Coming Up Blank - Pippa's Journal

*stares at page* Just lately I've done a lot of that. Staring at a blank page, trying to get a story on a deadline done. Staring at a mass of text covered in tracking changes by my editor, or even just one comment along the lines of 'more here'. And now today, as I go to write my blog post at Spacefreighters Lounge, I'm struggling to think what the heck to write about.

I just think the last few months have been a bit too much and I'm burned out. Dried up. Tired. Don't get me wrong, my writing life has been a blast since July, but I'm exhausted mentally. When my smartphone died mid-February and left me essentially internet-less for nine days of school holidays, at first I was annoyed and frustrated. By the end, I'd read books, spent some serious quality time with my monsters and not missed some of the toxicity of the internet. And then I had to come back to a ton of work and days of panic as I wondered if I'd actually meet any of my deadlines, and whether I actually can get Keir back out in May. Sigh.

So why do I keep doing it? Because underneath it all, no matter how tired or down I may get, I have the best job in the world. In the universe. I have a head full of people and places that I've created, and as you can see from my post last week I've even started turning those characters into physical form other than books. My muse and my motivation might be AWOL right now, but I know they'll come mooching back when they're ready (hopefully soon). Not much of a blog post, I'm afraid, but hey - I know we've all been here at some point. In the meantime...

News

Spacefreighters Lounge is now five crew-members strong as Greta van der Rol joins us. *waves* And I've moved days (in case you hadn't noticed). I'll be blogging on a Tuesday from now on, instead of Wednesdays, which revert fully to Sharon since we've been sharing it the past three years.

EXCERPT |  GOODREADS
Available at... Breathless Press |
Smashwords | ARe | Bookstrand
Amazon | B&N

My scifi romance adventure Tethered is releasing in print in two weeks. Woot! It's also currently the number one top seller in the Cyber (SFR) category on my publisher's website, AND it's number 6 in the overall top ten bestsellers for the whole site! Yay! (psst, it's also 25% off for the whole of March, as are all the books). I don't think I've ever been on a bestseller list before, and certainly not so high.

Keir has been through its first round of edits with Dani, but I'm currently stuck on the ending and waiting for some feedback. Sigh. The book has also grown another 4000 words, taking it up to 111K. Wowsers! It was 100K when released with Lyrical Press. You'll be getting a bit more of the Emissary, more of Keir, more of Quin...well, just more!

KU - I'm only getting a few borrows (and while I'm getting borrows of my short stories, I'm now no longer getting sales of them), but since the borrow payout is currently more than the royalty of 35% I get with Amazon for a title under $2.99, I can live with that!

Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened, my YA dystopia, releases next month. At the same time I'll be writing part two for the April Camp NaNoWriMo. I plan to do two camps, both to finish the ZG trilogy, while doing the sequel to When Dark Falls for NaNoWriMo in November. I still haven't finished the alien romance I was scheduled to complete for February, and now I'm behind with the angel story due to be finished for end of March. Sigh. I'm not doing great on my deadlines right now. On the plus side, I'm well over my 250 word a day minimum word count that I set myself...even if 4K of that is all the new words for Keir! So far I've written 25K of new words for 2015 - at that rate I should be able to hit 150K for the year end. *laughs cynically*

Ping Pong

Great post on diversity and disability in SFR, Laurie. Actually, I guess that would include my superhero story When Dark Falls. Without spoilers, one of the characters had an allergy to sunlight, and her experimentation to devise a way to cure it led to her developing a particular superpower. I'd never thought about it like that before. And the hero had to have cybernetic implants after almost dying from serious injuries in a battle, which led to his superhero talents.

Donna, congrats on your book launch party. There's nothing like holding your first book. ^_^ Or holding any of them, actually.

Greta, welcome aboard!