News for the Week of 4.18.13: Fall-Down Tiredness, Three Dances' Warm Reception, and Potential Kickstarting

Hello, Dear Friends and Readers!

I write to you today completely and utterly exhausted. It’s been a heck of a week. The Three Dances launch party went off well last weekend; I’ve been posting snippets from my speech there up on my blog all week, if you’re interested. Tomorrow I’ll post a reading from “The Jazz Festival” as well.

Three Dances itself is getting a much warmer reception than I expected. I thought of it as quite a weird book, but people are saying wonderful things about it on Goodreads, and Amazon, and Wattpad, and also in private messages to me. And that makes me wonderfully happy.

Meanwhile it’s off to the next book! I’m finishing up revisions on Soulwoven: Exile---just ten chapters left, and I’m getting into the real meaty, pulse-racy, everything-changes-forever sort of material. I feel sort of like I’m dancing drunk, because by the time I get to the book every night I’m so tired I feel like falling over, and then I have to try to put words on the page in a way that makes sense and tells a story, and that’s hard.

But I learned in college that sometimes I dance pretty well when I’m drunk.

Anyway, the wonderful reception that Three Dances has gotten has me thinking more about Soulwoven and how to best launch it this summer. I’m thinking about a Kickstarter, because the book is long enough and serious enough that I’d love to buy some professional help for it (copy editing, developmental editing, and line editing, in that order), but I have nowhere near the funds I need in order to do so. And I like the idea of letting fans fund the book in return for little treats like signed copies and marked up manuscript pages and doodles in the margins and critiques or edits or phone calls or visits from me. I want to reach out and make you guys a bigger part of my writing and my life, and that seems like a great way to do it.

Oh, and as I’m finishing up on Exile, I’m noodling final revisions for Nadya. I think it’s going to be good. I was a little rushed getting it out to agents last month, and I think giving it another pass or two will do good things for it.

So that’s me, so tired that I forget to feel excited some days.

Hope all’s well with you, too.

-Jeff