
Time’s up.
If you haven’t voted for the DragonAwards yet, your last chance is nigh. Of course, what I’m hoping is that you’ll vote for A God in the Shed in the Horror Novel category, but obviously you can vote for whatever you want and I encourage you to do so.
So fill out the form and once you get the email, vote your heart out
Feel free to encourage others to vote too! The more the merrier?
Thank you
JF Dubeau
Yesterday I got the clearance from editing master extraordinaire Matt Harry to start writing my final draft of Deus Hex Machina. Today I built my new editing scene list to help as a roadmap for what I’ll be doing for the next month. As you can see, most of the book is changing in some way, although a lot of the changes are going to be minor. I love this part of the process: Getting to dive into the book, polish up the rough edges and round out the wonky corners. It’s like falling in love with the story in a completely new way.
I’m unsure what happens once I’m done with this draft, so for the moment I’m going to assume that I go into an edit phase like the rest of my cohort. My guess is that such an edit will be very brief because we spent so much time upfront preparing for the 4th draft writing phase.
I can’t help but smile to think how far Isidore RAM has come. I am so proud of this little book, I can’t wait for you to get a chance to read it.
Cheers,
Amanda

If you followed along last year with my updates on the publication of These Are My Friends on Politics, you’ll recall that the real stars of those updates were the pictures of my 16-year-old dog Nina.
Last month, she passed away. I haven’t brought it up much because (a) I didn’t feel like it and (b) I didn’t have anything valuable to say about losing a beloved pet beyond the fact that I do not recommend the experience. For those who didn’t know Nina firsthand, I’d rather leave you with something uplifting that characterized her life than simply share some sad news amid the endless bad news that keeps hitting us these days.
So I did the reasonable thing and wrote and illustrated and published a book about her instead. It’s nothing extraordinary — look, *you* try making a book in a month in your spare time during one of your busiest work periods of the year — but it conveys much of what made Nina such a big deal in this little corner of the world. And it has some pretty pictures in it. And it’s more funny than sad. And perhaps it’s a nice distraction and reminder that the world isn’t all bad even if we’re threatening to end it with simultaneous nuclear and civil wars.
Anyway, it’s available now if you’re interested in taking a look. Thanks for reading, and enjoy. If you have any dog-loving friends whom you think would enjoy this, please pass it on.
Amazon (paperback and Kindle): dog.billyok.com/amazon
iBooks: dog.billyok.com/ibooks
Kobo: dog.billyok.com/kobo
Barnes & Noble: dog.billyok.com/bn
Indiebound: dog.billyok.com/indiebound


The first transport is away...

As promised, the manuscript is in. I still have to finish polishing up the summary that’s required for the editors, but everything that’s actually going to be content in the book has been handed over.
I think I might go watch that Game of Thrones finale again now...
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