The first of my beta readers who I don’t know in real life, and just barely know online–meaning someone who is under no obligation to be nice to me–has just gotten back to me and apparently really loved the book. I’d been so afraid I would never hear back from anyone.  (Thank you, Carol, if you’re reading this.)

So I’m … on a bit of an emotional upswing. I also have a talent for understatement.

Here’s some other stuff that’s gone on since I last posted:

  • Mailing list officially set up. It’s rudimentary but it works.
  • Picked a launch date, although I haven’t officially announced it–I only have one subscriber on my mailing list, so yeah. But soon I will put it up for pre-order on Amazon and announce the date on my site.
  • Registered with Nook, Kobo and Draft2Digital for publishing.
  • Investigated some promo sites, but I’m still not quite sure which ones I will go with. Most of them would like your book to be free or 99c. Possibly I need to put it on ‘sale’ at launch.
  • Tinkered around endlessly with the cover. Still unsure about it–traditionally, your basic Urban Fantasy has a person on the cover. A guy showing his abs for no good reason, a woman with shampoo-commercial hair, stuff on fire, etc. My cover is just a graphic design, and some fairly basic symbolism. I like it, but that means nothing.
  • Dug up an old vampire/werewolf short story I started writing about ten years ago and started tinkering with that. It’s unrelated to the novel, but I’m thinking of completing it and posting it ahead of the book launch as sort of a dry run. And I’ll put some random guy with abs on the cover. The problem is, what started out as a fairly basic story keeps growing as I work on it. So we’ll see if I have time.
  • I’ve tentatively begun tweeting a bit more. There is a whole long backstory to me and social media that I’ll probably post about at some point, but ultimately it’s not that interesting.

In other news, I’m leaving for Las Vegas in three days and my hair is busted. I’ve had two bad haircuts in a row. The first one, before Christmas, involved my longtime stylist who has apparently gotten pretty bored with me, because she spent most of my haircut texting on her phone. It showed. I had something of a mullet. We’ve broken up now, although she may not realize it yet.

The next cut, a few weeks ago, was at the salon of the wife of a coworker. Halfway through the cut, the power to the whole building went out and stayed out, and there wasn’t enough light for her to work. So yeah, busted. And I just don’t have time to get it fixed before I leave.

So: the next few weeks involve travel, a mad scramble to be ready to launch my book and possibly finish the short I’m working on, and going around having really bad hair.