Hit 20k on my WIP! Here have some gifs of happy courtesy the BBC!

I have the first chapter of my current WIP, the latest attempt to get my Zodiac story right, and I really like how it’s coming around. I’m about sixty pages in, and this is only first ten, but the whole thing’s plotted out—no guarantees it’ll actually predict the result, though!

The Roaring Silence: A Zodiac Protectorate Novel

Chapter One

Outside Wilmington, Illinois—April 8, 1923

Harrison let the dirt fall through his fingers and onto his grandfather’s casket. He felt a tear forming at the corner of his eye, but he blinked it away and returned to Suzanne. He didn’t look at her, but stood beside her. Knowing what he needed as she always seemed to, she took his hand; her thumb worked circles into the back of his knuckles, just as she would whenever he came from the feed store, stressed about the day’s work or meager pay. “It won’t be much to live on,” he’d always tell her, but she’d simply take his hand, put it to her cheek, and massage the back of his hand as she insisted, “It’ll be enough.”

Harrison’s mother Sharon hadn’t gone to the interment; she’d gone back to the house after the service to prepare dinner for the extended family who’d come for the funeral. Aunt Mavis, ever the spider in her sister’s boot, had insisted on staying in their father’s farmhouse instead of with her sister and family. She and her husband had claimed that they didn’t want to crowd or be underfoot, but Harrison would bet a full month’s wages that they were packing up their truck with anything they deemed valuable every moment they thought they wouldn’t be caught. No other purpose could have drawn them back across three states so quickly.

Read More

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, writing, and cat-snuggling, in addition to sneezing and being miserable with allergies as a result of aforementioned cat-snuggling. As such, all of my social media has been at a standstill for the most part. (Can’t really say I’ve missed it … O_o)

Anywho, hopefully I’ll get my twice-daily queue filled back up sometime soon. Codename Eagle Chick is coming along nicely, and I’m very excited about it. Also, for those of you who don’t know, MSFV is hosting the July Secret Agent Contest here. I’m not doing it—I definitely won’t have a fully polished manuscript in time (I just competed in the May contest, after all!) but I definitely encourage anyone with a polished, ready-to-go manuscript to give it a whirl, and good luck!

First day of playing catch-up with Camp Nanowrimo, and I ended up with just shy of 5,500 words. Not bad, not bad at all.

Now I’m just 10,000 behind where I need to be to finish by the end of the month. But that’s life, isn’t it?

The blog’s been pretty devoid of anything other than reblogs, for which I heartily apologize. I’ve been sending out the first round of queries, some of which have gotten good feedback, others no more than form rejections, other rejections that have been personalized with info that’s helped be revise and prepare for round 2.

But then I got bored of doing no creating, so I’ve now started planning a new story, another YA Contemporary tentatively titled Codename Eagle Chick. I’m excited about it, and furthermore, I’m doing Camp Nanowrimo with it (I know, I have a lot of catching up to do to finish by the 30; also, feel free to friend me, or whatever the system is—I’ve only ever done NaNoWriMo).

 And that just about brings you up to date on me. I’ll try to get on here more often, though. I was just trying to do a tumblr embargo in order to be more productive, and it worked—to a point. After that point, I started to miss my tumblr community. I love you guys, and please don’t be too shy to shove something in my ask box!

Pasted from the comments section here:

Good beginning. You give us just enough but have restrained from explaining everything right off the bat. I like Alex, she’s tough but fallible. Maybe rethink your genre—it is technically contemporary but can also be described as espionage, suspense, thriller, depending on the story. It’s hard to tell without seeing the query. But it sounds very Ally Carter’s Heist Society.I’m hooked enough to keep reading.

Needless to say, I’m super excited! Now, back to editing in case s/he requests something! *squee!*

(Disclaimer: I swear I don’t use this many exclamation points in my real writing.)