Hit Summer With Your Best Shot 6/21 – SEQUEL PREMIERE

Happy Memorial Day Weekend! In the spirit of this occasion of remembering those who gave their lives for America (may they always be honored and remembered), I thought I’d make a pretty big announcement of my own.

The sequel to my time-travel coming-of-age romance Forgetting What I Couldn’t Remember is called Forgiving What I Couldn’t Change. And you can read it on June 21st (yes – the first day of Summer). Summer isn’t just a season; if you’ve read book one, you know that Summer is the name of the biggest grade-school-baddie-turned-psychopathic-criminal. So of course, I figured the best way to forgive her once and for all was to drop this second and final installment on the first day of her season.

Forgiving What I Couldn’t Change actually takes place in the SoCal fall, but that’s basically still warm weather (with the addition of pumpkin spiced everything). It was really fun to situate the characters in that season of blending the savory with the summertime. That also mimics the interesting blend of spastic daytime patterns as experienced by Vera and Fader in the virtual reality world they get trapped in.

The book will be available in ebook, paperback, and eventually, audiobook – narrated by the amazing Chelsea Kwoka. She voiced book 1 and hit it out of the park, so I knew we absolutely had to work together again.

To catch up on book 1, you can find it on Amazon HERE. I always like to tell people how personal both books are to me (but the first book especially – because it’s basically me traveling back in time to enact some justice on my old bullies).

I also have (what I hope) is a fun book trailer on YouTube all about book 1 – care to take a look? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUUTZ820GTI

Thank you so much for all your continued support. Comment below with more content you’d like to see from me. I could talk about my writing for ages, but I know that lifestyle stuff is important too, of course!

I’ll leave you with a quick spoiler-free passage from the sequel that I particularly enjoy. This is a moment between Fader and Vera while navigating the digital reality world:

Between the sound of the falling acid just outside, and the repetitive drip-drip-drip of hidden water somewhere in the cave, the silence was bearable. But only for so long. 

            “I don’t bite, you know.” 

            Fader huffed. “That hasn’t been proven. You looked like you were in enough pain to bite me if I hadn’t have given you that cloth to chomp on instead.”

            I rolled my eyes, even though the gesture may have been left unseen in the faint neon halo light. “That’s not entirely true.”

            “You sure? Because I can’t stitch up my own wounds. Don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.” 

            “What I’m sure of right now is that… I want you.”

            He froze, like being stung by an unseen predator. “What?”

            “Want you next to me, I meant. Yeah, like, scoot in. I’m cold.” Turning away momentarily, I prayed that Freudian slip didn’t just damage everything good we had going on. In a virtual reality world built on real-world death, you’d be surprised at how hard good stuff was to find.

            Before he could find a proper rebuttal, he moved closer to my side, wrapping his arm around my bare shoulders as shivers ran up my spine. “Okay, you have me. Is that all you wanted?”

            The ambiguity in his words wasn’t lost on me, so I treaded lightly. “It’s definitely a step in the right direction.”

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So I Finally Caved and Got a Tik Tok Account…

I’d been putting it off for months. It’s a time-sucking, highly addictive platform that I knew would probably be more irritating to deal with than it was worth. But I did it anyway – because marketing reasons.

Yep – in any marketing endeavor, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you’ve got to go where your target demographic is. And for me, as a Young Adult / New Adult author, I know that my readers probably are hanging out on there. So engaging on that platform was a no-brainer, even if learning the controls was slightly clunky at first. But in many ways, it’s not really all that different from Instagram (which I’d like to think I’m pretty well-versed in).

The concept of Tik Tok is fun, because it’s pairing music with trends and ideas that bring people together. I’m not typically a huge fan of taking selfies, but I do that anyway for marketing reasons. If there’s anything I learned from my college marketing classes, it’s that people want to see the human behind the product. Even though I’m selling books, they want to relate to and see who they’re supporting. So if Tik Tok is a way for readers to catch a glimpse into my illustrious life of sitting at my desk blogging, then so be it.

If you want to give me a follow on Tik Tok, I’d surely appreciate it, but by no means do you have to, of course! I just appreciate that you’ve read this far, and care about my stories.

FOLLOW ME ON TIK TOK HERE.

I always try to limit how much of the irritating “buy my book” posts I do, but I have to tell you that my sequel is getting SO CLOSE to being finished! Well, the first draft anyway. If you want to read the first installment of my time-travel coming-of-age bully-ass-kicking snark-story, you can find a copy of Forgetting What I Couldn’t Remember HERE.

“Maybe getting older lets you finally see all sides of the dice – not just the ones that are facing up.”

Vera Bartlet is a soon-to-be college graduate with absolutely no idea how messy her life is about to become. It’s not just the job search looming on the horizon or her lack of a boyfriend that’s got her stomach in knots – rather, her dad has been missing for almost a decade, and no one knows what happened to him.

When Uncle Edgar mysteriously arrives back onto the scene, he comes armed with some interesting new ideas about what may have happened to Vera’s dad – and an even more revolutionary idea of how to find him. With nothing short of bending time and space, Edgar sends Vera back in time in the hopes that she might find the clues they need to get her dad home.

As she sifts through the mangled pieces of reality and her altered memories of middle school drama become jumbled in between truth and fantasy, Vera has to choose which elements of her past should stay in the past, and which she might like to incorporate into her future. Time travel is never simple, and there are always side effects – but in this case, it might just hold the key to finding her dad. Will Vera stay sane long enough to find her dad and make peace with the bullies who made her miserable?

Is Wattpad Effective for Book Marketing?

I guess I’m about to find out.

If you’re anything like me, you love free samples. It’s always a good feeling to be able to try before you buy, isn’t it? So that’s why I cleaned up my Wattpad, making it look a little more professional (it was time to delete all those band guy fanfics once and for all haha). And most importantly, I added free samples of my books.

I mean, Amazon offers free samples too, but Wattpad seems to cater more toward my target audience (which is largely high school and up). And now that I have a slightly greater social media presence, I’m hoping this will translate to views and sales. Only time will tell though – I highly doubt anyone on Wattpad wants to pay for books, but I’m thinking this should help, at least a little.

After all, being an author is so much more than just selling books – it’s about the connections you make with readers (as well as other authors), and the opportunities that arise from those interactions. Plus, your art is out there for the world to see, so I’d say that’s pretty dope too.

If you’d like to check out my Wattpad, you can do that HERE. 

That being said, if you like what you see and just want to dive right in, I certainly won’t stop you! You can purchase any of my books HERE.

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