Taryn East Writes

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...