What to Do After Finishing a Book

You worked so hard to finish your draft. Maybe you stayed up late, or you woke up early (you weird early bird you). Maybe you struggled to stick to your outline, or had to rewrite a hard scene eight times, or realized you introduced a character in the first half who just…disappeared (we’ve all been there). But you finally did it. You finished your book.

And…now what?

Sometimes, after spending months and months creating a book’s world, its characters, and its plot, I feel almost at sea. I never know quite what to do with myself. Do I keep tinkering at the chapters I know aren’t perfect? Do I let my friends read it? Do I print it out, put it in a shoebox, and bury it out back in the dead of night, never to be unearthed?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be wondering what to do after finishing a book too. Well, I’m here to help. Here are my pro tips for what to do after you finish a book, plus a few suggestions of what not to do.

DO let yourself be done. I realize how tempting it is to keep fussing with your draft even after you’ve written The End. There’s so much work still to be done! So many imperfections to correct! But it’s actually really important to hang a bell on the amazing thing you’ve just accomplished. Whether it’s your first or your fortieth, finishing a book is a big deal. And even if you know you’re going to return to it at some point, for this moment, it’s time to step away. Which leads me to my second point…

DO let your book rest. Not only do you need a break after writing your book, your book needs one too. Chances are, after spending so long focused on your draft, you’ve lost all perspective on it. When I finish a book, you can often hear me say, “This is either the best thing I’ve ever written or the worst.” But usually, after taking two weeks or a month away from it, I realize it’s neither. It’s usually half-way decent, but needs work. And that time away is necessary for me to see my work with fresh eyes.

DON’T send it to agents/editors/publishers right away. Don’t send a first draft to anyone in the publishing industry. Ever. I know it’s tempting to immediately share the thing you worked so hard on, but sending it out before it’s ready could damage its chances of being published, or even burn a bridge in the publishing industry. There’s still work to be done.

DO focus on yourself. Writing a book can be mentally and physically taxing. When I finally surface after finishing a draft, I’m usually a bit dazed, a bit burnt out, and often my wrists or my back are aching. Self-care is a necessity. Instead of jumping right into revisions, or starting a new project, try to take a little time to refill the well by reading, watching TV/movies, listening to music, or doing an art project that has nothing to do with writing. And remember that the healthier your body is, the healthier your mind is. Try going for a long walk, doing some yoga, or visiting your chiropractor.

DON’T come back to it until you’re ready. Avoid setting yourself a hard deadline for when you’re going to start edits (unless you’re actually on deadline, of course), like two weeks, or a month. Listen to your muse, who’ll let you know when your well is refilled and you’re ready to work again. I know I’m ready to come back to a draft when I start dreaming about it again. When the characters voices start chiming in my ears, and my fingers itch to pick up a pen. Sometimes that’s a few days. Sometimes it’s months. Some stories I never return to.

DO reread it. Once you feel ready to get back to it, the first step is reading what you’ve written. Now that you’ve gained some distance and perspective, a read-through will help you identify what’s good, what’s meh, and what definitely needs to be changed. Rather than diving in willy nilly, reading your work from start to finish should help you plan out your revision.

DO make big picture changes first. It may be tempting to obsess over grammar and word choice. And those are important! But chances are there are big, structural changes that need your attention first. And it sucks to spend hours perfecting a scene’s word choice only to realize you need to delete it or vastly rewrite it. Identify which scenes need to be moved, changed, or deleted entirely before nit-picking. Same goes for character arcs, world-building, and plot.

DO get some help. Finding people who can read your work and give you useful, honest feedback is invaluable. It’s not too hard to find beta-readers and/or critique partners, once you know where to look. Anyone whose opinion you trust is a good start, but I’d avoid parents, siblings, or good friends, since they probably love you too much to be particularly honest. Do you have a local writer’s group? Author acquaintances on the internet? Look for like-minded folks who are eager to read your work!

That’s it! Congratulations on finishing your book, and remember to pat yourself on the back–what a huge accomplishment!

Writing the Unknowns Back into History

March is Women’s History Month. As longtime readers of this blog know, women’s history is my jam, so I felt like I couldn’t let this month’s post go by without talking about it. But I want to come at it from a slightly different angle than I have before. I apologize right now if this post sounds self-serving but this is my soapbox as of late.

I’ve set myself up on a hard path as an author because I write about people no one has ever heard of. People are naturally leery of what they don’t know or understand and thus less likely to take a chance on a book whose subject they don’t already recognize. And that can be a depressing prospect when you’re trying to write a book while balancing everything else in life. However, I am committed to sticking to my mission of shedding light on the stories of unknown women.

As we are all aware, history has been written, by and large, by white men. And it has been reduced to a handful of “marquee names,” leaving out even the influence of many important white men, not to mention women and people of color. That is a tremendous loss for us and for what we believe to be true about our nation. Yes, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Tubman are important. But much like Hollywood and its never-ending love of sequels and reboots, if we don’t contribute something new to history (or in my case historical fiction), we won’t ever learn anything new, just keep hashing the same old points over and over. Without a variety of perspectives in our history, we are looking back on a false, or at best incomplete, record.

History is anything but homogeneous, so our books about it should reflect diversity. Where are the stories of the women who supported the great men we read so much about? Where are the overlooked and uncredited women? (Hidden Figures was a great start, but there are so many more.) What about the LGBTQIA women who risked their lives by being who they were in an intolerant nation? Where are the stories of the strong women who survived natural disasters, poor harvests and plague (1918 Spanish Flu, anyone?) to go on to either do great things or just lead quiet lives? I’ve learned through my research that there are so many amazing stories that we don’t learn about in school and readers deserve the chance to know about them, too.

Every now and then an untold story breaks out. As Hamilton has shown us, there were other key men fighting for America’s independence and shaping the new nation, just as there were other people fighting for abolition, women’s suffrage and conducting the Underground Railroad. It is wonderful that we have our idols to look up to, but we shouldn’t limit our learning to just their stories. When that happens, we miss out on the rich tapestry that made our history happen. Just as it hasn’t been one person or even a council of people who have helped us get to what I hope is the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, not a single person made any other event in history happen. Thousands of people, many of them women and people of color, contributed to abolition. But we only remember the loudest handful of voices. What about everyone who supported those four or five icons or those whose stories are tread over completely in favor of the well-known names?

I believe in widening our history, not narrowing it down. I want everyone to know about the 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin, who refused to move to the back of the bus, months before Rosa Parks got the glory for doing the exact same thing. I want people to be riveted by the story of Ida Tarbell, the journalist who created modern investigative journalism in the early 1900s with an expose on Standard Oil, even though Julius Chambers and Nellie Bly are often credited with that feat. (I love me some Nellie Bly, don’t get me wrong, but her methods were different than Ida’s, whose are much closer to the ones still used today.) And I want people to read the stories of women of color–Black, Asian, Native American– and the spouses (gay and straight) who contributed to the women’s suffrage movement. Those stories alone would go a long way toward giving us a more complete picture of our history, of who we can and should admire and what we can do in our own lives to change the course of history.

But it is difficult to make people change. It’s easier and less risk to reach for a book about a person or from an author you already know and love. I do it just as much as the next reader. As an author, the only thing I can tell myself is to just keep going. Flood the market with as many books about unknowns as I can. And should that mean I will have to keep self-publishing and accept that I won’t ever be rich from my writing, so be it. But I can also hope that, not unlike Hamilton, one of my unknowns will take off and change everything.

New Release and ALL the Giveaways!

That cat is me this morning. I’ve got the day-before-release-day spins. There’s *this* to do and *that* to do and omg I forgot something else!! Please may I have an extra few hours today….like maybe 24 extra….?

It’s clear that I haven’t figured out how to balance the writing with all the non-writing parts of being an author. I find it awfully easy to get caught up in the networking and blog posting and promo-joining and whatnot. There’s also the editing and the formatting and the cover arting and the teaser-making. It all sucks up so much time! This last couple weeks I’ve been spending just about every free moment on something to do with publishing – and some not-so-free moments, tbh – and I haven’t written a new word in all that time.

Yikes.

But enough about me. (LOL!) You’re here for the new release and ALL the giveaways, right? I’m pretty excited about this book. It’s different from our other Irene&Liv books, but it’s still us. In a good way. Frog is part of the Royal Powers series, a shared-world series about an imaginary country on the coast between France & Spain, with two mythical royal families who also happen to possess superpowers. When they invited us to contribute, we couldn’t say no to a premise like that, and it was a whole lotta fun to play in that world.

You can find Frog HERE! It’s $3.99 or FREE with KU!

Here’s the blurb...

Spy vs Spy

Jim Calhoun and his sister Lori are just two Americans in North Abarra exploring their roots. They are definitely not off-duty CIA agents.
Enzo da Silva is the head groundskeeper on Princess Odile’s country estate. He is definitely what he seems to be – the guy who trims the hedge maze and measures oxygen levels in the national forest.
The Princess’s birthday bash is a major celebration every year. As the big day approaches, a series of accidents plague the preparations. It’s almost like someone wants things to go wrong. But it’s not as though two commoners like Jim and Enzo – with absolutely no super powers – can stop a rogue supervillian.  And if Jim and Enzo keep showing up at the same crime scenes, it’s not because they can’t keep their eyes off each other.
Definitely not.

Did I mention you can find Frog on Amazon? It’s $2.99 or FREE with KU!

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To celebrate the second season of the Royal Powers series, all of the authors got together for a SUPER BIG giveaway! The prize is a $75 gift card plus books from all the authors, and you can find the rafflecopter widget HERE. (Irene and I are also running our monthly giveaway for a $10 gift card. The rafflecopter widget for that one is conveniently located on the same page.)

Click HERE to get to the GIVEAWAY!

And finally, I joined another multi-author giveaway! One lucky winner will win a bundle of prizes including 2 x $5 gift cards, 8 x backlist ebooks, 1 x swag bundle, 1 x audiocode, & a signed paperback! Here’s a list of some of the participating authors:
RJ Scott, H.L Day, Clare London, Davidson King, Susan Scott Shelley, Liv Rancourt (that’s me!), A.D. Ellis, Elle Keaton, Anne Barwell, Avery Cockburn, Mel Gough, Jay Hogan, and Elizabeth Noble.

A bunch of the authors have freebies over on bookfunnel. You can find them here!
And go here to enter to win the grand prize!!

Thanks so much for reading along!!

Art Can and Should Be an Escape

As artists we like to think our work is important. It doesn’t matter what your media is, you want your art to reach people, bring them some joy, provide some entertainment, no matter what that might mean for the consumer. I like to think of art as an escape and I do try to provide that when I’m writing. Probably why I like to write Fantasy novels.

As I’ve mentioned, my family went through some tough times in the last few months, beyond the pandemic. But even before that happened to us, we were dealing with the pandemic just like all of you. Trapped at home, feeling weird doing normal things like going to the grocery store or getting take-away, letting the days run into each other. And of course, a small bummer was that all of our shows were out of production for months, so we didn’t even have that as an escape.

Then the shows came back! Places were able to let production companies get back to work and we were all promised new content! Huzzah!

But, oof. What a disappointment so many shows were! What I couldn’t understand was how so many–SO MANY–shows decided to lean into pandemic and incorporate it into their stories. Like. WHY?

I know at the beginning of the pandemic it was still kind of novel; plenty of us were relatively untouched by it and sales of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books spiked. People were watching those kinds of shows and movies. It was like hair of the dog, right? Let’s see how much worse it could be instead of just realizing you’ve been wearing the same pair of pajama pants for three days and have probably downloaded one too many food delivery apps for that free first delivery fee. I understood it. Hell, I even did a live-stream story time of World of Ash for my followers.

But after eight months of it, I was definitely past that point and ready for a real escape. I wanted some levity, some feel-good, some normalcy in my entertainment. But every show had the damn pandemic in it. Or fucked up politics (I mean, we definitely had plenty of that too, right?) Even sitcoms, which should be a completely safe space for some stupid, predictable humor, had the pandemic in them. I mean. Shows that never mention real current events or who the real-life president still had the pandemic in their storylines. WHY? (I will make an allowance for Prodigal Son–they mention it, but skipped it. Like, the characters went through “quarantine” but we didn’t have to go through it with them. That wasn’t so bad.)

Then my world blew up personally and, when I had some precious time here and there to sit for a minute and check out, I was desperate for real, light, easy escape. I didn’t want to be reminded how ugly the world was. I didn’t want to watch someone have their world taken away from them. I didn’t want to see what I could see out my window on my screen. That’s not an escape. That’s rubbing salt in the wound.

I don’t actually remember a time where I needed something like books or TV to distract me from actual disaster. The last few months of 2020 were the hardest months of my life, so it was the first time where I looked at my sources of entertainment for some help checking out, even if just for an hour here or there. When I say I want my books to provide readers a little escape, I’m thinking of escape from every-day life. Something different. Something fun and dangerous but safe.

I’ve never thought about how someone might be going through the darkest part of their life and my books helping them escape, even if just for an hour or two. Now. I have had readers reach out to me with notes about how my books did just that for them and it really touched me. I don’t think about that when I’m writing because, let’s face it, that’s a lot of fucking pressure to put on yourself. So I just write the story I’m gonna write and hope someone enjoys it. If it turns out it helps them through a dark or terrible time, I am so grateful.

And I needed that myself. I couldn’t really read. That seemed to ask too much of my brain. I was lucky and fellow Scribe, Lyra, had a WIP that she wanted beta’d and it turned out to be a light-hearted escape with drama I could mentally manage. It was a nice escape into a part of the country I’d never seen and there were no pandemics or politics. But TV? Movies? Nope. So, at the suggestion of my dear mom, I tried Psych.

So light-hearted. So funny. So vanilla but entertaining. A buddy comedy that’s not really about cops. It’s even set in the next county over from me. Yes, there’s plenty of murder in it, but it’s cozy murder mysteries, not blood and gore and terror. It was exactly what we needed–true escapism. Even the drama aspects weren’t too much to manage. We could watch an episode or two and feel our anxiety levels evening out. We could turn our brains off and unwind from terrible days so we could go to bed relaxed.

Realizing how little in the way we have of these kinds of shows anymore, Psych, The Librarians, Veronica Mars, Buffy, is disappointing. I don’t mean you can’t stream these older shows, I mean we don’t have anything like it now and these shows keep getting cancelled, even if they’re popular–good sitcoms are also axed left and right while trite and annoying ones are allowed to be renewed again and again. There is a glut of drama out there, for sure. But we also need shows that don’t ask too much of us. Light romance, extremely light drama, enough gentle comedy, all neatly tied up in a 44-48 minute bow.

There were times where I worried my Matilda Kavanagh Novels were too basic witch, too light, too quick. But I wrote them because they were fun for me. I enjoyed the episodic nature of the series–each book can be read on its own but there are over-arching stories tying them together as a series. I liked that the characters didn’t ask too much of me. Yes, there are some darker themes and Big Bads, but there’s a lot of fun and silliness in them too. I needed that and maybe, sometimes, you do too.

Art as escapism is as important, I think, as art as a statement. I hope, when we get on the other side of this, we get back to some fun escapism again. Not everything has to be high brow drama or slap-stick comedy. There’s some middle ground and I hope more TV and Movie writers and producers remember that.

I will say, since we’ve gotten to the other side of our ordeal, we have been able to give other, newer shows a chance. If you haven’t watched Bridgerton, I don’t know why. And I’m giving big kudos to Resident Alien because Allan Tyduk never disappoints and it is really, really funny.

And just one last comment. Can the new trope of the dead wife as the set up for the widower’s story please stop? Legit, there are at least 3 “sitcoms” with that plot on right now.

Anyway. What shows, movies, or books are your go-tos when you need an escape? Are there any out there that got you through a tough time?