Aurora Kelly

Today I hit my March writing goal of 10,000 words in my WIP, The Gossip and The Guest. And there are 11 days left in the month. Quite an accomplishment considering last month I hit 10k at 10:43pm Feb. 28th. Really came down to the wire on that one.

I have also recorded another two hours of my amateur audiobook for The Catalyst, a project that I have mixed feelings about. I absolutely love bringing Cora’s voice to life. Reading her diary out loud feels like speaking to a friend, dishing on all the crazy things that happened since we last saw each other. I struggle a little with consistent voice for other characters, and accents staying the same is nearly impossible for me, but I am loving this revitalization. However, I have plenty of concerns. Will anyone like it? Did I preform it well? How bad is the audio quality, really? Do I know how to edit this?

Not to mention how challenging it is to record. Even if I’ve got the voices down and I’m capable of actually saying what I’m reading, it’s near impossible for me to find quite minutes strung together. My boyfriend’s cat’s paws make noise on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, as does her crunching her food. The refrigerator runs every half hour for ten long minutes. The heat is radiators that like to wait for the fridge to kick off to start haunting the house. The neighbors have two kids under ten and a penchant for yelling at the kids, each other, and their two dogs. It’s also approaching lawn mowing season. Rough.

There’s plenty for me to do in the breaks (I don’t, but I could). The Catalyst was rejected from print on Ingram for the size of my cover file. I have to trim it, or something. The Commander leaves KU the first week of April. It still needs to be reformatted to be pulled into a file that isn’t a kpf. I have a feeling that cover will need resizing too. I want to make hardcovers available for both. I need to set up an itch.io. There’s other sites I need to research and set up. The audiobook will need a home after it’s edited. Do I go the normal routes or do I break it into a podcast?

Self-publishing way back in 2020 felt so freeing. Scary, sure, but way easier than trying to query. I don’t regret that decision for a second, but this is not easier. Especially once I try to break Amazon’s grip, it gets harder and harder. I’m not good at keeping balls in the air. But that one guy I was letting juggle them is kind of the worst.

As for The Lady and The List, that’s in hold until the second week of June. Why is that, you may ask? Because I took the terrifying step of submitting it to Carina Press, Harlequin’s LGBT division. I don’t really expect much to come of it so if you don’t see me freaking out before then, expect that by the end of June.

For now I’ll focus on my birthday that’s in a few days, and the fifth anniversary of publishing The Catalyst a few days after that.