Newsletter Archives - Memoirs of an Imp of the Perverse

Jul

2023

All the Promos!

This is going to be one busy week for me! I have two Facebook takeovers, a promotion that starts tomorrow, and another one that starts on Thursday. So let’s get that out of the way first.

The Facebook Takeovers are on Friday and Saturday:

Friday, August 4th, 1PM Eastern — Laverne’s News

Saturday, August 5th, 1PM Eastern — One-Click Book Addicts.

They’re only 15 minutes each, so blink and you’ll miss them.

The first promotion, which starts tomorrow and runs all month, is the Brave New Worlds promo through BookCave. Sign up for author newsletters to download over 40 Fantasy and Science Fiction books, and enter for a chance to win a $20 giftcard to the bookstore of your choice.

If you don’t want to sign up for newsletters, then we have the BIG Tribe Called Success promotion, which will be this weekend ONLY. SO MANY BOOKS! All genres, and all free.

Neither of those links are live yet — Brave New Worlds goes live tomorrow, and the Tribe link goes to a sign up for a reminder email.

We’re also getting ready for school this week — Senior Year starts next week. We get the schedule THIS week, and I’m not ready to be the mom of a high school senior. I’m not. He was just five a minute ago.

Once school starts, work starts back in on The Sea Prince, and on Balance of Power (which I have admittedly been poking at since I finally knew the title.)

The Sea Prince
The Coral Throne, Book 1

43823 / 120000 (36.52%)

Balance of Power
Heir to the Firstborn, book 7

4202 / 90000 (4.67%)

Chapter one of Balance of Power will go live on my Patreon next week. Joining me on Patreon also allows you to go back to the beginning of Heir to the Firstborn and see how it has evolved since I first started this project in 2018, and tiers start at $1 a month.

I started something new last week — I put signed copies of Written in Water into a local bookstore on consignment! Spellbound Bookstore is an absolutely adorable little bookstore right at the edge of historic Sanford, Florida. (If you’re local? It’s across 17-92 from the Firestone on 1st Street, on the corner facing the Burger King. Parking and the entrance are in the back.) Three copies will be there for at least 40 days, so go check it out and support a local bookstore!

(Okay, two copies are left. I know one has already been sold.)

I also entered a consignment agreement with This Bookstore Kills Fascists, which isn’t open yet but it coming to the Tampa Bay area. They will have the entire Heir to the Firstborn series available once they’re open. Those won’t be signed, but I have signed bookplates if you want an aftermarket autograph — just message me!

I’m going to have a chat with a third bookstore next week, so I’ll let you know how that goes.

Now, you can already get my books in paperback at your local bookstore but they have to order them for you. Or you can get signed copies directly from me.

Catch you next week, with hopefully more news!

Oct

2022

Cover Reveal!

If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you saw these on Friday. (If you’re not… well, you could be. There’s a sign-up widget either to the right, or down below this post, depending on if you’re using an laptop or a mobile device.)

Anyway… Patreon patrons saw these first, newsletter subscribers got them Monday, and now here’s the big, wide reveal of the final two covers of the Heir to the Firstborn series!

I think Visions in Smoke is my new favorite of my covers. Preorders for both books are open now on Amazon, and will be coming shortly everywhere else. Click the covers to be taken to the preorder.

The other big announcement that went out on Friday was that Riverdale Avenue Books has acquired The White Raven: Morrigan’s Heir! Okay, blog readers knew that two weeks ago — sometimes, there is a benefit to following both the blog and the newsletter, since the blog is weekly and the newsletter is once a month.

As usual with me and writing historical fantasy, I have to look things up. A lot. So this week, my topics have been Roman medicine, surgical techniques (including the use of fibulae to close wounds!) and what would Cretic wine have tasted like (Cretic wine being wine laced with opium.) And I’m not even done with chapter one!

(Yeah, I’m not done with chapter one after two weeks. The writing has been slow.)

The White Raven: Morrigan’s Wrath

2859 / 90000 (3.18%)

***

The Sea Prince
(The Sea Prince, book 1)

39655 / 120000 (33.05%)

In other news, the final part of the Chronicles of John Zebedee went live on Kindle Vella this morning. John Zebedee Meets the Witch Queen of the Elvenlands is a long one, and will run until the end of January. Amazon is currently running a promotion where you can read 100 episodes a day for free. It ends tomorrow, so if you want to read the first two parts of John Zebedee, you can find Heir to the Elvenlands here, and Monstrous Town here.

Oh, me, will you look at the time? It’s right at this moment 1:30 PM and I have to leave in twenty minutes. That’s all for this week. Stay safe, everyone.

Sep

2022

Now.

This is basically where I live these days. Now. I’m not really thinking more than a week in advance, because so much can change in a week. So, I live in the now. The future? That’s Future-Liz’s problem. Now-Liz has enough to deal with.

As you might imagine, this makes planning anything… interesting. I’m still sitting down with my planners on Sunday, but I’m not looking any farther out than the following Sunday. Meal plans? Those are suggestions that may or may not happen (especially since my oven has decided it’s going on strike, and replacing a gas oven? That’s an interesting undertaking…)

On the upside, I’ll have an all new oven for Cookiepocalypse, when Future-Liz gets to that point. On the downside, I won’t have a new oven in time for next Sunday dinner. See why meal plans are suggestions?

So what’s happening in the now?

I’ve finished my read-through of the first four Heir to the Firstborn books, and passed them on to Darling Editor. New editions of the books will be going live in the next month or so, leading up to the release of Children of Dreams in November. I’ve updated the covers on the website, but I won’t be updating the covers in Goodreads or on any sale sites until the new content is available. Then I’ll do them all in one swell foop.

Today I start the read-through and rewrite on Visions in Smoke, which means that I should get into the read-through and rewrite of Children of Dreams sometime next week. At that point, I’ll probably set up the preorder for Children of Dreams. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Also in the now, I’ve confirmed that I can’t package and sell a book of compiled Vella episodes until 30 days after the last episode goes live. So that means that The Chronicles of John Zebedee will be an early March release, and I need to engage my cover designer at some point soon.

I’m doing another newsletter builder giveaway this month, with copies of Written in Water up for grabs, along with 30 other titles. Click the graphic to go over and see what’s available, and enter to win a $25 gift card.

I’ve gotten back into researching Imaginative Anthropology, but it’s hard to focus on even non-fiction at the moment. And I’m working on new edits on Swords of Charlemagne for Book View Cafe,

At some point, I may tell you what’s going on behind the scenes on this end, and WHY I’m so distracted. But right now, I don’t have permission from the others involved. Until that happens? You just get to know that there’s a lot of things happening here, and even vague good thoughts are appreciated.

Nov

2020

It’s November! Quick, Write a Novel!

(I had written a brilliant post. Absolutely brilliant… and lost it when I accidentally closed the browser. Ummm… genius is fleeting?

Wings of AirHeir to the Firstborn, Book 4

107521 / 150000 (71.68%)

***

John Zebedee Meets the Witch Queen of Elfland

724 / 30000 (2.41%)

It’s November, which means that Nanowrimo has started, and everyone is going to write a novel this month. Or at least, everyone is going to write 50K words. That’s most of a novel. Or, if we’re looking at the Heir to the Firstborn books, about half of one. If we’re looking at John Zebedee? That’s a book and a half.

I started John Zebedee Meets the Witch Queen of Elfland for my Nano project, and I think I can finish it in the month. And, since it’s novella length, I’ll be doing it while finishing up Wings of Air.

And then what? What am I going to do after I finally put John Zebedee to bed and get him out of my hair? Well, I have one more Heir to the Firstborn book to finish up after Wings of Air. And I have edits. Lots and lots of edits. I’m releasing the Swords of Charlemagne books in 2021, and while Hidden Things is ready to go… the other three books are not. I have my notes from the editor who worked on them, and I’ll be working on those once John Zebedee is finished.

There’s a cover reveal for Hidden Things this Friday in my newsletter. If you don’t read the newsletter, you won’t get that cover until next week. You’ll also miss this month’s recipe for one of my favorite Thanksgiving sides.

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I’m trying hard not to think about tomorrow. Tomorrow scares me in ways that I think I have never been scared before. And I keep trying not to think of the scene from Attack of the Clones:

So This is How Liberty Dies on Disney Video

I have hope, though. That’s about all we can have at this point. I mean, I voted two weeks ago. I did my part. But like any group project, our final grade is now dependent on if everyone else did THEIR parts.

So… hopeful but nervous.

However… I do a daily Tarot card drawing during the week, which I post on Twitter. I started almost a year ago, and the cards have not been wrong. Ever. They’ve been scary accurate in places (like the day they didn’t want to talk to me, so I just pulled any card. It was Justice, and that was the day that RBG died.)

This was today’s card:

Today's card

I like this one. I like this one A LOT.

Today's card is Death.

Significant change for the better. A positive, transformative cleansing.

SO MOTE IT BE!!! pic.twitter.com/H4sp69E6md

— Elizabeth Schechter (she/her) (@EASchechter) November 2, 2020

Significant change.

Positive, transformative cleansing.

Please let it be so!

See you on the flip side.

Sep

2020

Things and Stuff

Wings of AirHeir to the Firstborn, Book 4

78694 / 150000 (52.46%)

***

John Zebedee and the Monstrous Town

14387 / 30000 (47.96%)

It’s been a strange week. Not a bad week. Just a strange one. Not as many words as I’d have liked, but that’s largely because of the strangeness. I don’t normally feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for no reason, but there you are. And it’s not the “I’m sick” truck. More like “I’ve been hit by a pillow and must now nap” truck. I’m tired. Which makes it awfully hard to focus on making words.

It doesn’t help that yesterday, on what was supposed to be my rest day from exercise, we had to move our compost bin because the HOA is cleaning and painting the wall that runs behind our property. Compost bin was against the wall, so it needed to be moved. Which meant emptying the compost bin And also meant clearing half of the weedy bed where the pineapples have taken over, and where we’ll be moving the compost bin so we don’t have to do this again the NEXT time the HOA decides to maintain their bloody wall (seriously, the last time was over five years ago, and was before we had the bin.)

Thank goodness we saved the old kitty litter buckets. Five of them were filled with compost which was then spread into the vegetable garden. Six more are full and waiting to be returned to the bin once the bin is settled into its new home after the wall is painted.

On the upside, we’ve got the best turned compost in the state.

Once the wall is painted, we’re going to redo that entire bed, and the only reason we only cleared half the bed is because we have ANOTHER pineapple fruiting in the middle of the summer. About half of the pineapples we grow never make it into the house, because raccoons love them some pineapple. With the last one, they must have heard M thinking “That needs to come into the house,” because it was fine when he was out there mowing the lawn, but an hour later when he went to pick it, it was half eaten in the middle of the mowed lawn.

Raccoons are passive-aggressive goth corgis.

I have been writing, and I did get words in last week. I’m almost done with the synopsis for John Zebedee Meets the Witch-Queen of Elfland — I just figured out how to resolve a corner I backed myself into. Work proceeds on Monstrous Town, and on Wings of Air. Which, if you look at the numbers up on the tracker, is going to be a monster of a book. I really am thinking that there might be a book five in there. We’ll see what happens.

The first newsletter went out last week. I’m going to keep it to once a month for now, so the next one will be sometime the first week of October. Plenty of time to jump in and see what shenanigans I’m up to. (There will be a recipe in the next one!)

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Necronomicon (or NecroNOTacon!) is coming up in two weeks. I’ll be on a few panels (Steampunk and Writing Sex on Saturday, and moderating The Best Advice on Sunday. I will also be part of the annual Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me game on Sunday.) The fun is going to be that the first RWA Board meeting of the new board is the same weekend.

And that’s about all, I think. Back to making words!

Aug

2020

My Brains Are Full!

Wings of AirHeir to the Firstborn, Book 4

75034 / 150000 (50.02%)

***

John Zebedee and the Monstrous Town

11228 / 30000 (37.43%)

I’m really kind of amazing that I got that much done this past week. The RWA held their first ever Virtual Conference, and it was AMAZING!!! The panels went off brilliantly, and I only saw one tech snafu all weekend, and the meetups were fantastic, and the only thing missing was the hugging.

And I came away with a realization that I could be doing more. So… I’m doing more.

I’m starting a newsletter. It’ll probably be a once a month thing, with some excerpts just for newsletter subscribers, and news, and the current state of where things are in Liz-Land, at least in terms of publishing. Maybe recipes. It’ll be fun. There’s a place off to the right (or there should be) to sign up. Or you can sign up at the end of the post.

I’m also working on a logo, which you might have seen rough designs of on Instagram over the weekend. Right now, I have something that looks like an odd Pokemon. I’ll see if I can work it out to be a little less “gotta-catch-em-all.”

Although, if you want to catch all my books, I’m certainly not going to say no!

There was a great informal meeting on swag, and we got to talking about how swag needs to change when conferences are all online. And in talking about digital swag, I got to thinking about my first ever swag — those naughty dice from RWA Nationals in 2017.

It wouldn’t be hard to code a naughty dice roller, now would it? With interspersed book covers and links to my sales pages?

Like the original naughty dice, this idea made me giggle. A lot. So it’s something else that I’ll eventually play with. (No, I’m not farming this one out to Teen Boy. Even though he is better than I am at Java.)

Conference is over now (sadness!), and I’m back to work. Today is sort of a limbo day. It’s the last day of the RWA interim board service, and tomorrow starts the new board’s year of service. But the interim board really doesn’t have anything to DO today except breath. So that’s what I’m doing. Breathing.

And writing. Because I have to catch up on my words.

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