Entangled by Midsummer has been released! It’s currently live on Amazon and Kobo, and will be up on the rest of the sales channels within another day or two, it has a page on Goodreads, and it should show up on my BookBub profile soon. It actually went live on December 21st, so while Amazon is showing it as published on the 20th, I didn’t submit the files until the 21st. 🙂 Print will be available soon—I’m trying a new approach there that will take a little more time, but I got impatient and decided I’d just publish the ebook since it was ready to go.

As often happens to me, this book began as a short story assignment (ha!) in a writing workshop. After much fretting, procrastinating, and chocolate, I finished the book in 2016, sent it to my editor, got her initial comments…and then did absolutely nothing with it for three years. The delay was partly because I’d started putting together short story collections (initially ebook bundles, then anthologies), and as I only had so much time, something had to go by the wayside. But it was also because novels are scary. Not only are they quite a bit longer than short stories, they take a lot more time and energy. Plus if you write a short story that’s good but not great, it’s just one of a bunch of stories you’ve written—whereas if you’ve only written one novel, your second novel is going to stand out a little more to potential readers, so you want it to be the best book possible. This all apparently requires a lot of fretting and procrastination, and I certainly did plenty of both with this book. 🙂

So in the summer I finally buckled down, got back to work, and finished the book! It was originally released in November as an exclusive title in a bundle of books on StoryBundle, so I couldn’t publish it anywhere else until that bundle ended. DeAnna Knippling, my friend and co-conspirator on many things (as well as my super awesome editor) interviewed me about my novel for that bundle. The fabulous Adriel Wiggins did continuity editing on this book—among other things, she caught a few eye color changes, as well as a few time inconsistencies since I made a few changes to the timeline. Thanks, Adriel!

The one complication with this novel that I did not expect is that my writing skills improved quite a bit over the past few years, and since I’d set this manuscript aside for three years, I had to do a lot of work to tidy up a few spots. That took more work than I’d anticipated, but it was also really neat to see that I’m a better writer now than even just a few years ago. I’m also a lot more focused, so while I do still procrastinate, I don’t do so nearly as much as I used to. I’ve learned that even though sometimes writing a story (or a novel!) feels hard, I will get to the end.

It’s good that I’ve learned this lesson, because I’m taking the last two weeks of the year off from my day job, and have set a goal of finishing the first draft of a brand new novel. 🙂