I'll admit it. I went through a writing lull after I released Misfit. I had other things on my mind, and it took me a long time to convince myself to sit down and write anything. However, a couple weeks ago that beautiful being that is inspiration struck me with her arrow, and I've had a hard time stopping myself from writing since.
So on my birthday, June 28th, I will release my next book Witches in the Holy City. I chose that date, because I figured it would be good to have a deadline to have it finished by since I'm not at the mercy of an agent of publishing company. That gives me a little over a month to finish the book and do the final editing, which I am more than confident I can achieve. Mostly because last year I wrote a book with these characters, and after rewriting and editing it about a zillion times I still wasn't satisfied with the final product. It was just too "blah" for my taste. I loved the character I created, but there was too much focus on the romance between the two main characters, and while I do enjoy a good (please take note on the emphasis of that word) romance, I don't like it when that's the main plot. I realized this book was too much like a lot of the crappy paranormal teen romances I was reading, and that made me very ashamed of myself.
After letting it rest for a while, and focusing on Misfit, I decided not to let these characters remain unshared (not including my mom, who is very mad that I'm re-writing this book). One day the idea for a new plot line just clicked, and I started writing so fast that I didn't even stop to correct my misspellings as I went, which is something I always do, because I can't stand seeing that little red line underneath a misspelled word. The next thing I knew, I had a good chunk of the book written, and what wasn't written was already in my mind and waiting to be typed.
This book takes place in a college setting, and when I had the original draft I wasn't sure if it should be thrown into the YA category or not. I felt like because it's college, it shouldn't, but the content of the first manuscript seemed a little too YA-ish. Or maybe that's just my own personal criticism. Plus, the narrator is nineteen, and that's technically an adult, but most people think of anyone under 21 as a "young" adult. I think for genre labeling college is sort of a grey area, but I finally decided to just go ahead and not put a YA label on it. So even though my "target" audience (I hate that phrase, because I feel like a "target audience" should be anyone who wants to read the book) is college-age people, I think anyone over the age of 14 could enjoy this book.
So once the cover for the book is finished I'll put up another post dedicated to the book with a synopsis. And thus ends another long post from Shawn.
