Category Archives: Friday Five

The Friday Five – November 12

THE FRIDAY FIVEYes, it’s Saturday, but we’ve already established I’m bad at schedules. Additionally, this week has been hard in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. It can be hard to find the good in these kinds of weeks, but it matters more than ever now.

So, my Friday Five, post-Trump edition.

  1. I was able to go to Miami this week for the Gemina signing! Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff were both delightful, and it was fantastic to be able to hand them each a stack of books to sign, all of which are now back on my shelf with the rest of my signed books collection.
  2.  Almost everyone in my Twitter community has been amazing this week. Graceful even in their outrage. It’s a privilege to be able to work with these people, and I hope they’ll continue showing me all the ways I can work to ensure the next four years don’t turn into a train wreck.
  3. Cashew milk ice cream. I can’t eat much dairy, and this stuff is a serious blessing on the days when I really need to drown my sorrows in chilled chocolate.
  4. Even if it came too late, I have seen a number of stories about people who voted for Trump realizing exactly how awful he is and beginning to work with the rest of us to mitigate the damge he’s going to try to do. I hope more people follow their example and that Trump’s clear racism, misogyny, and bigorty becomes the turning point for this country. We can survive it if something good is waiting at the other side, I just wish it hadn’t had to come to this.
  5. Book news. More details on this one later, but for now? Book. News. 😀

The Friday Five – October 28

THE FRIDAY FIVE

I’ve skipped a while because I’m bad at remembering, but that’s a shame because the last month and a half has been filled with lovely things. So this week, I’m doing a Friday Fifteen to catch up on some of the wonderful people and events I have to be thankful for.

  1. Getting to road trip from Utah to Florida with Cait Greer in September! It was a marathon push across the country filled with too much fast food and too many altitude headaches, but we got to stop in Tallahassee to see some great friends and at the end of the trip my bestie moved in with me. Definitely a win!
  2. My new agent, Eric Smith, has awesome taste in entertainment. He assigned me homework because of a soon-to-come WIP, and because of that I found a new fandom: The Expanse.
  3. HOLY HELL THE EXPANSE. It’s amazing. I love it. I’ve watched season one so many times already I’ve lost count, and I’m on book 2 of the series even though I do NOT have the time for reading anything I didn’t write. It’s become my new favorite. You all need to watch and read and enjoy.
  4. I attended GRL (Gay Romance Lit) Retreat for the first time! I got to hang out with amazing people like Anna Zabo, Elyse Springer, Amelia Vaughn, EJ Russel, Avon Gale, and Carrie Pack.
  5. I finished final proofs on Assassins: Nemesis! THAT MEANS IT’S DONE! And it’ll only be a couple of months until you guys get to read it.
  6. Also in Nemesis news, the first few chapters went up on Riptide’s site! That means they’re also up on my site’s page for the book. You can meet Blake!
  7. I mentioned Cait Greer moved in, right? But I haven’t mentioned her cooking yet. She cooks! Which is amazing. I love food, and I intensely dislike cooking. I’m utterly and immensely grateful she’s willing to feed me as long as I clean everything up afterward.
  8. My new #TeamRocks friends. It’s amazing how wonderful my agents other clients are, and I’m so thankful I get to be part of the community they’ve created. One day I sincerely hope we get to hang out in person!
  9. Entangled Teen. I can’t go into why, but wow. They’ve been AMAZING. They listened to me, took what I said seriously, and acted on it. I am so happy to be working with such a dedicated, supportive team. Hopefully, I get to keep working with them for a long time yet.
  10. My editor at Entangled, Kate Brauning. She’s been SO patient with me this year as I got further and further behind schedule (because I am awesome at overloading myself while simultaneously underestimating how long each project is going to take). And her notes for Ryogan Chronicles 2 are making this book SO GOOD.
  11. Edits. Oddly, I’m so grateful for edits. For being able to do them and for the wonderful notes I have to help guide me, and for how much better this book is becoming as I work on it. I wasn’t sure about the first draft, but I’m beginning to love the second version of the story.
  12. Ace Awareness week! I love that this is a thing, and I’m really happy I learned about it early enough to write a new essay I’ve been meaning to add to the site.
  13. Giveaways! I wish I could do more of them, but the one I have running now is BIG. And it includes a copy of Island of Exiles, which I’ve never given away before! SO MUCH FUN!
  14. Speaking of Island of Exiles, I saw the final cover and WOW DO I LOVE IT OMFG IT IS SO PRETTY AND YOU GET TO SEE IT SOON WHAT?! 😀 Pay attention Monday morning. It’s gonna start popping up all over the freaking place!
  15. Winter in Florida is never exactly what one would call winter, but this year it’s cooled off earlier than usual. We’ve had almost a week of low humidity and decent temperatures, and that makes me very happy.

I could keep going, but I’ll leave more for later. Next week, hopefully. <3

The Friday Five – August 26th

THE FRIDAY FIVE

Sometimes we forget the good things that happen because the bad ones feel so much bigger. In an effort to keep that phenomenon at bay, here are my five good things for this past week.

  1. Yesterday, for the first time in a long while, I not only hit my word count goal but actually felt like I’d made appreciable progress. It was a glorious feeling. I have missed it greatly. Hopefully it continues for the next few days until I suddenly have a finished book!
  2. Related to the above, my Entangled editor Kate Brauning continues to be epic and patient and encouraging. I am so happy I get to work with her, and I sincerely hope I can continue working with her for a long time to come.
  3. My dear friend Tristina Wright got to share her words with the world recently! And this week, it opened up from just being available to subscribers to being readable by everyone. Which means you should go read it, because Siren Song is so amazingly beautiful, you guys.
  4. I teach at a in-patient rehab center for teenagers with addiction and other issues. Over the summer I’ve been running a summer reading program, which I’ve done before. Previous incarnations didn’t achieve much in the way of new readers, but this year I had them all reading I am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells. I have never seen a group of students at this center so excited to read, and I have never been more grateful to an author for a book. Or for the perfect timing of a movie version of a book. They’re all looking forward to watching it on Monday! And, honestly, so am I. It looks amazing.
  5. Thanks to the collected efforts of some authors on Facebook, I was able to find a short story I haven’t read since 2001! It’s stuck with me over the years, and I found myself thinking about it more than usual when I started lesson planning for the year, but I couldn’t remember the author, the title, or the anthology that I had originally read it in. Some sleuthing by some wonderful people didn’t just give me the title and author; I got a link to the full text of the story, too! It’s Velvet Fields by Anne McCaffrey for those interested. I highly recommend reading.

The Friday Five – August 19th

THE FRIDAY FIVE

Welcome to the first ever Friday Five post!

To give credit where credit is 100% due, I have stolen this idea (with permission) from the lovely Katie Cotugno’s Five Good Things posts. The world can be a crazy place, so I think it’s excellent to recognize and publicly acknowledge the good things in it when we can. I am going to try to make these posts every week (I set an alert on my phone and everything), and this is the first one. Here are five things I enjoyed or am grateful for about this week:

  1. I don’t know how I’ve gotten so lucky with editors so far in my career, but I am so super grateful for my Entangled editor Kate Brauning who has been uber patient and supportive, helping me contain and shape my current projects and encouraging my new ones. She has continuously not keelhauled me for being overdue on this draft. I gotta say that I greatly appreciate that in an editor.
  2. Cait Greer has been especially fantastic this week, listening to me flail and whine about book problems only I can actually solve. A+ awesome friendship. Plus, we’re counting down the days until I fly to Salt Lake City, help Cait load up a trailer, and then road trip with her back to South Florida! I am very excited about that trip. There will be a LOT of pictures.
  3. It’s wonderful to me every time I see my Don’t Erase the Aces essay shared anywhere. The response to this post makes it more than worth the anxiety of writing it. Thank you to anyone who has promoted it, and even more thanks to the people who have told me how much the story resonated with them.
  4. I am closing in on 100k in my current project. The end is kind of in sight? If I grab a old-school seafarers telescope? And look in exactly the right direction? And good things are happening in the background on book one in this trilogy! I am trying to use that to spur me into finishing book two…
  5. Tomorrow (later today?) I am continuing my efforts to be social periodically and am meeting up with several local SCBWI friends for lunch and a workshop session! My regional chapter is fantastic, and I adore all of my local people, so I’m really happy I get to see them.