Hello you wonderful people!
I hope you enjoyed your half-sunny, half-cloudy bank holiday in lockdown. I had a tiring but fun weekend. It involved a visit from the family in the garden while we all tried our best not to get blown away in the wind, a BBQ in the sunshine a day later and copious amounts of gin. But most importantly, I finished chapter 19! I am now at 52,932 words for those of you who were wondering, which I am pretty sure your weren’t. But I am telling you anyway, because I am excited. Exhausted, but excited! I am fast approaching the end of my first draft. That’s right, the end is in sight! Then the real fun begins, where I go through everything I have written and add in all those extra little bits of detail. I am itching to get it finished and out there, but I have to keep reminding myself not to rush. As tempting as it is, I really want Hunted to tell you all those things that Gifted did not. I can’t wait for you all to find out the histories of the characters and how they became who they were in book one.
I have enjoyed seeing a couple more reviews appear over the weekend, which is awesome! My paperback sales seem to have rocketed over the last couple of days too which is really exciting. There are over 6 million books on Amazon, my rating has been steadily dropping since the original hype of release day and I had dropped to number 312,747 in the Amazon charts. Today, I have shot all the way up to 30,804! It is the highest it has been since the 7th May and obviously I am overjoyed. At it’s best, the paperback was at 5,935 and Kindle was 4,886. There’s a long, looooooooong way to go before it’s a bestseller, but it’s on its way.
Anyway, here is my weekend summed up in pictures…
Maybe not the most inspiring of sunsets, at least not through my phone, but they were pretty stunning from my house. I have taken to writing in my kitchen on an evening because I can watch the sunset while I write. The sunsets are one of my absolute favourite things about my house. After always living in fairly built up areas, I cannot get enough of the views now that we have moved out to the sticks. The wildlife is pretty impressive too!
As I mentioned in a previous post, our garen is pretty useless at the minute, but it’s BBQ season and the garden will not stop us! My lovely Dad loaned us his camping BBQ until we start work on the garden next month. I am hoping that the garden will be a nice place for me to write in the summer. And also a nice place to drink!
If my weekend had not already been filled with enough food, it definitely was after we found somewhere delivering desserts. This was my daughter’s ‘Daim Girl’ waffle. She had this after consuming her weight in fillet steak. And no, we could not move for the rest of the evening. It was not big and it was not clever. But it was delicious!
Step aside Stephanie Meyer! If only!
As mentioned before, I had a couple more reviews appear over the weekend. Unfortunately, I lost one too, which is really frustrating! It would appear that Amazon are thoroughly enjoying making my cry by deleting my reviews at the moment. But I have screenshots of them all and reading them really does make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So keep them coming!
A huge thank you to Rachael and Becky Boo for these two lovely reviews. I am so pleased that you both enjoyed it and I hope you will both read book 2 when it is released.
This wonderful lady wrote two of my most favourite EVER series. She is fantastic! A few years back (like, seven years back), I contacted her through Goodreads and Facebook, asking her for any recommendations when it came to writing and publishing. At the time, she replied to me a few times and I was blown away by how lovely she was. She has written and released a new book, chapter by chapter, through her blog and last weekend she uploaded the full lot as a free book on Amazon, which I downloaded the second I saw it. I sent her a little thank you note on her Facebook announcement for her advice all those years ago, and she only bloody replied!
If you are ever stuck for something to read, I seriously recommend anything written by Josephine Angelini. I have never and will never fall in love with fictional characters the way that I did in her books.
And that pretty much sums up my weekend. The sun has well and truly gone again and my guinea pigs are all grumpy with me because they can’t get out in the garden as much. I am still in desperate need of a hairdresser, and I am still missing hugs 🙁 But, we are happy and healthy and we are staying safe. I hope you all are too.
Love Love xx
