With the release of my next Celia Roman novel A Witch and Her Familiar (Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI, Book 2) a few days past, I’m already anticipating the release of the next book in the series. Mostly, that means the writing end of things. When the manuscript for A Witch and Her Familiar was finalized, I took a couple of weeks off from writing to brainstorm the next book, Black Witch Rising. This is the first novel I’ve brainstormed since…
Back when Sunshine Walkingstick popped into my head in September 2014, I seriously considered publishing her stories under my first pen name, Lucy Varna. Two years later, when the first Sunny novel was published, I decided that her stories were dissimilar enough from the Lucy Varna stories that I should publish them separately. Thus was the Celia Roman pen name born. Over the past few years, I’ve rethought that decision, often with a twinge of regret. How much farther along…
It’s time again to review the previous year’s progress, personal and professional, and write goals for the coming year. 2022’s focus was on rebuilding my creativity and pulling myself out of burnout. I did this in several ways. The first was by exploring my innate strengths, beginning with the CliftonStrengths test and continuing from there to the Better Faster Academy, a Strengths-focused resource created by Becca Syme, a success coach for writers. I’m not going to bore you with my…
Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Witch Hollow (Celia Roman) and other stories in the Sunshine Walkingstick Series. When I’m working on a story, it’s not unusual for random ideas about future stories within that story world to come to me in odd moments. I keep dedicated pages in my OneNote story folders precisely for recording those moments, usually labeled “Ideas.” Sometimes the ideas are simply titles, sometimes they’re characters, and sometimes entire plot threads pop into my head. Today, I’d…
A while back, I wrote a blog post about how difficult Sunshine Walkingstick (Celia Roman) can be to write. At the time, I was completely burned out on Sunshine from pushing myself to write and release three books in the series back to back (common advice in self-publishing circles). I was certain I would never work on Sunny again. And yet again, I proved myself wrong. I ended up adding a third short story and a fourth book to the series,…
I’ve finally finished all four stories in my “secret” project, a collection of dark Christmas stories which will be published under each of my writing names, Lucy Varna, V.R. Cumming, Celia Roman, and C.D. Watson, one story per name. I conceived of this idea after stumbling across information on chapbooks, and had thought to produce four super short stories and have them published either individually or collectively as a chapbook. Now traditionally, chapbooks are rather small in size and length,…
Three years ago this month, I published my first novel, The Prophecy. It was a huge step for me. I’d always wanted to write fiction, but could never get past the initial idea and first few scenes of a story. That changed in November 2013, when I had a huge epiphany: writing fiction wasn’t all that different from writing non-fiction, something I’d been doing for a while. All I had to do was translate the outlining and other skills I’d…