Have you missed any of these freebies?
Jun 28, 2021 8:58 pm
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Hey, amazing humans!
The last week sped past for me. As I mentioned in my last email, Jaywalking was delivered to the editor, but hasn't yet come back from her desk. When it does, and after I make my last pass, I will send out ARCs and schedule a pre-order at a special, lower price so that anyone who read the novella and wants the full-length book gets a discount. I'll be sure to let you know when that happens.
If you've been with me a while, you know I have two beloved horses. Big Red Horse is a fourteen-year-old gelding who knows exactly how cute and cherished he is and regards me with entitled disdain, and Little Red Horse (who's really not so little any more) is an eight-year-old mare who's as devoted to me as the average Labrador Retriever. I have never met a horse quite like her, to say the least, but when I'm managing her intense, quirky personality successfully, she's a lot of fun.
Little Red Horse and I went to a horse show this weekend, our first one-on-one outing since 2019, when I took her to the national finals for our discipline. She tried her best but was very jittery on that last trip, but this weekend she handled the new environment, the challenging weather, and the novelty of leaving the property after a solid year of no traveling like a superstar.
If you want to see horse pictures and other snapshots from my daily life in image form, you can follow me on Instagram, where I also posted a blurry, sweaty, but happy selfie of me and Little Red Horse this weekend.
P.S., we got some ribbons, and one was blue!
What I'm reading
I am so close to earning the right to jump into Subtle Blood, book three in KJ Charles's Will Darling Adventures series. I adore KJ Charles as an author and as a human, and I have been anticipating this book for months. I hear it's well worth the wait. But first, I have to finish up my June writing goal... more about that below.
What I'm writing
I spent this week working on Burning Season, and I'm tentatively pleased with my progress. My process has shifted a little with this book. Usually I don't plan much in advance, but the Wild Ones series requires a little more organization than that, as it has plot threads that cross through all the books and, in this case, bridge multiple generations as well. So, I had to sketch out some of the story events in the series with care, and while I was doing that, scenes kept popping into my head, not necessarily in order. When that happened, I sketched the scene quickly to capture it, and then placed these snapshots of time in the book in their proper order. The result is the closest thing to an outline that I've ever produced.
If you're a writer, or you listen to writers talk about craft, then you probably know the general distinction between those authors who are "plotters," meaning they plan out the story before they write it, and "pantsers," who begin writing phase with no plan and discover the story as they go.
I don't believe that there is such a thing as a plotter who plans every detail of the story before beginning to write it, or a pantser who knows nothing about the story beyond the sentence they're writing in that moment. Rather, most of us fall somewhere in between. Maybe we're just thinking out story events in advance without writing them down, but we're still planning as much as a plotter; or, maybe we're making adjustments to our outline as we realize mid-scene that the storyline should change, but we're still finding the right course for the story as we write as much as a pantser.
Still, if I were forced to choose, I'd generally call myself a pantser, so the presence of a real, typed-out document with notes on each chapter is a little alarming to me. Also, I hardly ever write scenes out of order. But the book is feeling great as I write it, so hopefully it's coming together as well or better than the books I've written in the past. Time will tell!
Freebies of past, present, and future
One of you emailed last week to ask if there would be another opportunity to download Sweat, Leather, and Lipstick, the mailing-list exclusive short story in the Wild Ones series set immediately before the events of Burning Season. That email made me realize I should do a roundup of all the exclusive content now, and at regular intervals in the future!
Current mailing list exclusive short stories:
In the Mountains (with switching)*
In the Mountains (with exhibitionism)*
*There's a small caveat here, in that I'm about to retire In the Mountains. After I wrote Sleepwalker, I also wrote this free short story for mailing list subscribers. But the scenes are set between the last chapter of Sleepwalker and its epilogue, which in hindsight might be a little frustrating for readers, or even make it seem like there was something missing from the end of the original story.
I will be re-releasing Sleepwalker along with Jaywalking and had originally planned to only change its cover, but I now plan to incorporate In the Mountains into the book itself, rather than having it exist as a standalone short story.
So, if you'd like to read that short now, this is your last chance to see it on its own! And if you didn't know or forgot, it has two versions for those who don't like the original kink I included. :)
I'll be writing another freebie in July that should be popular with you mm fantasy romance fans out there who were so supportive while I was writing Undertow! I hope you'll look forward to checking it out later this summer.
I hope you all have a great week.
xo,
Rachel
Books by Rachel Ember