What's Next...

Now that Breaking Lacy is officially out of my hands and out into the world now, I'm feeling rather helpless and restless at the moment. I put forth my absolute very best effort. It is largely in the hands of Fate now. Yes, I know I still need to be present with my marketing and networking, but that will never stop. The story is out there. That part of the work is done and there's not much left to do but wring my hands and wait for the actual release for sale. 

I know I did some things wrong, like not lining up ARC readers for early reviews, and not investing in certain ads and/or promos on this site or that. I know I will probably regret that, but the budget for those things just wasn't there, and at this point it really is too late anyway. All I can do is hope that the people who have bought it so far will actually leave reviews when and if they finish reading. And that is out of my hands too. 

So, to distract myself from worry over whether this will be an epic fail in terms of time and money wasted, I'm going to get started on the next one.

Diary of a Ghost is a YA Paranormal Romance that I started in late 2010, and finished in 2012. Here is a short blurb:

For perpetual eighteen-year-old Cordelia Baxter, there are worse things than being dead: Falling in love with someone who is alive.

Cordelia has been in spiritual limbo since the night she was savagely murdered twenty years ago. Her parents moved out and left the house abandoned after her funeral, and for the past two decades the ghost of Cordelia has become the stuff of local legend. Everything changes when a new family buys the house and Julian Cahill moves into the room where she died. When an incident with a Ouija board renders Cordelia visible to Julian, despite their inability to touch, a strange and unlikely romance blooms.

Amid the backdrop of Julian’s suspicious sister, who aims to have Cordelia exorcised, and Julian’s dangerous amateur pursuits to solve a twenty-year-old murder, Cordelia must quickly learn how to live with the living before all their lives are ruined.

It went through a few rounds of revising and editing and beta readers before I entered it and placed in the Quarter-finals of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards contest. Over the course of 2013, I entered it in various pitch contests and had the manuscript requested by a number of agents. A few of them said they really loved the idea and the characters, and the writing itself was good, but the plot needed to be beefed up a bit more, so I took a hiatus to figure out how I wanted to go about doing all that. And now, I think I have. 

There are so many things I love about this story and can't wait to share, but I think I'm going to pace myself and save some of it for my next post. To give you a hint of where the idea came from, I'll leave you with this (primarily the cover art, but also the song too):