Taryn East Writes

Hi folks, Wow I've had such an overwhelming start to this year I haven't had a chance to catch my breath. With starting a new full time job; and kidlet starting school; a neck injury; and my sister's upcoming wedding... Life has been a bit full-on and I'm only barely getting back up to speed now. So, my apologies for not keeping up with my usual schedule, but I've had to do some re-adjustment to my personal expectations. As such, I've made a hard decision - which is to postpone the release date for King Tide. With the original due-date being in June I still have a couple of months, but I'm nowhere near ready for that (especially with my sister's June wedding). I feel like if I push myself try to get it out, as per the previous timeline, what I'll end up with will be a rushed/half-arsed product that will not be as good as it could be. So I'm going to push back the release-date by at least several months. Probably until November. That will gi...

If you didn't know, November is NaNoWriMo a month of hectic writing fun in an attempt to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, and I participated, and "won" (I made the 50K... just barely) :D I haven't quite reached "the end" yet, so I might keep at it for part of December too, in the hopes of finishing up the prequel I've been working on. I've also finished and launched The Conjunction in paperback on amazon! So go get it, if you like dead-tree format! :) In due time (ie the next couple of weeks) I'll eventually get the author copies I ordered, and I plan to sell signed copies through my main website. Note: if you buy them direct from me, I'll make a slightly larger royalty than if you buy them from amazon. Also if you buy them from amazon, I get a slightly larger royalty than if you buy them from other distributors. Finally, despite the huge difference in price, I don't make any more off paperbacks than I do off ebooks...

I'm so excited, the paperback version is nearly done! Here's a quick sneak-peek at the cover. I'm hoping to have it all sorted before Black Friday, though that might be a stretch.

I had a good month full of busyness. I got myself back in the habit of regular writing by working up a backstory for Tink. Dunno if I'll write it up and make it available to others. It's interesting as a story, but not sure it's a very gripping tale. Maybe if I have some spare time. But it served its purpose and got me into writing every day again for next month's plans. I've been working out how to use Amazon Ads by participating in the 5-day amazon ad challenge. Ads are essential tools for authors, because otherwise how do people find out about your book? Amazon ads are the ones that occur next to searches, and you can target them so that eg only people that are already interested in your genre get ads for your book - which means people get annoyed less by ads for books they aren't likely to be interested in, and this is what I was learning how to do. I've just begun, so there's not many people coming in to look at my stuff yet, but hopefully th...

Biggest month evar!!! This month was launch month and The Conjunction finally went live. All my pre-orders went through, and I've seen a few individual others picked up as well as plenty of page-reads in KDP, which tells me that at least some people are pretty happy reading it through. I also got my first pre-order for book 2 (which I suspect may be my dad - thanks dad!) :D Speaking of, my cover artist ( Burning phoenix covers ) put the finishing touches on the cover for book 2, as well as giving me some A+ content that I have yet to upload, which means that my book 2 King Tide went live for pre-order. I've updated my author website (through Nerdly) here: Taryn East Writes to add both my new books, as well as moved a few pages from the blog there, eg my Reading List I officially joined IASFA because now I am officially a SF/F author! I've started getting back into writing (after a couple of months of solid editing only) and have picked up Tink's backstor...

Another big month, mostly editing in preparation for publishing The Conjunction , which will finally go live in 3 week's time (so much excitement!) :D Until then The Conjunction is still available for pre-order on amazon The Conjunction has gone to my copy-editor, and I've been integrating their edits as I go (I'm about halfway there). It then just requires a proof-read and it'll be ready to go by my 21st of September target. I had fun with the amazon 5-day ad-challenge, and learned a little bit about how to get my book in front of the people who will hopefully enjoy it the most. I'm getting plenty of impressions (around 5000 total), and about the right amount of clicks (4) - but no sales that way so far. I wasn't actually expecting any sales, my book is a singleton from an unknown author and not even available for reading yet. But it was a great exercise, and cost me a grand total of 84c, so I may keep the ads up for a while and see if anything changes w...

Wow! What a month! I did a full read-through of The Conjunction , editing as I went - adding in some more snappy lines and a few extra fixups based on some beta-reader commentary. I then did a hard edit using ProWritingAid . Goodness, that is a really useful app! Well worth the lifetime subscription! It pointed out a lot more things than I’d have thought, and by the last few chapters I was editing a lot of the things as I went, rather than waiting for ProWritingAid to point it out to me. I also played around a lot with Scrivener to produce a final-ish copy of the document - with table-of-contents, front and back matter, etc. I’ve now handed the complete novel off to the copy-editor/proof-reader and am eagerly awaiting their results (and the next round of editing) 😃 In the meantime, I signed up for the “5 day amazon ad challenge” (cos it was free). I set up a few ads - totally not expecting anything at all to happen, because: first novel AND only in pre-order. I got a few hu...

I was retrenched from my IT job in the first week of this month, so it's been a bit of an odd month. I managed to secure a part-time contract so I have been doing some work. But a lot of extra time has been spent editing The Conjunction into shape ready for release. I've got ISBNs and have been editing with the help of ProWritingAid, and am about ready to hand the first few chapters for my final copy-edit and proofread. All with an eye to publishing in the next few months. I picked a date out of the air and chose September 21st for my release date, and put The Conjunction up on Kindle for pre-order. So if you're actually reading this right now, you can in fact buy the book. It's just a soft-launch for now - I won't be doing any marketing until a bit closer to the date. In the meantime, I'm reading Happy the next Awaken Online book by Travis Bagwell. I've really been enjoying this series and have bought every book on preorder as soon as it comes out.

May is typically when SAD starts setting in. So I spent the month concentrating on work and parenting to conserve valuable spoons... but as it turned out I was retrenched in the first few days of June. So, looks like I have way more time to spend on writing this month. I'm working first up on the minutiae of getting The Conjunction ready for publishing first, then will get back to King Tide . I need ISBNs, I need to get a proof-read done, etc etc. So that's my priority for this month. In the meantime, I'm now reading my way through "The Twice-Scorned Lady of Shadow" (book 3 of the Guild Codex Unveiled series ) by one of my favourite authors: Annette-Marie .

April was an even slower month. I had a lot of external priorities to work through and writing took a back seat, unfortunately, to my IT job, parenting, and coping with basic mental health. So I only wrote around ten pages total for King Tide for the month, most of which was written in the first fortnight. I did get some dictation and writeup for King Tide, and I have begun plotting out the final quarter of the book. But it's a bit of a rough sketch still. I know where I want the story to end up, but not really sure of the steps to get there, and that tends to hinder my writing, even though I'm definitely a pantser. As for the first book: The Conjunction . Editing is still on pause pending spoons to pick it up. Thankfully I don't have anyone really waiting on it - nobody is going to get cross at me for not publishing yet, apart from myself. Meanwhile I'm still reading: Book 6 of A practical guide to evil. Though I'm finally approaching the end. There's o...

Bit of a slow month for me. I made some progress writing King Tide , but it was a bit of a slower slog. I don't have much of an improvement in word-count because I haven't managed to dictate much, it's all still handwritten. So I still have ~75K typed up, and ~26 pages of handwritten first-draft (which would mean maybe another 7800 words). I've had a month of working hard at my other job instead, plus COVID-based make-up-xmas and kidlet birthday party instead. As for the first book: The Conjunction . Editing has been on pause as well. I had the first chapter returned by my english-teacher friend who is editing it, but I haven't had the spoons to take that and run yet. I find it hard to mix up writing with editing tasks - the mind-set for each is very different. My internal critic has to be locked away in order for me to write well. If I let it out to edit, then it'll also pounce all over my ability to write. Meanwhile I'm still reading: Book 6 of A p...

When I was 5 I liked to do jigsaw puzzles upside down (to make it harder) and blow bubbles off the balcony -- watching them drift over the street. I liked to walk to school by myself (one block) and learn Origami from the lady in the flats behind us. When I was 7 I wished on every star that I could have a baby sister. When I was 8, I got one. When I was 10 I liked to explore the backways of Oyster Bay, picking flowers to make perfume (which smelled terrible). I played fantasy make-believe games with my cousins - involving magic and unicorns, where we saved the world. When I was 12 I got another sister... I stopped wishing. :) When I was 13 I liked to play make-believe with my sisters and all the younger cousins. We plotted adventures for us all, in-amongst the bamboo. When I was 15 I liked to climb up on the roof and watch the clouds drift by. I liked to ride my bike home from school and play LARP in the park across the road. When I was 17 I liked to swim in the backyard po...

My writing process is a bit chaotic, but I do have a process. Step 1: starts with roughing out a basic arc of the book. I'm more of a pantser than a plotter, so this is really just a basic synopsis - to make sure it has all the exciting plot-points and I haven't missed the rising tension or other main beats. Step 2: my first draft I write long-hand. Yep, pen and paper. It gets me into Flow much easier than typing and I spend less time staring at an empty page. Pictured right is a page from The Conjunction to show you what I mean. I ususally write with no paragraph breaks, just everything on the page and sort it out later. Step 3: after most writing sessions I'll also dictate some of what I previously wrote. I'm usually behind by a few scenes. I copy that up into Scrivener, which is how I keep track of all the writing for my book. Then I go through it to fix the autocarrot mistakes. Step 4: after dictation, I print out a copy for editing and take to it with a ...

I'm still madly writing my way through King Tide (the second book in the The Hope Gray series ). I'm roughly 75k words into the first draft. My first-draft final wordcount was around 110K, so that means I'm a bit under three quarters, which matches up with where I feel I am in the story right now. I still have a bit ore action and the stunning conclusion to write up before I hit the editing hard. As for the first book: The Conjunction . The first edit is complete, but I still have some hard editing and proof-reading to go, to polish it up ready for publishing. I aim to publish in June on both Kindle and Kindle-Unlimited, and shortly after that I'll hopefully get a paperback version available through Ingram Spark. At which point I'm hoping I'll also have King Tide ready enough to put up for pre-order too. I'm not yet ready to start plotting out the third book, though ideas are bobbing about on my backburner. Meanwhile I'm also building up a quick...

Woohoo! I've begun my journey as a published writer. It'll probably geta bit more interesting once I acually publish my first book, of course :D For now I'm still setting everything up, so be patient, I'm still working at my Tech job full time as well as solo parenting... so this may take Some Time :D My current tasks are below: