Hello! Long time, no post! I’m sorry I haven’t been as chatty as I normally am, but that’s because I’ve been very, very busy with getting Book Two out in time for the Halloween season.
As much fun as I had writing Lost in Fondant, I made several mistakes the first time around. From taking five years to write it, to not using an outline and just being a pantser, to sending it out before it was ready, to not having a solid cover design, to not building any hype behind it before I published.
Sure, I rectified most of these mistakes after the fact. I completely overhauled the manuscript with a deep line edit and resubmitted it. I redid the cover twice until I learned enough about graphic design to make one I was happy with (No AI, because I wanted to learn these skills on my own). I brought on the SUPER talented Carlos Sanchez to sculpt that amazing zombie hand which now graces Lost in Fondant.
But when I decided to challenge myself to get Book Two out in time for the Halloween season, I remembered allllll the mistakes I made before and learned from them to make this one better.
This time, Book Two would have a kickass cover design right out of the gate.
This time, I took James Patterson’s Master Class in outlining and learned how to build a map for my book before I began to actually write.
This time, I would send my manuscript to the two people I trust the most, who are also avid readers, and let them give me a no nonsense, straightforward beta read. (Thanks again to my wonderful mother, Patricia, and my dear friend Tamara).
And this time, I did a deep line edit. I read chapters out loud to myself, which is the best way to edit in my opinion.
And everything else clicked together beautifully.
No, that’s a lie. It so didn’t. I gave up every single minute of my free time to work on this. I went through like 20 title changes. I struggled with the climax, and every version I would come up with just sounded dumb to me. I was worried I had too many characters and subplots. I wondered if I should just scrap the whole thing.
After I talked myself off of that ledge, then the cover was another project. Once the title was settled upon, I had to worry about what the rest of the cover would look like.
I asked Carlos to paint the mask for the new cover, and he did a tremendous job. I mean, look at this!
But that was the easy part (for me).
I spent two weekends, made many batches of cannoli and took about 10,000 photos before I could get something where I was like, “THIS one. This is it.”
And after all of that, I finally have this:
I have to say, I’m damn proud of myself. I was worried I would leave this planet having never published a single book. Now I’m publishing 2 before my birthday this year.
Overall, this has been a real learning experience, and I can’t wait to take these newfound skills of mine and apply them to more books, getting better with each one.
My hope is that you stay with me for this journey of mine, and that you enjoy the stories I put out into the world.