Love and Spaceships, Volume 5

A book deal and some other stuff, but yeah... A BOOK DEAL!

Welp, for those of you who have stuck with me on this log slog of a publishing journey and maybe felt a teeny bit sorry for me along the way (it’s okay if you did; there were a lot of times I felt sorry for me, too), it finally happened! I got a book deal!

It’s been about 7 years since I started this journey of becoming a traditionally published novelist. Three manuscripts and about 130 rejections later, I sold my rom-com HASHTAG, CELEBRITY CRUSH in a sweet 2-book deal to Hachette Forever, a Big 5 Publisher in New York City. This, folks, is what we writers call a “big deal.”

Here’s the official announcement.

Here’s a quick little video I made about the journey featuring two author friends of mine who happened to be down in Florida when I got the offer. I wouldn’t be where I am without them and so many others, including my husband who you can see in there giving me a huge hug. (I have to credit Mark for several of the jokes in the book.)

I’m usually a sci-fi writer, but I wrote this on a lark during COVID. How did it come about? Well, our family spent the quarantine watching the Marvel movies in the recommended order, and we got (ahem) a little obsessed. Mark had seen them all already, but the girls and I hadn’t. We got sucked into the characters, the story, the humor, and the actors so much so that the girls started looking up promo tour videos and sharing them with me. Being a part of building that epic story must have been so much fun.

All those feels mixed with my cabin fever got me wanting to write something funny and fun, set in Hollywood and centered around being a part of something like the MCU, so I invented Lost Star Dance Troupe Saves the Universe and let my imagination go from there. Did I imagine the Marvel actors playing many of the parts in the book? Yes, I did. It was part of the fun. And the book is chock full of sci-fi TV and movie references, so even if you’re not a “romance reader” per se, you’ll have fun picking out all those Easter eggs.

The book is scheduled to come out in the Spring of 2025, which is a long time away, but I’ll be using this time to build up my social media and have a little fun with you guys, who are along for the ride. Thanks again for being here!

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But what am I working on at the moment, you ask? In my last newsletter I mentioned a fantasy project based on my nephew Nick’s board game, Rolling Empires. We were going to launch it on Kindle Vella, but I discovered Vella’s not available in Canada.

Ummm… that doesn’t work for us since Nick is in Canada along with a lot of our family members and his Kickstarter supporters, so we are switching to Royal Road. This is a free online serialized fiction platform dedicated to fantasy and sci-fi. The only problem is that in order to maximize its algorithms for visibility, you have to publish a lot, and quickly—we’re talking 5 episodes a week.

Just watching Kermit trying to write that fast is stressing me out, so I’m going to work with Nick to get the whole thing written (or at least most of it ahead of time), and then we’ll release it on the optimal schedule. Sometimes you gotta play the game. (Get it? Play the game. It’s based on a board game?)

I promise the jokes in HASHTAG, CELEBRITY CRUSH are better.

I promise they are.

That’s all for now! In the meantime, if you know of anyone who might enjoy this newsletter, please share it with them, especially if you know they know me personally. I want to get the news out to everyone in my orbit.

It’s a big loaf of bread, and I want to share it.