#WWW and #WIPpet Wednesday – 17 February, 2016

Happy Wednesday everyone! Hope you’re feeling a bit better than I am; I have taken today off work because my nose is all stuffed up and also I haven’t been sleeping well. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have been the most productive employee if I showed up to the office today.

 

If I were an elf, this might be me lately.

I’m going to talk about writing first today. If you’re just here for WWW Wednesday, feel free to scroll about halfway down. Those who don’t follow my Facebook page (link to the right if you’d like to) would have missed the post where I announced that my proof of A More Complicated Fairytale arrived yesterday. And that is honestly very exciting. But at the same time, it’s a little overshadowed by the fact that lately, I’ve been finding it really hard to write. I mean really hard. I’m lacking in both inspiration and motivation, and allowing everything to distract me. Reading is much easier, so I’ve been spending all my time enjoying other people’s writing instead of working on my own. Of course, there’s nothing exactly wrong with that, but I know that if I’m serious about my writing, I can’t just ignore it full-time. I’ve identified some of the triggers that are making me feel this way in general (because it’s not just the writing, but the writing is suffering from it), and I’m working on addressing them, but until then, everything feels a bit sucky.

 

/moaning.

All that said, I have written a little more on the story I shared from last week, and I’ll share it now for WIPpet Wednesday. For those unfamiliar, WIPpet Wednesday is a blog hop in which several writers come together to share excerpts from their WIPs that somehow relate to the date. You can click the little blue guy in the top right to join in. For my maths today, I’ve subtracted the 16 from 17 and have one paragraph for you. Amy’s trying to work out if she could get away with not telling her parents that she won’t be graduating this semester (for those who missed last week, she failed one of her subjects in what was supposed to be her final semester).

Maybe they didn’t have to know. They lived several hours away. Maybe she could pretend to have graduated successfully, get a job here in the city and re-take her final class over the next semester while she supported herself like a grownup.

Next up is WWW Wednesday, where we answer three questions about our reading over the past week. This is hosted by Sam over A World of Words. You can link up on today’s post on Sam’s blog to join in.

• What are you currently reading?

I have just started Cogling by Jordan Elizabeth Mierek. I’m writing this post a little bit in advance and at time of writing, I am literally only halfway through Chapter One, so very little to say on that for now, but I hope I enjoy it! The ratings on GoodReads are very high.

• What did you recently finish reading?

I finished The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson and then went straight onto The Madness Underneath, which I finished in a day. The plot was definitely a lot stronger in the first book than the second, but MJ has a really accessible and easy-to-read writing style, so it took me about 150 pages of Madness Underneath to realise that nothing was really happening!

• What do you think you’ll read next?

I mentioned Dawn French and Gillian Flynn in this question last week, but since I own those two books, they’re on hold for the moment because the library decided to have all my holds come in at once. I had Unwind by Neal Shusterman on hold for literally six months and it is finally here. Seraphina by Rachel Hartman also came in (dragons! yay! I love dragons), and The Shadow Cabinet, also by Maureen Johnson and the third book in the series, is showing up as “in transit” on my record, so I should be able to pick it up tomorrow.

That’s it from me this week. I’ll try to get around to as many blogs as possible over the coming days!

December26 (2): Well, that’s awkward…

Prompt: write a story about a writer who reads/writes fanfiction of his own characters. Taken from /r/WritingPrompts (I didn’t actually know there were non-scary parts of Reddit).

It was always kind of funny when someone “yelled” at Rob, all in capital letters, telling him that Sirena and Michael would never have got together like that, and how way off base he was. He was well aware of that, and he wrote it as an experiment. There was never any telling how angry fans were going to get, though. He wondered how they’d react if they knew it was him writing the pairing they so despised.

He’d had to spend a fair bit of time on Urban Dictionary, learning the meanings of terms like “I can’t even!” and “My feels!” but he now knew enough that he could maintain a conversation while sounding like one of his own fans. He just had to remember not to mention too many things that weren’t actually specified in the books, or to at least frame it as an interpretation and not canon if he did mention it.

His only regret? Not learning what a “kink meme” is before he clicked the link…

Cover Reveal: Bound by Kate Sparkes

Fellow WIPpeteer Kate Sparkes is releasing her debut novel, Bound, on June 26, and I’m incredibly excited to be part of the cover reveal today. We’ve been reading excerpts from this novel on Wednesdays for a while, so we’re all pretty psyched about finally getting to read it in its entirety!

Bound (Bound Trilogy #1) – Release June 26, 2014

Welcome to Darmid, where magic is a sin, fairy tales are contraband, and the people live in fear of the Sorcerers on the other side of the mountains.

 

Rowan Greenwood has everything she’s supposed to want from life— a good family, a bright future, and a proposal from a handsome and wealthy magic hunter. She knows she should be content with what she has. If only she could banish the idea that there’s more to life than marriage and children, or let go of the fascination with magic she’s been forced to suppress since childhood.

 

When Rowan unknowingly saves the life of one of her people’s most feared enemies, a simple act of compassion rips her from her sheltered life and throws her into a world of magic that’s more beautiful, more seductive, and more dangerous than she ever could have imagined.

 

Now Rowan might just get everything she ever dreamed of— that is, if the one thing she’s always wanted doesn’t kill her, first.

^^ Doesn’t that look awesome?! The cover design is by Ravven

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A Bit About Kate:

Kate Sparkes was born in Hamilton, Ontario, but now resides in Newfoundland, where she tries not to talk too much about the dragons she sees in the fog. She lives with a Mountie, two kids who take turns playing Jeckyll and Hyde, three cats with more personality than most people she meets, and the saddest-looking dog on the planet. Her first novel, Bound, will be released in June 2014, assuming the dragons don’t eat her, first.

You can find Kate in various places around the Internet, including her blog, Disregard the Prologue, Twitter and her Facebook page.