That moment when your mojo crashes

So, this week wasn’t supposed to be a nightmare week. It was supposed to be a nice week. I was going to catch up with the weeds in the yard, and it rained a bit, and it was nice.

Then on Tuesday one of the big girls landed on the 20 month old on the trampoline and broke the baby’s ankle.

Nice week instantly shot. I’ve gone back and forth to the ER, bounced around appointments for the orthopedic surgeon, etc. etc. all week long. The baby now has a massive cast that she uses to club people with. (Her ankle is already well enough to do that, which I find amazing.)

In the midst of this, I tried drawing a golden age of scifi book cover for a friend.

Me: Hee hee, this is fun.

Her: Wait, the girl is supposed to be black.

Me: mojo crashes and burns because that means the whole pic has to be redone

So now it’s Saturday and my poor hubby has to work. Next week, 3:30 wakeups, which turn both of us into zombies. I just can’t catch the mojo again.

This morning, I scraped out a quick drawing, just to keep in practice:

So that’s been my week. I’ve been so tired and stressed that when I sit down at my computer, I’d rather stare at the wall than create anything. But maybe things will calm down now? Maybe?

Song of the Rose: Beauty and the Beast in space

It’s launch day for Song of the Rose! I’m sure there’s other space opera version of Beauty and the Beast, but this one is mine. 😀

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The human race is at war with the Rox, a ferocious race of horned, demonic humanoids from space, and humanity is losing.

When the humans and Rox agree to a hostage exchange, Lieutenant Zayn is asked to volunteer because of her social standing. She will be housed with a prince of the Rox, and their good behavior will ensure that peace talks will go forward between their races. Zayn is terrified of sharing living space with one of the demons, but she agrees in order to bring about an end to the war.

Alnair l’Nath is a prince and commander in the Rox fleet. He is nervous about being shut in with a human princess who might knife him in the back, but he wants the war to end, too. He and Zayn despise each other on sight, even though Alnair finds her oddly attractive.

Zayn and Alnair gradually make peace as they discover that humans and Rox are not so different. But when a rogue agent of the Rox kidnaps Zayn and Alnair in order to end the peace talks and escalate the war, it will fall to a human and a Rox, and the growing love between them, to end the conflict forever.

This is a sweet romance with only mild kissing, but plenty of suspense and action.

Available on most retailers here

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I wrote this book on accident. I’m kind of burned out on fairytale retellings, mostly because I’ve just read so many. They’re kind of predictable, because if you know the basic story, the retelling will hit the same story beats. And they’re also kind of like … 1500s medieval tech level, peasants and princes, Western European fantasy.

For some reason, my brain went, “But what if it was in SPACE?” And I had to start writing and playing with it. The first draft was much shorter, written in a week before Christmas as a gift for my writing group. They demanded that I go back and expand it. So I rewrote it from the ground up, and I think there’s about 1 page remaining of the original version. Which is fine, because the spaceships needed a lot more time to shine. While humans have regular spaceships, the aliens have these silicon-based lifeforms they fly around in. Their ships are sentient and have attitudes, kind of the dragon and rider dynamic. “You are my pilot and if anyone threatens you, I will vaporize them.” I wound up falling in love with my ships. I’m working on a second story in this same universe (Cinderella!) that is centered around a girl in a forced labor camp who accidentally imprints on a young ship … and he grows up into a giant frigate and demands that she be his pilot.

In Song of the Rose, Alnair and Zayn each think that the other is the beast. And the Roses wind up being this alien artifact that … well, I don’t want to spoil it. Read it for yourself. 🙂 🙂

And now February

I kind of fell off the bandwagon with Bloganuary, sadly. I kept trying to do the prompts, but they were like, “Describe yourself as a tree” and “what do you feel when you look at the stars?” and … I had nothing. Or more like, I had way too much and it was too personal to put in a public blog, heh.

Anyway, now it’s February, and I need to get my rear in gear. I have a book to publish this month! It’s Beauty and the Beast set in space with aliens. It’s only a novella, probably barely topping 100 pages. I had my husband proof read it for me. He was ‘meh’ until he got to the kidnapping and space battle stuff, and then he was entertained. So hopefully this story will entertain guys as well as girls.

I’m hoping to have it out by the 14th for Valentine’s, so I’ll be formatting and launching it this week to get it live on all platforms before I announce it. I like to give people lots of buying options.

After that, I hope to get Sanctuary launched in March. It’s the next book in my After Atlantis series, and it’s still deep in revisions. I’m pondering whether to add a couple of scenes, and got bogged down. I’m very happy with it so far, though. It has the fluff and magic and wonder I was aiming for when I wrote it: basically, what happens when a guy whose very life force is infused into a magical island begins breaking his heart over a fickle girl. And how both him and his island begin to die in very apocalyptic ways. And how the girl has to straighten out her own problems in order to save him … and then still half-injured, stave off an attack of bad guys who would like nothing better than to drag both guy and girl off and leash them for their magic.

And then I have to write a fresh book and I have no idea how I’m going to top Sanctuary. 😀 😀

Here’s a manga-style book cover mockup for another story I’m playing with. It’s high fantasy inspired by Final Fantasy 14, which is interesting, because I loathe high fantasy. It’s just a little story about an angstball knight on a quest to find the wife he saw in a vision, and the healer who travels with him and thinks it’s great fun. They earn their keep by slaying monsters, so … it’s like fantasy battles and romance all in one.