"Flynn's In" is out

For those of you who picked up AKA Lexi Frost during its free Amazon weekend awhile ago, the sequel is now out. (Because we're still at the beginning of the series, you can get away starting with the second book. Starting with the next one, you really need to know the backstory.) I had a lot of fun writing Flynn’s In.  Something about teenagers.

I know teenagers aren’t fun. They’re annoying. Mine are whiny, grumpy, lazy, inconsiderate, and seems to have a hearing impairment. Actually, The Girl isn’t lazy or inconsiderate, she’s a walking panic attack and going overboard to prove her little brother is the worst kid on the face of the planet (in theory so we’ll buy into her sales pitch to just get rid of him). I’m pretty sure pharmaceutical companies invented things like Valium because of teenagers.

The Boy isn’t the worst kid ever, he’s a fairly typical teenage boy. Trust me, that’s enough. Writing Flynn’s In, I didn’t get much inspiration from my teenagers, mostly because they weren’t teenagers yet when I wrote it. I did see the writing on the wall, however. Granted it was in crayon, but it was there, and it told me to do something a little different.

Writers tend to read a lot, it goes along with the job. If you don’t read, you shouldn’t write. I read a few books on raising teenagers to write Flynn’s In and the next one, A Thousand Words. It’s more obvious in the third in the series, but it’s there in the second too. Some of those little tidbits of advice to frustrated parents leaked in. Recently, I’ve been reading up specifically on teenage boys, so we’ll see if some of that advice leaks into the books I’m writing now.

Of course putting six teenagers in the heroine's house is just for fun. The point of romance is to escape. Fall in love again, feel those stirrings deep inside and remember your first kiss, get lost in the story and the seduction. Stories have hurdles, a house full of teenagers is one. I bet it’s a hurdle none of you would want. And these teenage boys will probably make you feel better about yours.

Print is in!

Print! I’m in Print!

And it was a pain in the butt! Actually, now that I have the hang of the different formatting, it won’t be as bad. And Flynn’s In, the sequel to AKA Lexi Frost, may actually end up in print first or about the same time as I bring it out as an eBook. I’m done with the formatting on it and just have to do the whole proof thing.

Print formatting is different. For one, the Table of Contents doesn’t just do itself. You have to put in page numbers. And (I suspect) people expect them to be right. Margins matter and you can’t fiddle with them.

Suddenly those ellipses that you had in an eBook that may appear on one line or two depending on the font size the reader chose, need to be noticed. They have to be all on one line.

And dashes matter (as a nod to Grammar Nazis). In print, you can tell the difference. There’s a dash, an en-dash, and an em-dash. Who cares? Some editors. Mine didn’t, but I do know the difference whether I choose to observe it or not. I don’t like em-dashes, they’re big and unwieldy. I like en-dashes, but there’s rarely a case where I’m allowed to use them. Regular dashes are just “meh” and I’ll use them where they’re needed. If you don’t care about these things, skip this whole paragraph.

I personally was very distracted by just a few words or one line at the end of a scene being on a different page. For these issues, and the ellipses issue, I had to find each instance, then do minor rewording to jigsaw the words together better. So if you put the print version of one of my books next to an eBook version, they will be slightly different.  If I didn’t tell you, no one but me would notice. Maybe my editor. 

Oh, and the red stripe across the cover, that changed. It’s still there, and still red, but it’s a different shade of red. Thought I would admit it before someone pointed it out to me. As if that was going to happen.

So now my second book published (third written) is the first in print. Yay!