly numbers lately, to better understand how I work.

March weekly wordcounts

Here’s the chart of my weekly wordcounts. The first and last “weeks” of February are a bit artificially low, as they were partial weeks. Still, that second to last week of February, I hit 20K, which might be a personal best. (I haven’t been tracking weekly counts long enough to be sure.) I got there via a vacation day and a holiday, plus a solid weekend of work, to write that new Facets of Passion story. I like how I can see my rate increase through the month, however. This week was down, due to dealing with family illness and travel. I was feeling kind of bad about that, until I saw my monthly stats.

March monthly wordcountsYes, I just made 50K for February, which I’ve only done once before. Plus, as the lovely Laura Bickle generously pointed out, it was a short month. It will be interesting to see what March and April bring. I predict March will be another high month and April will drop considerably, because I’ll be revising two novels in that month. Editing time makes for poor metrics – even if you count pages revised and you’re clipping along at 30/day, that looks kind of pitiful. I need a way to weight that. Hmmm…

Oh! And the other fun news is that a spin-off story from the upcoming fantasy trilogy (The Twelve Kingdoms) has been accepted to a sword and sorcery anthology! Former Word Whore James R. Tuck is editing. CP Marcella Burnard will have a story in there, too, so it should be loads of fun. Turns out they’ll do two volumes of the anthology. She and I, of course, wrote very female-centric stories (not usually the thing for sword and sorcery), so we’re curious to see if Tuck divides the volumes by male/female, which would be interesting. It should be out in June, so we’ll keep you apprised!