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| | Hi Friend,
Here we are with the last NEWSIE of 2018. It’s also, thankfully, the last “LIARS’ PARADOX yada-yada-yada, click this link, check out this site, more LIARS’ PARADOX blah-blah” email.
The next newsie update probably won’t be till after the holiday hangover has worn off in February so, even though LIARS’ PARADOX hasn’t hit shelves yet, I wanted to thank you for the preorder, thank you for the support, and thank you for making it possible for me to continue entertaining you with tall tales and real life ups and downs. I do hope you enjoy the start of this new series and until I hear otherwise I’m holding on to an image of you in a nice warm silent bubble cozied up with that book, blithely unaware of real life because all that matters for those ten or so hours is a story that’s pulled you in so deep you’re not coming up for air until it’s done.
An author has her dreams. Hee.
Truthfully, I am incredibly grateful that we’re down to the final stretches with this book.
I’m selfishly excited for you to read it. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to sit on a story like this and not be able to talk about it or discuss it with ANYONE? You are my “book club.” I learn as much about my characters from listening to your feedback as I do in creating them, and so much of the enjoyment part of this process is being able to SHARE the final product with you!) But I’m also relieved that the pressure to write blogs and answer Q&A and do social media updates and try, try, try to find ways to help the 99.9% of the reading public that doesn’t know I exist discover this book and keep it from vanishing into obscurity is almost over.
We’re down to the finish line now and it is just horrible, horrible, horrible timing.
For me, that is.
With all the other book release type updates that have been going out, I haven’t had much of a chance to fill you in on what’s been going on with me personally. So most of this email is a peek into where I’m at with life and writing in general.
THE WRITING LIFE: Ever experienced a time where stuff kept flying at you so fast it started to feel like you were struggling in a snowstorm in which you could only see a few steps ahead, and your feet kept stumbling out from beneath you, but the only way through was to tuck your head down, brace against the wind, and keep moving forward because you knew stopping would be the end of everything? Well, it’s been like that, except far less dramatic.
I mean, overwhelming but not life-threatening or anything.
LIARS’ LEGACY is the working title for Jack and Jill book two. I’ve been writing this book for well over a year now. There were hints of struggle as far back as March, where, in describing the process, I’d said, “There’s not a day that I work on this thing that I don't seriously feel there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it together. . .I always struggle getting the full story out but I've gone through this enough now [to know] that if I ignore the self-doubt and just keep at it, eventually, with enough time and determination, it'll get there. But this particular book has been harder than usual.” What I couldn’t know at the time was that life was about to launch me from that into full insanity mode.
I’m a fulltime mom and primary caregiver whose own formal education stopped in elementary school. Each jump up the school ladder has been more unfamiliar to me than to my kids. Even basic things like class periods were new concepts that they had to explain to me. But I’m smart. Adaptable. Resilient. We figured it all out together, no biggie…. until my oldest neared the end of high school and everything related to graduation, and figuring out college stuff, and getting the kid driving and licensed and on the road fell on MY shoulders all at once. That was on top of the regular end of school, after school, summer insanity. And an air-conditioner going out, and a plumbing leak that required urgent repair, and two separate car tires getting punctured and needing replacement, and a car battery death that involved way more work than any car battery should, plus the normal time consuming life stuff everyone deals with when running a household, all of which together essentially turned into a nearly five-month-long session of me running from emergency to emergency.
From end of May through to the middle of September there was hardly a week where I got two days of uninterrupted work back to back—and it takes me a full day just to get my head to where it left off in the story. I was writing as much as I could throughout and by September had about a hundred thousand words of material (which is, give or take, about the length of one of my books) but it wasn’t chronological, nor was it coherent, nor was there any cohesive sense of characters or plot. I had no clear concept of how the second half of the story worked and my head, my thoughts, my ability to process even simple words and sentences was just mud.
I’d seriously begun to worry that I was broken. That maybe I was experiencing the early signs of dementia. I struggled. I tried. I couldn’t make the words work.
Then, in the middle of September all the chaos ground to a sudden, screeching halt. School was back in session, the oldest was in college and officially driving, I was no longer needed to chauffeur the rest of the house for every little thing, and I had missed my deadline for submitting LIARS' LEGACY.
Nobody but me knew how bad things really were. Not only did I not have a rough draft, I wasn’t sure I could get a rough draft and wasn’t even sure if I had it in me to try for a rough draft. The only thing I wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep for a year and make the world go away.
I did end up spending the next few weeks in bed.
In fairness, I was working.
The deadline had come and gone without a word, which allowed me a little bit of time to try to get my wits together. I figured end of September was about the latest I could reasonably delay before contacting my agent and telling her there wasn’t a book and so I used those two weeks to try pull the material together into a cohesive format so I’d have an honest sense of how long it would take to finish—or if it was even worth finishing. I’d wake up, open the laptop, work on the draft until about two or three in the morning. Close the laptop. Sleep. Wake up the next day and do it all over again. I’d drag myself to the kitchen for food and go back to bed. Sometimes there were showers. Not enough of them.
By the time end of September arrived I’d begun to think, you know, maybe there’s actually something here, maybe I can actually do this. I wrote my agent. I told her I didn’t have a book because I’d lost almost five months of writing time. That I needed a deadline extension and asked her to see what might be possible. As a result, the publisher extended the deadline to mid-November. That’s as far as they could stretch it with any hope of keeping the same publishing schedule. It was hard at that point not to despair.
I’d begun to think I could pull this together period, doing it that fast felt utterly, completely, hopelessly impossible. My options were to quit there, or to throw everything I had into it. I really wanted to quit. I probably would have if I knew how. That sounds facetious, but it’s not. Sometimes—and I’m not saying this is one of those times—but sometimes the smartest thing a person can do is quit something that’s not working. One of my biggest strengths (not quitting) is also one of my biggest weaknesses (not quitting) simply because I don’t know how to quit.
So my goal at that point became a race against time to try to cram five months of work into a month-and-a-half. I moved out of bed but basically kept that same schedule. Having another driver in the house helped because it meant that interruptions I normally would have had to handle myself, such as late after-school pick-ups, etc. could now be done by someone else and that was breathing room I’d never had before.
And so I burned the midnight oil toward the middle of November.
I didn’t finish the draft. No matter how much time I was putting into the book, I could only do so much so fast. But I was able to turn an enormous mountain of crap into something part way readable. More importantly, what was chaos began to form into a cohesive story—a pretty good one at that—but it wasn’t finished and so for the first time in my writing career I found myself in the position of submitting material that was not only in rough draft form, it also contained multiple unfinished chapters, many of which were just stream of conscious notes.
A bit mortifying to say the least, but it was the best I could do.
As soon as that draft was submitted I turned right around and kept working on the manuscript. Yesterday I submitted an update. The second draft is further along than the first, but still unfinished and still with stream of conscious chapters and I’m guessing it’ll take me another solid month or so of working on it the way I had been to get the full story finished.
Last I heard my editor has started reading it and I have NO idea what happens next.
I have no idea if my editor will love what she sees enough to want me to continue, or if she’ll think it’s too much of a mess and too much work. My publisher could decide they want to extend the deadline a little to get me the time to get it finished. They could decide it’s not worth the trouble and cancel the contract and ask for their money back.
Three months ago I wasn’t even sure if I could pull a story together out of that mess. Now I see the story. I know where this is going and even though I can’t see the end of the tunnel yet, I do see the tracks, and I know that if I keep following them eventually I’ll see the light and if I do pull this off , it has the potential to be even better than the first in series (and that’s a tall order because LIARS’ PARADOX is pretty amazing if I do say so myself—at least insofar as the type of book I enjoy reading goes) but I really truly have no idea what’s going to happen next.
Remember how I said the release of LIARS’ PARADOX was horrible, horrible timing?
There are hundreds, if not thousands of books published every day. The reading market is seriously glutted—there’s far more supply than demand—and one of the hardest things for any author/ book to do is break through that clutter. Readers can’t buy what they don’t know exist and readers are also often hesitant—for good reason—to buy what they don’t know. If a book doesn’t break through due to lack of visibility, then it becomes that much harder to get the next one published and promoted.
So, as the launch day for LIARS’ PARADOX approaches, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to get as much of LIARS’ LEGACY written as fast as I can so that the series can continue, and trying to promote LIARS’ PARADOX as best as I can so that the series can continue. Oh. And let’s not forget the holiday school breaks and the interrupted schedules and all the little things like lights and trees and presents and trying hard to not be the Grinch no matter how much you really want to, and you know how it goes . . .
As for me, I’m doing the only thing I know how to do. There are still days when the sense of despair settles in, but that has more to do with how far behind I am and how much there is to do and how everything has collided at once. My head isn’t muddy any more. My thoughts have started to clear. I’m still not back to the me I was before chaos descended but I’m getting there head down, shoulders squared, walking into the wind.
And that, my friend, wraps up this novella of a summary on the current state of this writer’s life.
EVENTS & OTHER STUFF: There are two book events confirmed. I'm still working with my publisher to try to arrange one for Austin and don’t know yet if it will come to be or not. If it does, I will be posting the info on social media so keep a look out there. If you’re not on social media and would prefer I email you the information, let me know and I’ll get you on a separate list just for that.
** DALLAS/ FT. WORTH -- Book Launch on Release Day
Special Note: Psychologically this event is a really big deal to me. Never have I ever begged for an audience at any book event but I’m doing it here. It’s been four years since the last book hit shelves. If you are in DFW please come share this event with me and make it special? Let’s fill that room and show the publisher that this book has support. Also, as a form of bribery, since the book store is in a mall you can get holiday shopping in all in one go :D
Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Time: 7:00 PM
Store: Barnes and Noble, Stonebriar Center Mall, Frisco, TX 75034
** HOUSTON
Date: Saturday, January 26, 2019
Time: 4:30 PM
Store: Murder by the Book, 2342 Bissonnet St, Houston, TX 77005
Autographed copies: The deadline for preordering personalized autographed editions of LIARS’ PARADOX has passed but the store handling these may still be able to get you autographed copies. This is the link to order them. If the order link no longer works by the time you read this, try contacting the store directly by phone or email. They may still be able to get you what you want.
Theme Prize Giveaway: If you’ve preorder(ed) a copy of LIARS’ PARADOX before December 18th, then you automatically qualify to enter for the awesome backpack my publisher giving away (why a backpack? For that you have to click on the link to find out.) Doesn’t matter where you preordered or what format, if you got the confirmation before December 18th you qualify, so don’t forget to get your name in there. I’m really hoping that one of the cool kids will win it.
Audio Books: The audio edition of LIARS’ PARADOX is FINALY live and you should now be able to get it from your preferred venue, whatever it usually is. It has a different cover than the e-book and hardcover edition (that’s a whole other discussion) so don’t be confused by that. As long as it’s got my name and the correct title, it’s the right book.
GOODIES: We have six prizes in the Goodie Giveaway pile this month. If you’d like to be entered to win, simply respond to this email with the subject “GOODIE GIVEAWAY” [If your email program likes to be difficult and won’t let you change the subject, just put GOODIE GIVEAWAY in the reply and I will make sure it gets to the right place.]
The 5th, 17th, 28th, 36th, 49th, and 55th readers to respond will be prize winners this month. I read every single email that comes in but due to the volume, I’m ONLY able to respond to the 5th, 17th, 28th, 36th, 49th, and 55th respondents. If you email and don’t hear back, it’s not because I’m ignoring you, it’s because due to time and volume, I just can’t.
[Standard buzzkill disclaimer for all giveaways and offers of free books: Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Limited to U.S. addresses. I am not responsible for lost or misrouted emails, interrupted or unavailable network or server connections, other computer or technical failures, or post office mishandling.]
And that closes us out for 2018. Sending you love and happy thoughts your way, and wishing you contentment and warmth and laughter in the coming new year.
See you on the other side.
--Taylor
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