New Book Release: Nugget the Space Chicken Book 3

This is a long post this month because, well, I have lots of stuff to talk about. First up and most importantly, I have a new book! 

Nugget the Space Chicken and the Mermaid Treasure of Castalar goes live on August 6. It's currently available for preorder at all your favorite online retailers. You can also find me at any of my in person events to get a signed copy or order one shipped to you from the "Buy Signed Books" tab above.

This is the third book in the Nugget the Space Chicken series. These books are aimed at kids ages 5-9.

Reports say planet Castalar would be perfect for a human colony, but a wild lightning storm upon their arrival says otherwise. Their crash landing only makes things worse.

While their parents repair the lander, Jasper and Opal take Nugget for a walk to explore a small island. They discover that they are not alone. There are aliens in the water and angry pirate birds in the sky.

Can Nugget help humans become friends with the water people by recovering their stolen treasure?

I'm on the road again...

It's one road trip after another time of year. I recently did a seven hour drive to a new comic con in Iowa, which was my longest solo drive to date. I normally try to stick around five hours or less, but every once in a while, it's good to try something new. 

This was a fairly low cost table at an event center connected to an affordable hotel, connected to a very reasonably priced parking garage. The con was very well organized. I met lots of new authors, made new vendor friends, and signed books for readers who had never heard of me before. This wasn't a chicken-friendly event so I got to spend the weekend doodling with my new tiny travel watercolor set instead of tending to a chicken friend. Enter: flat chickens. LOL

While this was a fun experience, attendance was lower than all of us would have liked. That is an issue that they will be addressing next year, and I would give this one another shot. I didn't lose money, but I can't say as I made a good profit. On the plus side, I was gifted a photo op with Star War's actors C. Andrew Nelson and Susanna Malak and I did a lot of networking.

Keeping me company on the long drives, I've listened to the second and third books in the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne and I highly recommend them. I've got the next three audio books queued up for the upcoming weekends. You can't go wrong with irreverent fantasy filled with werewolves, witches, vampires, all sorts of gods, a talking dog and a druid.

Last weekend was a three hour road trip to Grayling, MI for the Ausable River Festival. This was a fairly good two day event last year, despite it raining on Saturday. This year we had no rain and perfect temperatures and books flew off the rack! I sold 110 books in those two days. That's my new second best sales day ever. If only every weekend was like that.

This month, I'm excited to have a couple events close to home, but then I'll be headed to Michigan's Upper Peninsula for the annual trip to the Wild Blueberry Festival. This was the event that inspired Laya's Vacation. These days, I'm traveling with Laya's daughter, Lola, who has taken to shows like a pro from the time she was just a few months old.

I'm excited to have a weekend off this month and then I have five more weekends full of events before my schedule slows down to the final three of the year. One of those is a literary festival I'm helping to organize. Whew boy, it's been a lot of work building something from nothing. If it all goes well, I'm hoping year two will be slightly easier. Fingers crossed for it to be a success.

November 16 can't come soon enough. That's the first day of my resting/writing season. I have so many projects I want to work on! 

If you're not familiar with 

the Insecure Writers Support 

Group, check it out here 

and find links to all the 

other participating writers. 

Let's to get to this month's Insecure Writer's Support Group Post. This month's question is: As an author, is there something you wish you'd done differently in your writing process? 

Yep. The same thing that most of us do with our first self-published book. We publish it, thinking its fully proofread, but surprise, it's not. Nothing worse than being all proud of your new book, only to have readers report copious amounts of typos. How? How can this be? Well, it might have had something to do with the fact that we did not have have someone else proofread the book after the last round of edits. Yes, your editor may point out typos, but that's not what they're solely focusing on. Not to mention, you're making corrections, tweaking things, adding the additional details the editor is asking for. All of that is ripe for introducing new typos. 

Are books ever perfect? We can hope so, but even traditionally published books have a ninja typo or two. All we can do is have as many eyeballs on the work before it goes to print as possible to try to catch those sneaky buggers. 

The moral of this story is: You cannot be the proofreader of your book. You can take lots of steps to catch everything you can, but have an eagle-eyed grammar-gifted human make that final pass. It's worth it.