The past few months have been very exciting for me, writing wise. Circumstances have kept me off this blog for a while, so it’s well past time I shared the best news possible. I have a contract for my urban fantasy novel The Grotesques with Canadian publisher Tyche Books.

It’s been a long road towards that contract with this manuscript. I rewrote the ending twice, and couldn’t help tweaking the rest of the manuscript and adding new chapters along the way. I am fortunate Margaret Curelas believed in the story and my main character, Ella, enough to take a second and third look at this book. I’ve posted a blurb on the home page and will keep everyone updated as it progresses.

Almost as exciting (I’m pretty sure any emerging writer will tell you nothing can beat a contract) is that my current fantasy manuscript Ivory Wish has done well in a couple of competitions. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Impress Book Prize under the, I admit, lame title Riding Free. (I can rarely name a story or manuscript before I’m at least halfway through and know the characters, world and plot intimately. My writing group is well aware of my handicap with titles but I think Ivory Wish both has the right ring to it and reflects the theme of the book.) It also won one of the Breakout Novel Scholarships. I was incredibly disappointed when the latter was cancelled but I am pleased with the way this manuscript is turning out, and it’s not long off completion. This one is set in a primitive African-based society and tells the story of a boy soldier who dreams of flying on a pegasus.

In between these two manuscripts, I wrote a high fantasy series, the Djinn’s Rage Triolgy.  The three books were an ambitious project that have turned into full length epic fantasy. As they stand, their word count is beyond what most publishers will consider from an emerging author, but I truly (as the very biased author) believe in these manuscripts, so I hope at some point I might divide each book and turn the trilogy into a series of five or six books of a more acceptable length. If anything develops from this, I’ll be back with a new post. Until then, it’s back to work on Ivory Wish.