I'M BACK, BITCHES!

I feel like I haven't talked candidly on here in awhile. Not that I haven't wanted to, I just forget. So much is happening, I don't even know where to start. So, I guess I'll start at the beginning. 

I moved back from Vegas to Oregon in July of 2014. Back to my old hometown, back in with my parents. I needed time to heal and get rid of a pretty bad infection I had. After that, I took a couple of months off, relaxing and making music with my best friend, Jesse. Eventually, in September of 2014, I picked up a job as the office manager/production assistant for a local film production company. The company was a Father and son duo that didn't have the means or the passion to follow through with their plans, so unfortunately, I was let go in February of 2015. I reapplied at T-Mobile and was rehired in March 2015, in which I stayed until November of 2015. Now here is where it gets interesting.

I missed working in entertainment and being around performers who inspired me daily, so I found myself in conversations with my best friend and old boss about going back to work for her in Vegas. She agreed it was a good decision and we solidified a time frame: Mid-January. So here I am, once again, packing up my life to move across states. But this time, there is one big difference, my best friend Jennifer is coming along with me! She is like the sister I never had, so I can't believe it's real. We're both nearing thirty, have nothing tying us down, and are very creative types. I can't wait to get down there with her and paint the town red. 

Apart from that huge bomb, I have also recently been playing around with cover design. I've always wanted to know how to do it, and I'm no Picasso, but, I think I definitely have what it takes. The only thing I need to know how to do is format the cover for the print books. That is driving me absolute bonkers! Once I get that down, I can actually begin to promote my work. Imagine that I have only been doing this for a couple of weeks, and that it has all been done with Picmonkey! I created a Facebook page for the covers, just more as a landing page. I don't want to begin to sell anything yet, just want a place to begin to build my portfolio. Here are a couple of examples of my first attempts at cover design!

There is another thing I have been doing lately that has also been taking up a lot of my time. I have been making a lot of music with Jesse for our duo project, DarienMae. Currently, we have over twenty full songs, with about a third of them 100% mixed, mastered, and produced by Jesse. We uploaded a few new songs to our Soundcloud this week. I'm obsessed with our newest track, In Your Lane! I think I've listened to it over 100 times in the past week. 

I have been slowly getting writing done for The Road Back to Us. Yep, finally chose a title for the third book in my Foundation series. It was about time, and it's so fitting. I can't wait to see what the cover will look like! That is definitely one of my favorite parts of the publishing process. Now the hard part of writing a blurb comes. I am not looking forward to it. I have also been changing the other books in my FS to first person, present tense. I was just not happy anymore with my old writing voice and felt they needed a face lift. I hope to have that done by the time I release TRBTU. It should be released by mid-February. 

I recently had my Darkness Falls series re-formatted and now have them for sale on Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but sales are slower than molasses...as in non-existent. I don't know if it is just because no one knows they are available yet, or because those sites don't have the kind of traffic Amazon does. 

Check out these awesome promo graphics my graphic designer made me for Learning to Live. They are so pretty!

Of course this would just be a jumble of thoughts. That's what I excel at.