Sulfur Begins!

... and Farro gets promoted!

I've been so busy over the weekend celebrating my birthday and catching up on life that I've been a little MIA. I'm back now, with some pretty thrilling updates (at least thrilling for me!), I'm starting the promotion process for Farro this week and I've started writing Sulfur.

A note on the first, I've been contacting book blogs about Farro. The act promotes deep, uncomfortable memories of my very brief and wholly awful stint as a telemarketer. I experienced the same feeling when querying agents, with about the same amount as success. So far responses from the book blogs have been incredibly kind and helpful, invalidating my fears, and I hope they continue to be that way! I'm excited for their opinions -- good or bad!

The Bigger News -- and the thing you probably want to know most about: Sulfur has begun. I have wrote the opening line, the opening dialogue (spoken by Bomani), even the opening event (secret for now). I love starting books almost as much as I love finishing them. I love picking where I should start in the story and scraping that and starting later. Farro originally began the day Khensa was kidnapped from Junktown, and her subsequent months in the temple. After writing this however, I didn't like the feel of it, the drag and the flab, and so I said, "Screw it, we're just starting at the end of it." Low and behold, a beginning. With Sulfur, I had a similar work through. Originally it was to begin with "the gang" getting ready to depart on their big quest and heading out on their mission and evading guards and staying under the radar and ugh, when does it end? Bang, Sulfur starts in the middle of the desert.

But when do we get to see it?

After my Beta-Readers have had a chance to go through it and reply.

Wait, what? Beta-Readers? You have Beta-Readers?

For Farro I had two teenagers reading it and acting like my cheerleaders. They didn't make any changes despite the grammatical errors, they are just reading it for the fun of it. A couple more Beta-Readers have been added to the Sulfur list because they have asked to be included and I was only too happy to oblige. "Why yes, you may read Sulfur and critique it, as long as you wave a pair of proverbial pom-poms in my face while you're doing it." Oh Beta-Readers, like dogs nipping at me heels.

Farro and Sulfur is here to stay!

Edited: March 27, 2011

So last week I was preparing to move Farro and Sulfur off Blogger -- on a website I'd have room to stretch out. However, after looking into it a bit more, and waffling about what to do, I have ultimately decided to remain on Blogger, which is easy to use and familiar, for as long as I can. Please feel free, therefore, to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Facebook and Twitter. I'll be posting updates on Sulfur through these means frequently.

Many of my readers have been messaging me, wondering when Sulfur will be coming out, and I thought I'd take a moment to answer this question:

I will be working on Farro -- editing, formating, polishing -- until May 13th (my birthday). This is the deadline I've given myself. My cut-off date. I could waste months, years fussing over Farro, and that's not time I really have. So I'm going to wrap it up, self-publish it, promote it, and start working on Sulfur without really looking back. So what does that mean for Sulfur? That means I won't likely be going anywhere near it until mid-May. At that point I'll be going into 'writing mode' and will do little else. When focused, I'm rather insomniac, obsessive, and Gollum-eque. Knowing this about myself, I hope to have Sulfur done between mid-June, early-July. I'll take some time to edit and polish it and put it out for the kindle anywhere between August and September.

Disclaimer: this is a rough time table. I am known to overestimate such things, I really am a terrifyingly fast writer when I get into it. I don't sleep, I don't even really eat. You know those hand-held Campbell's soup things? Yeah, that's my diet. I'm hoping to also have a larger group of volunteers willing to help with Sulfur's editing by the time it's done. For Farro it's only been me and my husband and neither of us are particularly great editors.

(On that note, if you are a good editor, and you'd like to beta/edit Sulfur this spring/summer, please shoot me an email. I'd be happy to consider including you on the list! The more beta's, the more errors caught!)

Love,

Arreana