Arctic Light

Hollow Souls is out on Amazon!

I owe a number of comments, and I need to do another roundup of Comfort Fest fills - I never did get it done this weekend, and I still want to write a couple more fills! - but between book release things and having a productive origfic writing week, I haven't really had free processing cycles for it. General plans over the next couple of days are to do some catchup on that sort of thing.

And FINALLY we have moved along to new books! I uploaded the final version of this today. It goes live on Amazon on Tuesday, so the BookFunnel download will stop working then. Get one now if you want it!

The third book in the series, Hollow Souls, will be out in late September.



Free BookFunnel download ('til Aug. 12):
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/4e26yuhbsp

Art student and reluctant paladin Kay Darrow thought that being life-bonded to a magic sword with its own agenda was the worst thing that could happen to her.

Turns out she was wrong. Because now there's a city after her.

Not the people in the city. The city itself.

Welcome to New York. But not the one you know.

This is the other New York, the one that lies below the real one. It's a place where stepping through a door can take you from the modern day to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, or the Harlem Renaissance, where a magical gangster queen rules with an iron fist.

And there's something alive and hungry in the shadows ...

Preorder links on Amazon:
Echo City preorder | Hollow Souls preorder

First of all, Rogue Myths is out on Amazon! (Originally released as Wayward Myths.) The sequel, Echo City, is up for preorder and will release on Aug. 11.

There's absolutely no obligation to buy. If you hang out around here, you'll probably get it for free eventually.

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Freebies!


Dragon & Detective

This is a 20K urban fantasy novella I wrote in June that is now my BookFunnel giveaway book for mailing list promos. For the promos it's necessary to sign up for my mailing list to get the book, but you can just get it from BookFunnel at this link instead.

(If you have any concrit: typos, anything that doesn't make sense, etc, feel free to give it to me. I'll be releasing it on Amazon eventually, but in the meantime it's only been lightly edited so far.)



The Thorn Wall

Next week's free mailing list story will be the original short story that turned into Rogue Myths. The short story is about 3000 words long and was an early-2009 test drive for slightly different versions of Kay and Muirin, who would eventually turn into the novel versions of the characters.

Those of you who've been here for that long might actually remember it from 2009, because I put it on LJ when I originally wrote it. And now you can download it from BookFunnel with a cover and everything.

The general theme for my creative life in 2018 was "diversify." I launched a bunch of new projects and series, and two new pen names (well, one new one plus revitalizing an old one) ... and ended up feeling like I was going 50 different ways and reminding myself, oh right, I don't multitask well! Oops. So basically, I did about half what I wanted to in 2018 (my webcomic suffered in particular). But I have a lot of different things to work on now, so 2019's theme is going to be focusing on the most important of them and making some progress on those.

Still, despite feeling like I didn't get as far as I wanted to, I was actually wildly productive in 2018! I had 5 novels out, and 2 anthology stories, and wrote another novel and a novella that'll be out in 2019.

Here's my 2018 list of publications.

Zoe Chant
This is a paranormal romance pen name shared between several authors. We were trying to keep this under wraps for awhile, but we are now publicly discussing that we're a group of writers, so I can talk about my Zoe projects in public posts.

• Pet Rescue Panther (Bodyguard Shifters #2) - Feb. 2018
• Bear in a Bookshop (Bodyguard Shifters #3) - April 2018
• Day Care Dragon (Bodyguard Shifters #4) - Nov. 2018

The next book in the series, Bull in a Tea Shop, will be out in the first half of 2019; I'm currently writing it. Yes, I'm still having ridiculous amounts of fun with these.

Lauren Esker
This is my personal pen name for paranormal and sci-fi romance.

• Metal Wolf (Warriors of Galatea #1) - June 2018
• "Heart of Stone" - MMF short story in the anthology Two Mates for the Dragon

The Galatea series is my first foray into sci-fi romance. The rough draft of the second book, Metal Dragon, is mostly done, and at the very least I plan to have both that and the third book, Metal Pirate, out in 2019.

Layla Lawlor
My actual name; I finally kicked off getting some of the non-romance stuff out there! I'm really happy with that, even though I didn't get as far along as I wanted to.

• Wayward Myths (Gatekeeper #1) - July 2018
• "Gilt and Glamour" - short story in the anthology It Happened at the Ball
• Kismet: Sun-Cutter - ongoing webcomic

The second Gatekeeper book, Echo City, will be out in 2019; I also plan to work on the 3rd book in the Gatekeeper series, and shift some focus onto Kismet, which is getting to the point where book 2 is starting to wrap up.

Mar Delaney
My new F/F pen name for tropey lesbian romance. I have a completed novella, Moose Madness, for this pen name, but it's part of an anthology and won't be out 'til early next year, so technically Mar didn't get officially deployed in 2018. But I'll have at least one novella out as Mar in 2019.

Thank you again to everyone who weighed in on the title polls! At this point I'm almost certainly going with Rogue Myths (though I'm also kicking around Wayward Myths and Runaway Myths).

Meanwhile, I have now got a mailing list for my realname books:
https://www.subscribepage.com/laylaslist

I also created a Facebook group for discussion of my books; I haven't really done much of anything with it yet, but feel free to join:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/293433284562739/

I've got a "how did you find out about this group" question when you send a membership request. This is at least partly so I can figure out where I know people from, since I won't necessarily be able to associate your FB name with your DW name.

Haha, after spending hours last night brainstorming alternate titles, I went to bed thinking that I was just going to revert back to using GATEKEEPER ... and woke up to find that everyone agrees with me that it wouldn't work! Which, I think you're right. So. Once more, from the top ...

Here are 8 different possible titles (including the two I've already tested out on you). Rather than uploading individual covers, I just made a block of 'em. A couple are ones that I'm not super happy with myself (as much as I love the title "Feral Myths" in isolation, I really dislike the - ahem - unfortunate implications of pairing it with a POC cover model). However, I would really be interested to know which of these, if any, you like!

( Expand the cut to see the covers )

Which titles do you like?



The names of the next two books in the series are Echo City and Hollow Souls. Ideally, I'd like something that works well with those. It doesn't necessarily have to be two words, but it would be nice if it conveyed a similar kind of ... idk, magic and urban fantasy, but maybe a little bit unusual or quirky.

The books deal with characters who are basically magical exterminators, though they're not necessarily the good guys, at least not in all cases. Rough draft of the cover blurb under the cut:

( Cover blurb )

It's not that I'm necessarily going to use the winner of the poll, I just could really use some title product testing. Thank you for the comments you've already given - they're super helpful! <3

(Why didn't I do this a month ago, is what I'd like to know ...)

Why is it that I have months to work on this stuff and then I do everything at the last minute?

Case in point: retitling a book 2 weeks before I'm releasing it.

I'm finally going to get my urban fantasy novel GATEKEEPER self-pubbed; I want to release it on the 26th, my birthday, because I kinda have a habit of launching new creative ventures on my birthday. (I debuted my Lauren Esker pen name on my birthday too.) So I'm working on final edits on that, but I'm seriously thinking about retitling it, even though it's had the same title since I started writing it in 2009. My thought process went like this:

- Gatekeeper is also the name of the series, I can't come up with something that works better, and I don't like the way it looks having the title and series name the same on the first book.
- GATEKEEPER, as a title, is really too long to fit comfortably on a book.
- All the other books in the series have titles of at least two words and they all look better, especially in the curly font I'm using. The titles of the other books are bigger and easier to see.
- Gatekeeper, as a title, doesn't even fit the first book that well.

So I've been frantically brainstorming titles, things to do with swords, iron, shadows, magic ... and I've kind of settled on this?



Pros: I really love how it looks on the cover!

Cons: ... I don't know if I can start thinking of the book as IRON IN THE BLOOD after nine years of calling it something else. >_> I'm also not sure if the title implies that the series has way more to do with fae/fairies than it actually does. That definitely is a thing in the book, and it's a thing to do with the book's main Maguffin, which is a magic Celtic sword. But the book is not all fairies all the time.