0 Mid-December check in

Well, well.  It looks like I'm back for my mid-month single entry check-in. It's about time I update you on the goings on in my life.

On November 30th, I finished the first draft of my novel.Cue trumpets and fire off the cupcake cannons. I was so happy to type 'the end'! Since then, I have revised, edited, chopped out entire chapters, rewritten entire sections, and stressed.

Yes, stressed.

There is a whole nother world involved in the business aspect of publishing your novel. It's not just about finishing your story and making the decision to self-publish, like I thought. I have learned about cover designers, formatters, buying ISBN numbers, copyrights, professional editors, marketing your novel so people know about it, Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, CreateSpace, printing on demand, and more. I have asked question after question to my author friends, bugging them about everything. Thank God they seem to be happy to share with a newbie like me.

Serious thanks go out to them, the people who are sharing all of their hard-earned information with me. I would still be Googling and hoping Wikipedia had the answers I was looking for, and maybe not ever finding out what the right way to do things would be. Because experience trumps Google every time.

I've also changed the working title of my novel. Bliss was already highly represented on Amazon and Goodreads with titles in so many different genres.  My second option, Talan's Bliss, just didn't cut it for me. I decided to pull a line straight from the novel and go with A Taste of Bliss instead. So far, so good. It also gives me a name for the series I hope it starts, The Taste series.

I have been just as busy creating my author alter-ego brand. I designed a website. It's simple and doesn't have much info right now, but it's working if  you want to check it out. www.AdrianRHale.com I would absolutely love it if you would connect with me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I could use some fans, and I think it would be awesome to share more of this process with people who have supported me from the beginning.

I have a cover photo shoot set up for next week to get the image I want to use for the cover. It's pretty exciting to see my vision coming together like this. I mean, a few months back, it was just a fantasy that someday I would write a story I thought was worthy of publishing. A vision board, a story idea, and a month of writing furiously later, and here I am, hoping I'll soon have a finished product.

Outside of my writing, I have just been working and holding down the fort. I spent last weekend in California, working at my old salon, seeing family and friends. I brought home a nasty little cold, but made it out of the Bay Area before #HellaStorm hit today. Have you seen that hashtag or the coverage of the crazy rain and winds that hit the Northern California area today? Crazy.

And now I must return to my editing and leave my blog alone for another month or so. Happy holidays, merry Christmas, happy New Year, and also, happy birthday to me in a few weeks. I'm not celebrating it this year (boo, hiss, mean dirty birthdays!) but it's worth a mention now.

See you in the new year, friends!