Cover Reveal for The Fracturing

60 DAYS.

Just look at this beautiful cover by Tatiana at Vila Design, would you? I mean, wowzas! It’s always a surreal feeling when you finally have a cover for the words you’ve been working on for so long.

And today marks 60 days out, y’all. In just 60 days my second book will be live.

There’s a whole lot of emotions I feel when saying that. I feel excited. I feel apprehensive. I feel the pressure. (Not from y’all but self-imposed.)

More than anything, I do feel excited. I have put in some serious hours making this book the best possible second book ever. I started the week after The Culling was released back in October. I took January off to work on a side project and because my family was all sick. Other than that, it’s all I’ve been doing since October of last year… edit, edit, edit.

Thinking about the amount of blood, sweat, and tears I put into this specific book makes me want to curl into a ball. This book comes packing a punch. This book has driven me crazy. This book still shocks me to this day.

And YOU, dear reader, get to have your eyeballs on it in sixty days.

I will be doing the pesky task of formatting next week, and then will be ready for the final readthroughs on the proofs. But, the hard part, all that grueling editing, is almost over. *Blinks the tears away* I’m not crying, you’re crying!

I hope to be back with a blog soon on what you can expect from me in the future, projects I am working on/want to do. (Other than editing the third Culling book, obvi.) But today I want to take a moment to talk about The Fracturing. Because this book tested me in ways I cannot describe…

I wrote this book in under three months. And it is just as huge as the first one. YA books are usually supposed to be 80,000-100,000 words. Mine are all in the 170,000 range. See why it takes me so long to edit? My books are essentially a twofer.

The actual writing for this one was my favorite of the three. I knew EXACTLY what needed to happen and where we needed to go. I had it all mapped out and figured out and it was a breeze. Until it wasn’t. And then it really wasn’t.

In a second book, I think it’s a given that there is a bit… more. But this book had more than I was ready for as a writer. Specifically, this book’s ending shocked the heck out of me. Still does. I can’t tell you the amount of sleep I have lost over just the last fifty pages of this book.

I also decided, at over 170,000 words as is, I didn’t have the time to go back and do much summarizing. I personally hate it when I’m reading a series and the first almost 100 pages is just reminding us what happened in the previous books. Yeah, no. I already read that book, thanks. So, no summarizing in this one. Zero summarizing, actually. My readers are sharp. And I know y’all don’t need me to hold your hand, so I’m not going to. We pick back up in the seconds following the ending of the first book. The first and second books will flow together like one behemoth of a book.

So…what can you expect from the second book?! Well, you can expect more, full-speed ahead. If you need to, depending upon how fresh it is in your brain, you may want to reread or go back and brush up on what happened in the first book.

You have sixty days.

Buckle up, y’all. Ready or not, The Fracturing is coming…August 1st.