Väktare is out now, The Hungry is on its way.

With the first book in the Väktare series released last week, the second book is now at second draft stage, with a release ETA of August. Physical copies of Väktare will be available circa the end of April through Createspace and Amazon.

In the meantime, take a look at the Väktare teaser trailer below, and get your copy of Väktare online from all major online book retailers.

There's a launch date! AND there's a FREE BOOK CODE for subscribers!

Well, it's true that November turned into December turned into March. But what's a few months between friends? The main thing is, there is a set date, the book is ready, and free on release date for loyal subscribers.

The final printed book will be 503 pages, and will be available through CreateSpace towards the end of April.

Meanwhile, the e-book version is available for pre-order now through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, and will be available through Smashwords on release date, the 1st April.

Despite how long it's taken to polish this one up to publication standard, rest assured that books two and three are already written, and are in the editing stage, so I expect to be able to release at least one more book this year, if not two, while book four is a quarter written.

I'm confident that lovers of all things urban fantasy will enjoy this very Kiwi take on werewolves in modern-day society and come back for more, which is why I'm giving away a pre-order code for this first book in the series right now on my website, www.kaialeigh.com. All you have to do to receive the code is subscribe to the mailing list (don't worry, I'm far too inept at email marketing to spam you!), and then either use the code at B&N, or Kobo now, or at Smashwords on the 1st April.

Thanks for your support, and I look forward to sharing Liss's exploits with you over the next few years.

- Kaia

Find me on Twitter, @NZUrbanFantasy

1 a.m, or 'getting ready for release date'

A short post, as it's very early in the morning and a long week lies ahead.

As the 16th November approaches, I find myself good friends with 1 a.m and 2 a.m, frantically working with beta readers and editors, re-reading Stephen King's 'On Writing' and speaking with other writers for advice on this first properly-launched book.

However, with some success, a cover design has been settled on!

Werewolves in Auckland, New Zealand

VÄKTARE 

Launching November 16th, 2016

There are no wolves in New Zealand.  Never have been.  But for more than six hundred years, there have been werewolves. 

Adopted into the West Auckland pack as a child, Alessandra De Witt is one of a handful of humans who know they're there.  To her, folks going furry is just part of life.  But while in wolf circles she's nothing extraordinary, inside Liss lies an ability that could show itself at any time.  Or not.  No one really knows. 

And while Liss's foster fathers prepare to ship her off to university, others are watching and waiting, ready to make use of her power as soon as it appears. 

On that day, you'd better believe things are going to get messier than a ruby club's after-party

Fifteen years in the imagining, Väktare is the story of the complex lives of werewolves living in New Zealand, and their human ward, Alessandra De Witt.

I started writing this book in 2001, back when there wasn't quite the abundance of werewolf and vampire fiction on the market that there is now.

Always fascinated with wolves, after I left university I spent a year planning a trip to Wolf Park in Lafayette, Indiana to study wolf behaviour, knowing wolves were going to feature heavily in my writing in the years to come.

For financial reasons this never became a reality but my interest in wolves remained. Like so many I was fascinated by these wild creatures that share such a similar countenance to domestic dogs, yet live the savage life of predators.

I especially enjoyed visiting Wolf Park's 'wolf sounds' page, which features their pack howling at nightfall.  That sound for me is suggestive of humanity's own wild origins, and I imagine our early ancestors sitting around their fires listening to that song with a mixture of kinship and awe.

But the book was shelved half-completed as my life went through a period of upheaval that didn't leave space for the concentration and dedication writing requires.

Although now there may be more books written about werewolves than any other type of fiction, this book was one I always wanted to finish.  These characters had burned their way into existence through years of living on the page and I wanted to let them out into the world for others to enjoy.

As it turned out, once finished, this book turned out to be part of a much larger story. Parts two and three have already been completed, with a fourth currently in progress.

So on November 16th, join Liss and the Westlands pack as they embark on a very Kiwi journey.

JUST FOR YOU

As we get closer to launch date, stay tuned for your chance to win a free copy of Väktare on Kobo or Kindle.

Yours among the flax and pukekos, Kaia.

Balancing writing with a full time job

For many authors, spurred forward by hot coffee laced with lethal doses of cold determination, there may be several years of unpaid work before their efforts provide a viable income.

Some achieve quick success - but those are in the minority.  Most of us are not in a position to give up our day jobs on a whim, and leave behind the routine, the security and the sense of achievement that comes with having a legitimate career.
You know, one your parents approve of.

I count myself extremely lucky to have my dream job.  It could be better... but not by much. A couple of years ago I set a goal for myself and achieved it, and while I had intended to set another career goal once I hit this point, my passion for writing has meant I've refocused those efforts into being great at my day job, and being as successful as time allows in my passion, until such time as I can grow it into a viable income alternative.

I don't have a partner, and am vaguely jealous of those who do - the love, support, and financial security it must give someone to have a backstop and a loving spouse who 'gets' what you do, must be amazing.  But when I look at what I have right now to contribute to a partner, it would be an IOU written on the back of a power bill to the effect of, 'When I'm famous, Gerald, this'll all be worth it'.

I've not yet met a guy who'd enter into a relationship with a woman who works 90% of the time, on the promise of a distant future of champagne and high quality patio furniture.

Even if there IS a firepit.

So how do you balance a full time career with writing?  

One strategy is to keep yourself on track with a schedule that lays out what you're going to concentrate on, on any given day of the week, so that you give equal time to your blog, your social media, your original creation (aka the fun stuff) and your editing.  As any self-published author knows, writing books is the easy part.  Building the business around your work to help deliver it into the hands of your audience is like training ravens to go back in time and deliver your book to your future readers between 7pm and 8pm on the last Thursday before the winter equinox in 1955.  It's not impossible, but some bending of our current understanding of physics is required.  And trained, time-travelling ravens aren't cheap.

What year is it?

Understanding what needs to be done, first and foremost, is key.  I recently listened to a great podcast, via the guys over at Rocking Self Publishing, where successful self-published author Adam Houge was interviewed.  Adam has a very clear understanding of the business of reaching your audience, which is a great place to start if you're looking at the cost of time-travelling ravens, wondering how you're ever going to make this work.

You can listen to the podcast here:  Interview with Adam Houge

But chin up, there is hope.  If you're lucky enough to have a great job you want to keep, and you want to be successful with this writing lark, getting organised is the first step.  Track everything you do in a spreadsheet to understand how long each task takes you and assign a space in your routine to devote to it.

There are some great books on marketing your writing to find your audience, but if you haven't read those yet, here are some basic tips to get you started.

1) Make time to learn what you need to do to reach your audience.  This is the most important task, and the hardest step to take when you're caught up in writer's fever.

2) Make time to stay across what Amazon's up to.  Amazon owns the market, let's be honest, and changes in The Algorithm (usually spoken about with a sense of both frustration and reverence) can make all the difference to your marketing strategy's success.

3) Keep talking to your fans via blogs and social media (hey fans!) - long silences are bad in any relationship.  (Sorry Gerald)

4) Zealously allocate your time to delivering your book to market, to make sure you don't end up with a heap of books on your desk, and no strategy for how to bend the space-time continuum.

5) Recognise that a lot of readers are also writers these days - so why not share what you learn as you go along?

And if you're a fan coming to see what this author is up to, the good news is that my first book in the Väktare series is getting close to completion, and will be released by the end of 2016, with two more in the series to follow in 2017.  You can learn more over at my website.

Marketing 101: Self Published Novelist Wonders: "What Kind of Controversy Best Defines Me As An Author?"

After painstakingly editing a manuscript for fourteen months, self-published Young Adult fiction writer Jackson Dundass took a moment to ponder what kind of controversy he could stir up in order to get his work noticed amidst the thousands of other titles published this year in the Young Adult category.

Dundass, who says he has worked tirelessly to create a book that depicts the pain and angst of teenage-hood against the backdrop of loneliness and isolation that he himself experienced growing up, admitted he had already submitted the novel to various web platforms when he realised he had failed the final marketing step of starting a viral controversy on Twitter.

Concerned that his work would be lost in the thousands-strong rankings of other self-published works, Dundass then sat down to decide how best to formulate his marketing plan, tossing up between garnering the rage of a small group of right-wing religious fanatics by drawing attention to his homosexual characters, alerting right-wing conservatives to the inclusion of explicit sexual content, or staging a terrorist threat against anyone who reads his book.

"I'm just not sure who should be angriest about what I've written," said Dundass in an interview on Tuesday evening, "But I want to start by offending one group before I try moving on to the next one - you know, you can blow your load too soon if you're not careful."

Dundass then put a hand to his mouth and giggled.  "Whoops.  Did I say 'blow your load'?  You should probably put that in the headline."

Angry right-wing conservatives, religious fanatics and people afraid of being blown up, were not available for comment.

NaNoWriMo from New Zealand

I was going to blog about editing, but as it turned out, I finished a novel and the story just wanted to keep going.  I guess that's how a series starts.  The date was the 1st November, which happened to coincide with NaNoWriMo.

What the heck is #NaNoWriMo?  I hear you say (Leaving you to wonder if I have exceptional hearing, or if I'm standing behind you in a mask.  Don't turn around.  Sssshhhhh).

National Novel Writing Month is an international event that draws together thousands of writers from all over the world to participate in a month-long writing frenzy.  The goal - to write 50,000 words in thirty days.

Generally, I tend to put down around 30,000-35,000 words per month, averaged over the three months it takes to put together a first draft of roughly 90,000-100,000 words.  So I figured this would be a good challenge to set myself.

So, instead of editing my (working title) novel, 'First Blood', a fun, supernatural-horror tale about a feisty twenty-something human living among werewolves and fighting vampires in the land of the long white cloud, I decided to join NaNoWriMo and scratch out at least half of a first draft in thirty days.

I have to say, if you have a competitive spirit and you love to write, NaNo is a brilliant way to keep up the momentum.  Even with a six-day break in the middle  (these things happen), I've managed to keep to the required word count because  I love statistics.  I love graphs that increase every day.  It's like an addiction.

What does this mean?  It means that in 2016, I'll be releasing two novels in this series, First Blood (if it retains that title) and Vaktare, the sequel.

And for all you aspiring authors out there who haven't yet put pen to paper... or, you know, keyboard to screen, I highly recommend NaNo - or, if you're reading this between Novembers, even just recording your stats and keeping a daily tally against percentage goals.  It's much easier to bang out a first draft if you know you need to put down 1650 words a night to reach a goal.

It leads to celebration when you run over, a reminder when you're under that you need to persevere, and I find that writing quickly fuels my creativity.  That sprint from idea to first draft is a hell of a rush.

Find out more about NaNoWriMo here:  https://nanowrimo.org

Not the best way to put keyboard to screen:

Tags:  #NaNoWriMo, #NZ, #NewZealand, #KaiaLeigh, #Novel, #Writing, #Vampires, #Werewolves, #SATCH

The writing process - should you know where you're going?

This is something I've often wondered.  I've never, ever sat down and written a book with a set of predetermined events in mind, and I wonder if knowing where my story was going would improve, or stunt, the writing process.

Here's how I tackle writing a novel.

1. I have an idea - usually it's a scene.  The scene will have a character, a place, a feel and a purpose.  Sometimes I know at this point what the log-line of the book will be - in other words, I'll have a high-level 'what if' premise that I want to work with.  Other times, all I have is an image, like a mental GIF.  This usually turns out to be my opening scene.  Nine times out of ten, it'll remain that way.

2. I start writing the scene and as I write it, questions will arise that will lead to filling out more of the story.  For instance - why is my character where they are?  What are they doing?  Are they waiting for something or someone?  Why are they sad/happy/angry - are they in danger?  From whom?  This will lead from a short opening 'teaser' scene into Chapter 1 where I start to explain the story (to myself).

3. By the end of chapter one, I've usually found out what my character's (initial) motivation is and this will lead me to the first Event.  This is plot point 1.  Here we are, doing a thing, when another thing happens that starts bigger things happening.  Usually things that my character wasn't expecting, or that we as the reader (and I was the author) wasn't expecting.

4. The journey begins.  There's always a journey, in the same way that there's always a lighthouse, always a man and always a city.  If you're a fan of Bioshock, you'll know what I mean.

The journey might be one from place to place, or it might be from one state to another (home planet to distant planet, bad, bad man to good man - or vice versa).

5. During the first third of this journey, I get to know my character(s).  They might start to build something, or do something.  Then plot point 2 hits.

6. Plot Point 2 - where everything falls apart.  Just when we thought we were getting somewhere, someone throws a giant spanner and manages to hit The Works first time.  Now my characters find themselves in conflict.  Often, this is where the 'real' adversary turns up, or if they've already met the Big Bad of their universe, it starts to ramp up a notch, perhaps revealing some motivation and purpose and unravelling answers to some questions we may or may not have asked.

Still, there's no planning.  What the Big Bad is, is often driven by the characters and their development - what they want, what's important to them, what they fear most.  When this happens is determined by whatever came before.

7. Plot Point 3, heading towards The Finale.  This is where more questions are answered, my characters' characters are tested, and hijinks begin to ensure.  Followed by...

8. The Finale.  Where everything comes together, anything left to reveal is revealed, characters fight or flee for their lives and the battle is won... or lost.  Its up to the characters.  I won't force them to win, although I always hope they will.

9. The wrap-up.  Everyone laughs, jumps in the air and there's a freeze-frame.

10.  There's a 10, because I like even numbers.  So, just as there's often a prologue, or as I often think of it when I'm writing it, a teaser (in the same way you get the before-credits teaser on a TV show), there's often an epilogue - just a little hint of where the character or characters are off to next.  Most of my novels aren't stand-alone, so these epilogues lead into the next book.

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, it's a messy process, but I find that when writing consistently, daily, plot holes are less likely to appear than writing over the mammoth period of time that Just Drink took (fifteen years from first draft completion to final draft completion, with a fourteen-year break in between).

Once the first draft has gone through the stages above, it's time for Editing... which I'll talk about in my next blog post.

I write... SATCH?

Supernatural Action Thriller Comedy Horror.  That's a LOT to try and pack into one book, and one genre.  But what if the standard genres just don't describe your work and SATCH just... does?

When you list your book on Amazon or Kobo, you pick the closest genre that fits your book; but then you and four thousand other novels are all sitting in the same Olympic-sized kiddie pool, packed in like sardines.  Sardines in a chlorinated pool.  I don't need to tell you how wrong that is.

There's a school of thought that if your book doesn't fit snugly into a genre or two, you haven't written to your audience.  And I agree with that... I do.  But... if you've ever gone online to look up your favourite genre, you'll find you're spoiled for choice - as long as you don't read the kind of books I write.  The astounding number of creative works out there under any one genre heading is... well, astounding.

So how can readers find the specific type of work they really love?  More than that, how can we tell original stories if we blinker ourselves to fit a genre heading?  How can we bring something new to the table when we write?  We know what we love, our audience knows what they love... and humbly, as a writer, I of all people realise, I'm not currently setting any new trends with my 'science-vampires pursued by evil scientists' storyline.  But if I were looking for a thriller, I'd be thinking crime.  If I were looking at action, I'd think guns and dudes in tank tops and red headbands who don't say much.  Vampires - well.  Don't even.  Science fiction is for world-builders whose vision extends beyond our own universe, and I'm not currently a world-builder, (although I do have a novel in the works that will be sci-fi, but that's not for here).

So I ask the question - are there really enough genres allocated by the big book sellers to allow authors to find their audience?  I would argue 'no'.  You don't have to be terribly original to find your work is simply not represented by the genres available.  Or the number you can select.

What do you think?

Find me on Wattpad

Hi all,

If you're looking for a free sample of some of my work, you can find me on Wattpad.  Find the first five chapters of 'Just Drink', the first few chapters of my second book, 'First Blood' (working title), which will be released around Christmas, and some of my older work, dusted off and published for fun.

What is Wattpad?  Wattpad is a writing community where all the work published is free, and writers of all ages and abilities can publish their work and get feedback from other writers and their potential audience.

Interview with Jim Vines on Jim Vine Presents

Recently I was interviewed by Jim Vines Presents, a blog for indie authors.  Read the full interview here.

Just... gonna leave this here...

Book Trailer for Just Drink

Finally published!

The day is here!  Just Drink is now available on Kobo (and shortly, Amazon).

What do the leader of a street gang and a teenage girl incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital have in common?

They just happen to share blood.

When Dylan finds her, Shaiyan is a teenager, locked inside a psychiatric hospital to protect the world from her unrelenting thirst for human blood.  Desperate to be with someone who suffers as he does, Dylan rescues her from her prison and takes her to live with him on the streets with a gang of misfits who collectively refer to themselves as The Six. 

Unknown to them both, the men who manufactured their madness are hunting them and will stop at nothing to finish what they began.

As  Shaiyan and Dylan find themselves embroiled in a silent power struggle between the most powerful entities in the world, they must find a way to stay alive and free, while holding together the tattered fragments of their family.

This is a modern vampire tale with a twist - there is no mythology, there's no vampire hierarchy and no one got bitten.  Instead, blood drinking is in their very DNA.  How it got there - that's the real concern.

Just Drink is book one in a series that follows the remnants of three families, caught in a battle between two global powers, whose motivations are unclear, and the outcome uncertain.

BUY IT ON KOBO HERE:

You can check out this book and more on my website, www.kaialeigh.com.

Great way to relieve stress

So, hey.  Having a stressful week?

This is a fun prank to play on your flatmates / family - especially those who have a nervous disposition.

You'll need a dark, empty house (preferably old and cold), Youtube and some speakers turned up loud.  Suddenly.  At night.  Through a closed door works well, for effect.

Cue up these two files and play simultaneously (I found Tiny Tim at full volume and Sound Effects at 30% volume is a good mix).

AND

If your housemates think you're not home, even better... turn your monitor off and quietly hide behind or under something.  Then jump out.

Okay, so they might hit you - or never speak to you again.  But I guarantee, you'll feel great.  Barring that lump on the side of your head where they hit you with whatever blunt object they had to hand.

* Results may vary.

Why hasn't the book been released yet? Isn't it after the first of July now?

Because:

They'll all be filled by the weekend... I promise...*falls asleep in exhaustion*

I didn't steal your name - I just like it.

Another fun thing about being a writer is getting to name characters.

Now, if you're writing Game of Thrones, you can get creative and just push and pull a few letters around to make new, unique monikers for your characters.  But my preference is for 'ordinary' names (most of the time) and to that end, I spend hours searching through baby name databases, finding names with just the right feel to them.

Unfortunately, the longer you're alive, the more likely you are to meet and make friends with people who share names with your characters.  And that can be a bit awkward.

I don't know what it's like for someone to read a book where the character shares their name as it's never happened to me.  But when a book that's been in the works for months - or, often, years - is published and it's filled with your friends' names, you have to wonder how it'll feel to them.  Even if you try and avoid using names of people you know, at some point that just becomes limiting.

In the universe I draw from, character names and even characters cross between worlds, take on different roles and appear in each others' stories.

This is part of a larger multiverse where multiple sets of characters live out their lives and adventures in altered versions of the same world.

In one version of the universe, werewolves and vampires are real.  In another, the concept of vamparism is real but is caused by a disease.  In other universes, supernatural beings only exist as ideas or hallucinations and occasionally, no one drinks blood at all.

So, to all the folks who find their names turning up in my books time and time again - I didn't steal your names, I promise.  The character models come from this infinite multiverse and those names came from the land of the internet.

Evaluating Style Writer 4

So, in my hunt for better editing tools to help speed up the process of refining my writing, I stumbled upon (or perhaps I read it somewhere), a piece of software called Style Writer.

Style Writer is great.  It scores you on all the important parts of your writing, which for anyone who enjoys gamification of life, is quite addictive.

Scoring categories include Bog (how often you mention wet soil in your novel), Passive (whether or not your characters hit other characters), Style (general fashion sense), Jargon (I can't think of anything witty to say about this one) and gives you an overall grade.

All sad puns aside, one of the most useful checking tools it offers is looking for signs of over-writing, which are characterised by bog or glue.  These are words that are used to hold sentences together but which don't offer much in the way of moving things forward.  The more bog and glue you have in your sentence, the longer it takes to make your point... the less attention your reader's going to pay.

For instance, an example of a sentence that needs tidying might be:

She stood still in the cold, dark night, breathing in shallow gasps, wondering how long it would take for the narrator to make a point.

Well, we could just have her standing in the dark.  After all, if your'e standing somewhere, you're generally not prancing about, so my telling you that that she stood still is irrelevant - as is probably the fact that it's cold and that it's dark because it's night.  So you start to see how you can shave words off to make your point.

My natural instinct is to over-write, so I like Style Writer's no-nonsense analysis.  You can't argue with an algorithm.  Well, you can, but you'd better do it succinctly.

Style Writer also looks for passive verbs and overused words such as 'nice' and you can add in new patterns to check for if you know you have particular stylistic tendencies.  For instance, I talk waaaay too much about eyes if I'm not careful.  The trick is to make sure anything you do in your writing is intentional, adds to your voice or the vibe you're trying to create, and doesn't pull readers out of the story to ask themselves 'why the hell do you keep going on about his eyes?'.

It grades your sentence length, checks for sexist comments (yes, seriously) and gives you everything in an easy-to-read pane that highlights whichever elements you want to check for, colour coded to their category.

It's not perfect - as with MS Word's grammar checker, it often highlights words that are correctly used and suggests alternatives.  This refers to the 'confused word' category, where folks might use lie and lay interchangeably or confuse its with it's.  More often than not, I find its suggestions are flat out wrong.  But the developers do ask for feedback and are adding to the software on a regular basis, so I'm hoping this is something that will improve over time.

I'll spend a few more days putting it through its paces, as I haven't used anything like it before, but I think this might be the one for me.  Licences are only $150 USD for one, and another $30 to add additional licences for a laptop or other work station.

At first blush, the only thing I would ask them to add is perhaps some achievements you can unlock (I scored Excellent in BOG!)  so that you can post your success to Facebook, because who doesn't want to do that? - And perhaps to re-skin it so that it looks less 1994 and more Age of Apps.  But many of the writing tools out there do have that ye-olde-world feel and I guess it doesn't affect how it performs.  It's just my preference to have things look shiny.

So, there's my blog post run through Style Writer.  I wonder how Style Writer will score me?  (For the purposes of this experiment, I haven't edited this post to tidy it up).

The Report #stylewriter4

I WANT to believe...

Beta Reading, Everybody

So, the 'final' draft of Just Drink (the name is now finalised) has been distributed to my kind and attentive Beta readers for their feedback and some final checks.  I've vowed to put the book down for a couple of weeks and come back to it once some initial feedback comes in and then start to do the final tidy.  This will be the final tidy before publication.

The cover has been created.  The ISBN has been registered.  The next three books in the series have been drafted and some initial talking-book samples have been created to see if it'd work in that format for another project.

Breathing space is... terrifying.  I'll admit, writing is a little like a drug habit and the ringing silence that follows when you put down your metaphorical pen (or pipe or whatever, I'm just mixing up this metaphor as much as possible here) is actually quite disturbing.

For a full year I've lived with these characters, exploring their motivation and living their emotional lives with them.  It's like watching a TV series, in a way, one that's fully immersive and when it's done, you don't quite know what to do with yourself.

Thankfully, I have other hobbies (obsessions), one of which is singing, another is composing and my next project will likely be purchasing some decent composing software and sound libraries and starting on that journey.  This'll complement the talking-book project.

And then there's the art - my passion for Anime has spilled into a desire to be able to create my own characters, so there's that.

But for all the waffle above, the key takeaway is (not sweet and sour pork, no), is that the book is essentially finished.  I believe it'll be ready for the Amazon and Kobo marketplaces by the end of June.

And then, there will be cake.