The New Book Trailer, Future Author Events and CassaStorm!

I made a new book trailer for The Magic Wakes. The old and new are both on YouTube, but I put this newest one on my webpage. I've only had three comments made about the new one:

• I love it!
• The song kind of grates.
• It's sort of busy

Do you guys mind taking a look and offering up an opinion? 

I've also been planning my summer book events. So far I only have two set up and ready to go, but I'm including the two I would like to add.

• May 25th--Bentonville, AR Farmer's Market
• June ?--Another day at the FM?
• July 27th--Book signing at Hastings in Murfreesboro, TN
• First week in Aug--Reading at North County Regional Library in Huntersville, NC.

Wish me luck!

And finally, the thing I'm the most excited about...

I got lucky enough to get an ARC of this from Dancing Lemur. Guess what I'll be doing for the rest of the day!

Alex Cavanaugh is one of the most supportive bloggers of authors. If by some strange fluke you don't follow the Ninja Captain, head to his blog now.  

He'll tell you he never planned to write three books, but we're all glad he did. I'll post a review soon!

Winner of the Dragumon Art Contest!

Isn't this great!

Philip Bartles was the only one up to my challenge, and I think he did a wonderful job. I love the energy coming off the staff, love the texture of the scales with the smooth yet reflective quality. The talons are wicked and I definitely would not want them slicing into me. The best part is the head is moving in the right direction. More dog like and less snake like.

Great job!

Philip will be getting a signed copy of The Magic Wakes in the mail, and when I finish the Dragumon novella he will get a copy of it.

I actually get more excited about this picture every time I look at it!

Another New House and My First Craft Fair

We successfully moved into our new house over the weekend. Some wonderful men and 12 year old boys came and helped. They loaded and unloaded the truck in 2 and a half hours! I'll post pictures as soon as I'm unpacked and really settled. I hope there is no more moving in my future...at all!

The weather was not so accommodating this weekend. And. And I was at my first craft fair trying to sell books in this unbecoming weather. Let me set the scene for you. Two days before the fair the temperature was around 80 degrees and beautiful. We were hoping for a great turnout and lots of sales. This is what the first day of the fair looked like.

Yes, that's my tent flapping open with the bright blue on top. I shared some space with two other great authors--Tamara Heiner Hart and Michelle Pennington. They were also selling baked goods, which kept us full and happy in spite of cold toes.

Don't we look lovely? I never took my hood off so I joked that I was scaring customers away by dressing like a thug. Truth is not many people came by and we had trouble giving away our food samples. Weird!

My little area of the tent. On day 2 I didn't bring out as many books because they were curling up in the damp air. I made a poster of reviews to set out and sold a couple of Sendek inspired necklaces. (Do you see that gift basket? I still forgot to collect info to give it away. So when I came home one of my teens claimed the blanket. One of these days I'll get another one together and give it away on this blog.)

The weather being what it was--terrible--I'm quite happy with selling 5 books. However I bought 50 to sell! Guess I'll be setting up at the Farmer's Market really soon.

How was your weekend? What are your writing goals for the rest of this week?

Mine are to sit and write for an hour every day before unpacking stuff.

New Posting Schedule for May and IWSG

I can't believe May is already here. April flew by and I'm not even sure what I accomplished. Let's see what we can discover in my IWSG post. If you want to learn more about this monthly blog hop, sign up, or just find more people who are participating, CLICK HERE.

And...

Although I participated in the A to Z Challenge last month, I felt like the majority of my time was spent waiting to close on my house. I tried to write but found it hard to concentrate. There were a few emotional frustrations dealing with my WIP as well, but I'll get to those in a minute. Since Talia didn't want me to write about her, I worked on three other projects last month.

1. Exiled--a short story originally started for a Unicorn Bell Anthology. We decided not to put out the anthology at this time, but after struggling to come up with this thing for a year I found that I sort of liked it. It's scifi all the way and deals with assassins and travel through time and space.

2. Fallen--a short story that you first got a glimpse of during a Show vs. Tell Blogfest in 2011. I worked on it last year and messed it up. This month I believe I've fixed it with the help of my awesome writer's group. It's on submission so we'll see what happens.

3. Fade Into Me--a YA Contemporary Fantasy (with my scifi twist on it). I pulled this out a week ago because I found myself thinking a lot about Ryanne after I wrote about her for Y day. After a day reading the 34K that I had written I wanted to dive back in. Yesterday I emailed the first 140 pages to my daughter and asked her to just read for 10 minutes and tell me what she thought.

She read for an hour and then said, "Dude! This is really good!"

I just wish I didn't think this was THE ONE, you know? It keeps paralyzing me and I'm afraid I'll never finish.

Which leads me to the insecure part of this post. I really wanted to have Search For Knowledge, the sequel to The Magic Wakes finished by now. It's been outlined for two years and half written for one. I stopped writing while I finished all the revisions on TMW and hoped to ride the high of being published to finish SFK.  I like what I've written so far, but I keep letting the inner editor interrupt the writing. What little I did write last month, I wrote in my notebook. For some reason I just couldn't deal with the doc open on my computer. It was way too intimidating.

I think I finally got to the bottom of my frustration.

I need to stop reading reviews.

Yeah, I know. Here's the funny thing. The written reviews have all been good and I can say they've made my day at times. However, there have been some things mentioned that I agree with, but I can't go back and fix it now. The frustrating thing is that 75% of the mentioned issues are things that got cut from the final product. Knowing that my instincts were right, but I let myself be talked out of them, is hard.

I feel like I let Talia down. Maybe that's why she isn't happy with me right now. She doesn't trust me to tell her story the way it's coming to me.

But I will.

I've learned a lot these last few months and I'm ready to take her story to the next level. If she'll start talking to me again.

How are your characters treating you right now?

Mid-Day Update:
I realize that I didn't post my new schedule for May! I'm going to post on Tuesdays and Fridays for May and probably the rest of the summer. I'll need the extra time to unpack and organize my house. And then it will be time to travel, sit by the pool, camp, etc.

I'll return to M, W, F posting this fall when my kids return to school.

Z is for Zee End!

Whew! We survived an entire month of posting alphabetically. I stayed on topic for the most part, didn't miss any days, and enjoyed reading other posts.

My failure for the month came in the form of commenting. I read hundreds of blogs a day but didn't post comments as often as I should have. There have just been too many things going on in my life. The great thing is they are all wrapping up at the same time as this challenge.

I'm closing on my new home this week and moving in. By the time I'm all unpacked and settled the kids will be getting out of school. It will be the end of a very stressful few months and the beginning of a wonderfully busy summer. Most of you know how much I love spending the summer with my kids. That means starting in June my posting will be sporadic at best.

Zee End is never the end though is it? And even a slow posting schedule can bring about some wonderful things. I plan on getting back to reading and posting reviews as well as writing and letting you know how it's progressing.

If you need a tour stop or are just looking for a place to guest post, let me know and we can work something out. Feel free to email me at charity.bradford @ gmail.com.

What was your favorite part of the A to Z Challenge?