November

I realised that apart from structural housekeeping on the website, I haven’t done a general update here… at all this year.

So. Here be an update!

It’s less than five months to Queen of Coin and Whispers being published! It’s currently available to preorder through two Irish book retailers: Eason and Dubray. (More preorder links to come, likely next month or early 2020.) Please consider preordering it: this shows there’s early demand, which helps with everything from print run numbers to QUEEN doing well enough that I can sell more novels in the future.

While I haven’t read as much this year as expected (I’ve been revising an adult novel to give to my agent, along with completing QUEEN’s edits and brainstorming another YA novel), I’ve read enough that I’m going to do a few 2019 round up posts, mostly in chronological order with a few special single title shout outs. One of the unintentional side benefits to having less reading time is that I’ve become much more selective about what I read. I now DNF a book within 50-100 pages because I simply no longer have the hours to give a book that I’m not enamoured with by this point.

Promo-wise, I was lucky enough to attend the 2019 CBI Conference in September, where I read an excerpt from QUEEN in the New Voices slot. In October, I was thrilled to attend DeptCon 5 as an author, after attending just as myself since its inception in 2015. I had a fantastic time on my panel and got to sign Queen of Coin and Whispers samplers afterwards! I was utterly unprepared for the length of my signing queue (along with how long writing someone’s name, my name, a signing quote and a thank you line would take — sorry everyone, I’ve learned from this!). Everyone was super patient and lovely, and I enjoyed myself despite my nerves.

ARCs (early reading copies) of QUEEN started to go out in early September, and the reaction so far has been fabulous. My editor and I did one last edit, post-ARC, before we went into copyedits, so the final text is almost the same. (Along with small changes, we tweaked one scene, and I reinstated another during the last 50 pages that I’ve previously cut but made my case for putting back in.) I’m hoping the encouraging response will continue as we get closer to April.

Along with editing, it feels like I spent a lot of 2019 waiting — waiting to complete edits, waiting for a cover (which arrived and I love), waiting to see if people liked the ARC, waiting for 2020 — but now that the year is almost over, I feel like it’s all flown by and I’m not ready for 2020 to be here and for QUEEN to no longer just belong to me.