I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that I have a novel published. It is an interesting feeling, having other people read something I’ve worked so hard on for so long. Fortunately though, everyone seems to like it. If you for some crazy reason haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, you can buy it here for Kindle and here for paperback.

Now I wrote Into the Flames so that it has some resolution. You can read it and hopefully not feel like you want to hurt e because you don’t know what’s going to happen next and you have to wait an indeterminate amount of time to find out (basically how I feel every time I read a Scott Westerfeld or Rick Riordan novel. Great marketing strategy, but dudes, so not cool). However, you may be happy to find to that I am planning on writing a sequel anyway. Multiple sequels, actually.

You see, I’ve know Rahab, Scout, and Hawkins for a long time. They almost feel like real people to me. Like pen pals or internet friends. People I talk to often but have never met irl (in real life). So the cool thing is, I could basically write a novel for any point in their lives. I know everything that happens to them, I just have to decide how and when to write it down.

That’s probably why I already have two more Grover Cleveland novels written and two started. Someday you may get to read them all. For now, you will have to content yourselves with hearing about my journey into writing the direct sequel to Into the Flames. What to know what happens two weeks later? You’ll find out in this novel.

I’m working on the prewriting for it now. I’ve got a whole new villain for Rahab and her friends to face, and I’m hashing out the details of some subplots as well. I’m assuming you’ve all heard of NaNoWriMo, where writers are challenged to crank out 50,000 words in the month of November. Well, I’m also going to be participating in JuNoWriMo this year. It’s the same as NaNoWriMo only it’s in June, and it’s founded in part by my friend Becca Campbell (whose book I just finished editing, but I’ll tell you more about that later). I’m using JuNoWriMo to work on this novel. So if all goes well, but the end of the summer I will have my next novel’s first draft finished.

For now, happy reading everyone! I hope everyone spends more than a little time this summer out by the pool reading a novel or two.

I apologize for being silent for a month, but things have been quite hectic around here. But then, aren’t they always?

But May is going to be better, I promise! The main reason for this is because my last day at Tate Publishing is Monday, and after that I will have more time to dedicate to my writing. Leaving Tate makes me mostly sad, because I love working here and the things I’ve learned and the authors I’ve helped. But I’m also glad that this marks a new point in my life where I can move on to other things.

In May I will be concentrating on my prewriting for JuNoWriMo. JuNoWriMo is just like NaNoWriMo except in June! I’ll be working on the sequel for Into the Flames, and I hope you’re starting to get excited about it, because I am! Rahab and co. will be sewing up their superhero costumes and saving the day! Just kidding, but it will have lots of adventure in it.

I’ll also be editing two books for the Consortium: Becca Campbell’s Foreign Identity and Aaron Pogue’s The Dragonprince Heir.

I also hope to start chipping away at my to-read list on goodreads. However, what with two kids and all this editing adn writing going on, I may not get to it. This makes me feel guilty as I completely agree with Stephen King when he says, “You have to read good books to write good books.” The fact that I haven’t had time to read for pleasure lately makes me fear that my writing technique will start to sag. And we can’t have that! I still have so much to learn already!

Anyway, I hope you’re still with me after my unplanned hiatus. Look for more stuff in the following months as Iget my groove back on!

So this is my second week as a published author.

Sadly, I haven’t had time to really revel in this fact. This week Sean and I took on another child, so getting sleep and wiping runny noses have been my priorities.

Nevertheless, Into the Flames is out there, and people have been taking notice! If you haven’t had a chance to get a copy yet, you have two chances to win one. You can go to Goodreads and enter to win an advance reading copy, and you can go to Heather Sutherlin’s site, Kids Gotta Write, and enter there by commenting on today’s post.

Heather has also been gracious enough to read and review my book and allow me to say a little something to her readers. My topic is how to get started building a rich fantasy world.

In conclusion, thanks to everyone who has already bought Into the Flames; you are helping my dream to come true! For the rest of you <insert reprimanding glare>, the paperback copies should be available soon. I’ll keep you posted!

Into the Flames is officially released and ready for you to read it!

Get your fresh new copy right here. It’s just $2.99 for hours of reading pleasure!

Just to warn you, this is the Kindle version. If you don’t have an e-reader you can download the version for your Kindle Reading App on your computer or iPad, or you can wait two to four weeks for the paperbacks to be ready (or do both!).

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’m now published. When I was little I told everyone I wanted to be an author when I grew up, and I really and truly believed that I would be. Now that it’s finally here, though, it feels unreal. It’s like saying you want to be an astronaut and then one day finding yourself in outerspace. Okay, maybe not completely like that, but at least a little bit.

When I was six, my favorite authors were Laura Ingalls Wilder and whoever it was that wrote the American Girls books (I even wrote my own American Girl book when I was eight). Now I have joined the ranks of people with complete novels that anyone can pick up and read. It’s even got my name on the cover! You can’t say that much about an American Girl book.

Rachael Lockhart as Rahab Carmichael, the heroine of Into the Flames

Hello, faithful readers! I sincerely apologize for the lack of posting for the past few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

• Editing Ghost Targets 4: Camouflage
• Writing a short story for the next volume of A Consortium of Worlds
• Trying to read a book that’s not for work
• Making sure all the pieces are into place for Into the Flames to be published
• Participating in two book clubs at work

But all excuses aside, I really should have been posting, at least to let you guys know what was going on. The biggest piece of news is that Into the Flames should be released sometime next week! Now this will be the Kindle e-version, but rest assured that the paperback copy will be available soon after. I can’t tell you how weird it is to have this date looming so close. I remember quite clearly a year ago when Aaron set this date, and I thought I would never be able to finish my rough draft in time. But lo and behold…!

So here’s what I’ve learned through this whole process, and it might not be useful for you, but it’s something I need to remind myself of from time to time. It is this: It’s easier to get things done if you just sit down and do it. And it also really helps if you have a deadline (even an arbitrary one) hanging over your head.

I’ve got to remind myself of this even as I’m working on this short story for A Consortium of Worlds. I know what I want it to end up as, but I’m having a hard time sitting down and writing it. It’s so much easier to stare at facebook and “formulate” what I want to happen next. And to be fair, if I write without planning first, my characters often end up running wild and doing things improperly. But then, it’s always a lot easier to fix characters runnign off into the bushes than to come up with something from nothing at all. If I just make myself sit down and finish this stupid story, then at least I’ll have something to work with. My deadline, which I’m not sure whether it’s arbitrary or not, is the end of March. So! There’s my goal for the next couple of weeks.

Along with making sure my first novel gets published. Yay!

Today’s fun fact: Rahab Carmichael got her last name from the character Melanie Carmichael aka Felony Melanie Smooter on Sweet Home Alabama. That’s how I knew to make Rahab a southerner, although I didn’t go as far south as Alabama.

Into the Flames when it was just a creative writing assignment.

When I was a young warthog, I used to watch those Disney channel inspirational commercials with dismay. They showed all those kids who excelled at awesome things: snowboarding, gymnastics, and so on. And then just thinking about the fact that every kid on the Disney channel was already a famous actor was pretty disheartening too. You see, all those kids had been practicing their craft, sport, etc, since they were like four years old. I was already ten-twelve-fourteen, and I hadn’t done any of those things! If I wanted to be a snowboarder, there was no way I would ever be a really good one. Definitely not as good as those Disney channel kids. I hadn’t even seen a real drift of snow at that time. I still haven’t! Those kids on Disney channel, and all those other people in life who were “really” good at what they did, they were passionate about what they were doing. They wanted to do it all the time. I felt bad that I wasn’t like that. I would never be really good at anything, because there was nothing that I had been doing consistently since I was four.

I had forgotten about my young dismay and self-devaluing until I saw this video for the fourth time, So You Want to Write a Novel. You can watch it here:

It’s a script someone composed of many of the assumptions people have about writing and publishing a novel. One thing the “sensible” character says goes along the lines of,

“You realize that most good writers have spent years honing their craft, and before that spent at least twenty years reading hundred of other people’s works?”

Now, I’ve seen this video many times, but this time around, that particular sentence really struck me. I realized that yes, I have spent many years honing my craft. I’ve written and rewritten and balled up sheets of paper and started from scratch all over again. I’ve been reading voraciously for twenty years. I’ve read the classics, the pop culture novels, across many different genres and types of novels, and I’ve developed my own style and learned to appreciate others’ styles. And I realized,

I’m just like those kids on the Disney channel.

It may not look as shnazzy as plowing through a gleaming white mountain of snow, but I’ve been working on something I love since I was four years old. I didn’t just wake up one day when I was a teenager and think, “Hey, I’m going to be an author!” I didn’t see some kid on TV being a writer and think it looked glamorous and want to emulate him. It was what I knew I wanted since before I can remember anything else. Me, all by myself, came up with this idea. And it suits me just fine.

My name is Jessie Sanders, and I am an author. Boo-yah!

The problem is, nobody believes them. Except for TEEN. Elly, Hea, and Saturday are recruited as agents and sent on a mission to bring down a maniacal ten-year-old genius.

The thing that I love about this book is that it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do. That is bring a fun spy adventure with three strong heroines and more than one intriguing villain. While there’s no doubt that the bad guys are doing bad things, you still like them and enjoy everything that they do. The girls, too, are very fun to watch and see interact. Elly is the natural leader and “plan” girl, Hea is the gymnast, able to maneuver any trap, and Saturday is the technical genius. The way that they work together is entertaining and inspiring. If only we all had two friends that we could absolutely rely on and be super spy agents together with.

Here’s what Josh has to say about his book:

There’s plenty of weird gadgets, exciting espionage, and plots for world domination in TEEN Agents. But at its heart, it’s a story about three girls who want to save their dads but have to grow up quite a bit to do it.

Right now, I’m the father of just one kid, a little boy. He and I watch all kinds of adventure cartoons, read comic books, and I continue to take in all that genre fiction I’ve always loved. But now I have an eye as to when I can share it with him.

I’d also like to be the father of a little girl someday. I don’t want to climb a soapbox, but it’s pretty hard to find stuff to excite and empower my hypothetical little girl.

But it shouldn’t be that way.

I should have as much strange and exciting genre fiction with young heroines as I have with heroes. Since I don’t, I decided to do something about that.

All in all, I enjoyed reading TEEN agents, and I recommend it to anyone who is young at heart and enjoys a good time. And here’s the best part:

For all of today, the Kindle edition of this book is completely free.

So go download it. You won’t be sorry you did.

Jessie Sanders, author

Good morning, gentle readers! The release date for Into the Flames is less than two months away, and we’re falling into the final stages of production.

Tomorrow we are doing a photo shoot for the cover.

Sometime this weekend (I know, I wish I could pin myself down on a more definite time) I will be rewriting the problem scenes that some of my beta readers had issues with.

Through the next few weeks I will be addresses the minor issues that my editors are noticing as they slowly work their way through the manuscript.

And after that, I think, my part will be done. I will hand off the manuscript to my publisher, Aaron Pogue, the back cover copy will be written, and the cover will be dressed for success!

Then it’s publication day! Book signing party! And become a famous author/millionare!!!

Haha. I don’t really expect that last thing to happen. But it’s always nice to have dreams, right?

I’m a planner, always looking toward the future and wanting to know exactly what is in front of me. So don’t be surprised when I say that I am already working on (in my head, at least, if not on paper) the next book that I’ll be writing. It’s an exciting time to be an author.

Well, mostly I’ve been basking in the joy of an almost-completed project and pestering everybody else to get crackin’ on editing and cover design. I had planned to finish this draft back in October, so the fact that I’m already running three months behind has got me slightly worried regarding everyone else’s duties. Only slightly, though, because Aaron and the rest of Consortium Books has been through this process multiple times now, and so far the books always get out there. Eventually.

I’ve also been daydreaming about what my book will look like on Amazon and planning a re-write of Bracken’s story, The Boy Who Wasn’t Superman. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, Bracken is my favorite character, so I’m rather looking forward to getting a chance to delve back into his history. He is such a complex character that I want everyone to be able to see what makes him what he is. It’s so exciting! But that’s something I probably shouldn’t be focusing on just yet. Probably I should be focusing on the editing process of Into the Flames.

Meanwhile, I’m doing some more editing for the Consortium and hashing out my newest short story for A Consortium of Worlds, Volume 1, Spring edition. The Winter edition is about to be released into your Kindles here in the next couple of weeks, so be on the lookout for that. I, sadly, didn’t have time to contribute this quarter, but as you can see, I’m determined to make it into the next issue. So far I know that my short story is set in the mythical land of Pocatello in the year M. 1564. The rest of the details are pending.

In addition to some half-hearted typing, I’ve started to work on my reading pile for 2012. This year I’ve challenged myself to read 20 books. A far cry from the 52 I pledged last year, but considering that in reality I only read thirty-seven, twenty seems like a realistic goal for this year. My goodreads “To-Read” shelf boasts over fifty titles. Perhaps I can make a dent in it? So far I’ve finished Homer Hickham’s novel, The Dinosaur Hunter, and I’m slowly but surely making my way through Mark Lawrence’s debut fantasy, The Prince of Thorns. As well as keeping “in the know” on my own YA fantasy genre and the world of Kindle self-publishing in general, I’m going to attempt to read one if not more non-fiction books on reading and editing. It’s always good to hone your craft.

As you can see, I don’t have much for you to think about today, but I hope you’ve enjoyed viewing the tidbits of my life. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some editing to do–my job is never done!