WIP Wednesday: Your last glimpse of Some Assembly Required before it is submitted!

Lex Chase and I have been hard at work finishing up our comedic (and surprisingly angsty and robust) foray into IKEA's spectral plane. I'm spending my day with some last-minute edits and then Some Assembly Required will be off to our publisher. It's been an interesting lark--much plottier and heartfelt than we'd imagined it we jokingly set out to see if we could outline a book based on a silly writing exercise assigned by Damon Suede at a conference in Orlando earlier this year.

It was never a book we truly intended to write, but Damon liked the snippets we'd written in the class and encouraged us to continue it. And then our editor heard him talking about it with us, and the rest is history. Or rather, the rest is ghosts falling in love in purgatory, which just happens to be housed in IKEA.

Given how much time we've spent frantically trying to finish by our deadline--which is today, by the way, because Lex and I like to live dangerously and down-to-the-wire--it was a surprise that coming to the end of the manuscript took us by, well, surprise. Suddenly we were done. It was happy, to be sure, because every writer likes to actually finish a project. But we were also sad to leave Benji and Patrick behind because we'd fallen in love with them. Personally, I think I might miss Agnes the most. She's plucky and mysterious and has most of the great one-liners in the book. *g*

So without further ado, here's the last snipped of Some Assembly Required you'll see here in #WIPWednesday, since after today it's no longer a #WIP. *sniffle*

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Some Assembly Required, release February or March 2016, Dreamspinner Press

Agnes didn't look over, absorbed in her knitting and apparently trusting him to work through the snarled yarn himself. He started winding. “Find her parents?” 

Benji didn't bother to ask how she knew. Agnes seemed to know everything that went on in the store, which made it all the more puzzling that Patrick thought he could prank her. Surely Patrick realized that Agnes was more, didn't he? Benji couldn't put it to words, not even in his own head, so he'd never tried to talk about it with Patrick. Besides, he kind of liked the unique bond he and Agnes had. It was certainly better than the antagonistic one she shared with Patrick. 

“Her mom. Pretty sure that will be the last time she wanders off. She was shaken up.”  

Agnes nodded, looking up briefly from her knitting. “Something about it shook you up, too.” 

It had, but he hadn't really noticed it until Agnes said something. He was always happy to reunite a missing kid with its parents, but it usually felt better than this. Today Benji just felt empty.  

And really, always and usually? Benji wasn't one for melodramatics, even in his own inner monologues. Why was he be using words that implied he'd been here years when it had been a month or two, tops? He needed to find a hobby or something.  

“I wish Patrick would decide if he was avoiding me or not,” he said, because Patrick was kind of like having a hobby. If a hobby was rude and sarcastic and more often than not ended with Benji needing to regenerate in the ball pit with Agnes.  

Agnes hummed. “Patrick has a lot more than that to decide,” she murmured. Her lips moved soundlessly as she counted her stitches, though the mass of finished rows on her lap followed no discernible pattern. Agnes's knitting was as cryptic as her advice.

Book three is finished! Party's on!

It's done! The final installment in the Dropping Anchor series has been sent in to my publisher. *big sigh of relief*

Credit: PlentyofColour

I've really enjoyed getting to know Niall and Ethan, Luke and Ian, and now, in the latest book, Frank and Warner. And as much fun as I've had with them, I'm definitely ready to move on and discover a new universe of characters.

This is also the first time since October 2013 that I don't have deadlines I'm working toward. It's both freeing and terrifying! There are probably half a dozen manuscript snippets I've started and put aside over the last nine months because I had to devote my time to the books already scheduled for publication, so now I'm at loose ends trying to decide what do pick up first. I feel like a kid in a candy store--any way I turn there's something exciting waiting for me, and I can't make up my mind!

For today, though, I'm going to focus on some of the mundane things that slip through the cracks when I'm on deadline...like vacuuming. And folding a mountain of laundry.

Anniversaries, travel, and rejection

I got a lot of crap for being so bundled up
(that's two coats and two sweaters plus my
scarf!) but what can I say? I'm half Filipino.
Any time it's less than 70 out I'm freezing.

I'm slowly climbing back into a regular writing schedule after taking most of July off for a few oh-shit-summer-is-almost-over-we-need-to-go-somewhere trips. After a week at the beach with the kids in South Carolina, we went up to Chicago for a few days. After that I flew out
to see my best friend Shannon in California for a few days, and then Hubs joined me and we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary a mere one month before our 11th with a trip to San Francisco (without the kids!).

Hubs and I have been together for 16 years, married for 11. We met on the first day of college our freshman year, and the rest is history. Part of what makes us work so well is our shared passion for social justice and our quirky and dark sense of humor. This week he's been in Seattle for business, and his trip got off to a bit of a rocky start when he had to rush a colleague to the emergency room after they went out for a meal together and the guy had an allergic reaction to something and went into anaphlactic shock. He stayed in the waiting room after the doctors took the guy upstairs, and a few hours later a nurse came down to get him. His colleague had given them Hubs' name as his person, and the nurse and doctors made the assumption they were a couple and had Hubs come up to be briefed on his condition and care instructions.

Anyone who's read The Buyout knows it's a very similar situation to the one Parker and Mason found themselves in, and once we knew his colleague was going to be okay, I pointed that out to him. His response pretty much sums up why I've put up with him for 16 years. He just gets me.

Somewhere in that whirlwind of travel I managed to eek out about 19K for my Christmas-themed novella Late Bloomer. It was rejected for the Dreamspinner Press Advent calendar anthology earlier this month, but I'm still in love with the story, so I've submitted it as a standalone novella. Cross your fingers!

After a month of being a nomad, it was a bit of a shock to the system to come home and have the Bub start first grade a few days later. We're back on a brutal (for a night owl like me) schedule of 6 a.m. wake-ups, and I'm not adjusting well.

Being home has given me time to get back to buckling down and focusing on writing. Edits have started on my novel Island House, which is scheduled for release in November. It feels good to be back in the literary saddle, so to speak. The Barnacle doesn't start preschool til after Labor Day, though, and the poor thing just mainlined about sixteen episodes of Jake and the Neverland Pirates on Netflix while I was in the zone focusing on my first-round publisher edits. Oops.




 

Turn that frown upside down...dealing with rejection

I'm fully aware that as a newbie author, I've been incredibly lucky. I spent months trolling internet discussion boards, blogs, and publishing resource sites trying to pump myself up for that first submission, armed with all of the publishing horror stories about how many rejections it takes before you finally get that successful bite. When I did take the plunge and submit to a publisher, the surge of nervous anticipation right after hitting send felt like every birthday-Christmas-night-before-the-tooth-fairy eve I've ever had. (I'll be honest, I've sent off four more since that first one, and the feeling is the same every time.)

My first three submissions were accepted, which I'm over the moon about. Every time I send something off, I feel like a small part of me holds its breath until I hear back. (For my upcoming novella, The Buyout, that wait was six weeks. That's not a really long submission lead-time in the publishing world, but damn, that first full breath after its acceptance was a nice one!)

This time, though, the much-awaited email was a rejection. My submission for an anthology didn't quite fit the bill, and I'll admit I had that heart-crushing moment of self-pity. But the editor was compassionate and professional, so the self-pity didn't last long. The rejection was sandwiched between a "I really liked it, but..." and a "You could try to re-write it and submit it as a novella," so I decided to turn that frown upside down and make it a smile. Or rather, turn that short upside down, add a few thousands words, and make it a novella. There's no guarantee that it'll go over better this time, but at least I've tried. And I love these characters, so spending a little more time in their world is a pleasure, not a hardship.

Connor and Jake have been together since college and their relationship has fallen into the rut that many longterm relationships do. They take each other for granted. They work overtime, they miss dinners. They slide into bed at night and keep to their own side because they're so damn tired that all they want to do is sleep. To make matters worse, they have a roommate, so their love life lacks the spontaneity of kitchen sex or even just the wanton thrill of being as loud as they want to be when they do find time for sex. When Connor becomes secretive and pulls away even more, Jake starts to worry that their relationship is in trouble. He even begins to suspect that Connor's having an affair. Just as Jake is sure that Connor is pulling the rug out from under him and sending their stable relationship crashing to the ground, though, Connor surprises him with a romantic weekend that puts all his fears to rest.

(See? Would you be sad about having to spend more time writing with these guys? With all this angst-turned-sweetness, my rejection frown is definitely turned upside down now!)


I'll be finishing the novella up this week and sending it off, so think happy thoughts for me. I'm also waiting for the submission editors to review my first full-length novel, Island House, so I'm a big ball of nervous angst right now. And while that's bad for my blood pressure, it's great for my house. I'm an anxiety-cleaner, so things are looking pretty spotless around here right now. (It makes up for how neglected things get as I finish up a manuscript!) *g*

What's coming up

I was lucky enough to get to attend the Dreamspinner Press Author Workshop last month in Chicago, and I came home super-charged and ready to write all the things. Of course, that only lasted a day or two before the realities of shaping my writing schedule around two young kids and a my freelance writing gig.

Driving into Chicago for the Dreamspinner Author Conference

First, can I just say how impressed I was with Dreamspinner Press? The workshop was awesome, and I really did feel privileged to be there. As a newbie author, it was amazing to get to meet some of the authors I really admire, like Amy Lane, J.P. Barnaby, Andrew Grey, B.G. Thomas, Shira Anthony and so many others. Just being in the same room as them was a bit panic-inducing, I'll admit. And there was swag! (I'm using my DSP ear buds to rock out to the new Fall Out Boy album while writing this!) *g*

Meeting the Dreamspinner editorial staff and about 70 other authors was a really motivating experience, and I've been trying to incorporate some of the things I learned into my daily work flow. (Like Tweeting more and blogging more often...) I also committed to a goal of writing 300,000 words this year. Daunting but something I'm excited to try!

To that end, I'm happy to announce that I was able to (finally!) finish Island House and get it submitted to Dreamspinner. It's the story of Niall Ahern, who left the U.K. for the British Virgin Islands four years earlier when his partner died, and Ethan Bettencourt, the man who makes Niall realize his life didn't end with Nolan's. They meet when Ethan arrives on the island looking for a vacation home. He chooses Niall as his real estate agent, and the two begin a flirtation that spans a hurricane, several misunderstandings, and two countries.

Those of you who've been coming to my fiction site for awhile might remember my Connor and Jake series. Their angsty love story was too fun not to expand on, so I indulged and put them through a little more hell before they finally got a chance at their happily ever after. That story, Better than Okay, is a short I submitted for Dreamspinner's cuddling anthology. Still awaiting news on that front, but I'll let you know if they make it into the anthology!