It’s been a big year for a lot of reasons.
I haven’t posted anything like this in a while, so I thought I would give a brief runthrough of everything I’ve been doing so far in 2023, because so far, a lot has happened, and it all still boggles my brain!
In my personal life a few big events have happened: I sadly lost my nanna in April, but a lot of family all got together at the wake so that was a big positive from it. I did start visiting her in her care home for the first time in a few years (since Covid shook the world), so I’m pretty happy that I managed to do that.
I was made permanent at the school I work at, however, which was a lovely positive, since I’d been with an agency for a few months before that. I also had a meeting about a potential teacher training course for the future, which means that I have to retake my GCSE maths. So I’m now in my second year as a Teaching Assistant and loving it. I have lovely colleagues, and work with some really cool kiddos who never fail to make me laugh.
Onto the bookish things now! In no particular order.
I actually completed my Goodreads challenge of 25 books in August, and I’m now on 33! Pretty proud of that since I’m a slow reader.
The Girl Behind The Glass rewrites & publishing process.
My second book has been a long time coming. It has taken up a lot of my year. I got sucked into editing this thing quite early on in the year as my cover was designed early on, and then it was sent to my editor, who gave brilliant developmental feedback. Then, eventually, I was happy enough with it to get it prepared for a proofread and get my interior formatting, character art and map art done, and published it in October! To celebrate YALC weekend and the fact that I’m currently participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, where you write 50k words in a month) the book will be free to download for a few days from tomorrow. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-Behind-Glass-Spellbound-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B0CBHP3J3D#:~:text=Book%20overview&text=Winnie%20is%20the%20daughter%20of,of%20Icefall%2C%20the%20Winter%20kingdom.
NaNoWriMo!
If you haven’t heard of National Novel Writing Month before, it’s an annual challenge for writers where we can write 50k of a new novel in a month. It’s usually a pretty good way to kick your own butt and make yourself write! I’m taking part this year, for the first time since starting at my school job, and I’ve been filming my first vlogs of it for the first time in a while! Here is one I made last weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ-XsqL7n4E&t=146s
When you take part in the challenge, all you do is plan your book in advance (or don’t if you prefer!) and update your daily word count on their website: https://nanowrimo.org/dashboard This way you can keep track of your personal stats, talk to other writers in their chat forums, and you even get a certificate at the end if you manage to complete it! If you do take part, share your progress on social media because there are always people like me that want to vlog their process and talk about it with others as they go along.
Events as an author!
I still can’t believe it, but I’ve taken part in two big author events this year so far. I was supposed to take part in a third this month as well, but realised I wasn’t ready financially for that one. After all, it takes a lot of preparation. You have to purchase your own author copies to sell on your stall, and provide your items for sale, eg bookmarks to be given out for free, sweets to hand out to little ones and their families, and always make sure to have posters on the stall. I took part in both of these events with my two very good author friends, Ally Aldridge and Roxy Eloise, who also write YA fantasy, and we had a blast at both!
Herts Book Festival.
What an event this was! It was a bit of a trek for us, but I was lucky to have my parents drive me down and then drop me of so they could go to a zoo for the day, and I was able to stand behind our beautiful stall with Ally and Roxy and sell our books. We had a cool bundle, all three of our fantasy books for 20 pounds, which people seemed to like because we sold 5! I’d never been so buzzed. It was the best day. We also met lots of other authors, and got to talk about our villains on a cool panel.
Great Linford Manor Park Heritage Day – MK Literature Festival.
This one was an event I was invited to by the project manager of MK Literature Festival, something I’ll go into in a moment. Again, we had a stall to sell our books, and this one was actually on my home turf, and by a pretty little lake. It was a lovely day, and again we sold a couple of our bundles and got to meet some lovely people.
Milton Keynes Literature Festival – volunteering.
Earlier this year, after the success of Herts Book Fest, I emailed MK Lit Fest because I wanted to see more author led events like that one, as Herts was held in a big tent for lots of authors to come together and share their stalls, whereas MK’s events seemed to be very individual, like workshops and paid events. As a small indie author, I thought we have a lot of space to offer in Milton Keynes so I got in touch and quickly met up with Flora, the project manager. She later invited me to the Parks Trust Heritage day as a speaker, which was awesome, and later to help out at a Publishing Masterclass event for authors at Aiimii, a beautiful events space in the centre of MK. I also helped out at an event in Waterstones with authors Alex Hay and Freya Berry. I’ve met some lovely people since then, and had the best time networking. Can’t wait to do more with them in the future.
Steel Princess is finally becoming an audiobook!
It’s still early days, but we have some plans in the works for this book to finally get an audiobook! I’ve met a lovely narrator, and hopefully I’ll have more to share about this over the coming months!
Exciting times!
I’m sure I’ll have more to share soon. Thanks for checking out my page.
What are you reading at the moment? Any big recommendations on the horizon, especially YA fantasy? I’d love to hear them!
April Grace 