Skye MacKinnon's Blog, page 6

New release: Roar

My Catnip Assassins series is now complete! Seven books full of murders, RH romance and every cat pun you can think of. And then some more.

Roar is the final book in this purrfectly exciting series, so you can now read all books in one go. Dive into the life of a cat shifter assassin and her three men as she cuts off body parts, goes on catnip benders and fights for those she loves. Even though she'd never admit to loving them. Obviously. She's a cat.

Grab yourself a bag of catnip and enjoy!
Read Roar Start the series

The Aliens are coming!

This winter is going to be all about aliens! Here's a wee preview of what's to come.A Very Alien Christmas (contains Alien Abduction for Beginners - Christmas edition, ménage)
Captured and Captivated (mystery story included, more details coming soon)Alien Abduction for Beginners (currently in Stolen and Seduced; pre-order link coming in late November)
Alien Abduction for Professionals (reverse harem, sequel to Alien Abduction for Beginners but can be read as a standalone)
Don't want to wait? Take a loolk at my existing sci-fi and alien books!

10 things you didn't know about Song of Blood

1. Skye and Liza started writing it over Facebook Messenger before moving it to Google docs.

2. They did not plot it out before writing it (something that makes Liza VERY nervous, to the point where she turned into a clingy girlfriend and messaged Skye constantly with questions).

3. Lysander's name was Tyler until a third into writing the manuscript.

4. The legend of the Lorelei is a real legend, originating in Germany, and you can visit the statue.

5. While talking about the untitled work-in-progress, Liza called it "the Skyza book".

6. The book was finished before they realized Avery didn't have a last name. Liza picked Bennett because she's a Pride & Prejudice fan.

7. Charles was half elf before Skye and Liza decided he should be half faerie lord.

8. Keira Blackwood, another paranormal romance author (and Liza's other coauthor) designed the cover.

9. The "real" Song of Blood (lyrics to the tune of "My Favorite Things" that Liza wrote after reading one of Skye's battle scenes) was a random comment Liza threw into the margin of the manuscript as a joke.

10. Skye wrote the German words that Avery sings to heal Tasha.

11. A placeholder title on their Google doc read "Avery's Epic Vandemic Tale".

12. While writing and editing, Liza and Skye teased each other constantly about British English vs. American English.
Read Song of Blood

A Gift for You: Mary Queen of Scots Colouring Page

I've got a present for you!

I was stalking one of my favourite artists and saw that she'd recently done portraits of queens with cats. It's not all that long ago that I published Saving His Queen, a time travel romance about featuring Mary Queen of Scots, So with a bit of begging I got her to design me a colouring page of Mary with a cat!

I'm so excited to share this and I hope you'll like it. You can download it for free below and print it yourself.

Share your coloured-in pictures with me on social media once you're done, I'd love to see what you come up with! Get your gift

New release: Song of Blood

I've got a new book for you! Song of Blood is co-written with the magnificent Liza Street and is a post-apocalyptic reverse harem with sirens, fae, shifters and vampires. Bit of everything, so to speak, set against the background of the Vandemic.

Empty supermarket shelves, mass panic, staying indoors.Sound familiar?
This is why. 

Back in March, when everything shut down for the first time, I wrote a few paragraphs about a woman having a bit of a nightmare finding toilet paper in the shops. I sent it to Liza and she added some more words and several months later, we have a full, long novel. I think it's been a bit therapeutic for both of us to write about a fictional, humorous vampire pandemic. Without toilet paper, obviously.
Read Song of Blood

Cover reveal: Song of Souls

[image error] A few months ago, I randomly wrote a few paragraphs about a vampire pandemic which involved a shortage of toilet paper (guess what inspired me) and sent it to my friend Liza Street. She liked it and wrote a few more paragraphs. Back and forth we went until we suddenly had a full novel. We kept this secret because neither of us wanted to set a deadline - this was just our fun little project. Until now.

I present to you Song of Blood, a post-apocalyptic reverse harem full of vampires, werewolves, fae and sirens. It's set in London and Liza (who's American) had a lot of fun impressing me with her (mostly correct) British slang. The Queen's Knickers is probably my favourite expression she managed to sneak in there…
While Liza expanded her British swearword vocabulary, I added some German mythology centering around the Lorelei, a siren who used to terrorise sailors on the river Rhine. I've always wanted to write about her and finally had the chance with this series.

Anyway, the book releases on the 10th October and you can pre-order it already. And if you want to find out more about Liza, take a look at her website - trust me, her books are amazing and it's been an honour to write with her.
Pre-order Song of Blood

A Makeover for Vikings

Sometimes I like to give my older books a new look - whether that's a new cover or a new title. In this case, it's both!
I'd planned for a while to give Norsemen Academy a makeover and now finally had time for it. Say hello to Taking Her Vikings - same content, new look. Still the same sexy Vikings, but now there's one on the cover too!

For now, I'm leaving the paperback the same so if you want one with the old cover, order it now. I'll upload the new paperback in a couple of weeks.

There were three men in my mind. One in the past, two in the present. How was a girl supposed to think like that?
Lainie never expected to be admitted to the prestigious Time Travel Academy.
She never expected to study runes, ancient languages and meet real life Vikings.
And she certainly didn't expect to fall for her teacher... and a Viking... and a mysterious archivist.
When a forbidden jump in time goes wrong, Lainie will have to draw on everything she's learned to make her way back into the present - and into the arms of her men.
A full-length steamy reverse harem full of action, intrigue and hot Vikings, set in both past and present. Includes resources to learn basic runes and Old Norse!

Take Your Viking

More than 200 free romance books

Are you a voracious romance reader? Today, for ONE DAY ONLY, stuff your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books or Google Play ebook reader with 200+ FREE ROMANCE READS!

Get the books at your preferred ebook retailer, for FREE, no strings attached. This is just a helpful collection of free-for-a-limited-time romance novels!

Included in this amazing collection of free books are my books Meow (Catnip Assassins #1) and Studying Her Vikings (Norsemen Academy #1). Get your free books

Free book: Meow

Meow is free this week for the first time ever!

A cat shifter assassin, lots of dead bodies and a slight addiction to catnip... plus some potential mates, secrets from the past and more kittens than you can count.

Start the Catnip Assassins series today!

The final book will release next month, so it's the purrfect timing to begin and read them all in one go ;)
Get your free book

Is it possible to work only four hours a day?

Two years ago, I quit my job and became a full-time author. With no other income than my books, I’ve been working crazy hours ever since to realise my dreams. I make a good living and have built enough savings to get me through emergencies or bad months, but there’s always the worry that it’s not enough. And so I work. A lot. Every day, all day. Even when I still had my job, I’d use every lunch break, evening and of course the weekend to write and work on my author career.

Hobbies? Gone.
Free time? What’s that?
Holidays? Only with my laptop by my side.

Then, last winter, I came close to burnout. I could barely write. Getting out of bed felt as exhausting as running a marathon (not that I’ve ever done one of those). My emotions were all over the place. I found it hard to gather the creativity I need to write my books.
That was a wake-up call. I decided I needed to calm down, reduce my output, focus more on my backlist and repurpose my existing books through audiobooks and translations.
Then came the coronavirus and erased all my plans. The pandemic plus some events in my personal life meant I didn’t write much. This wasn’t the time to change my way of working; my routine was all that kept it together.

Now though, I finally decided to make a change. After reading an excellent report by Skye Warren (subscribe to her author newsletter, she's full of amazing advice) about how working only four hours a day can be just as effective as working long hours, I set myself that very challenge: a week of four hours a day or less. Not a minute more.

I split my four hours in half: two hours for writing, two hours for admin, marketing and whatever else needed doing. I printed off a time sheet to keep track of what I was doing in that limited time to hopefully learn if I did things that were unnecessary or repetitive.

I used a stopwatch to track the total time I spent working, pausing the timer whenever I got distracted or took a break.
At the end of the first day, I was surprised I’d managed to tick off everything on my to do list. Knowing I only had a limited amount of time, I’d raced through my tasks without procrastinating, checking social media or thinking about how to word an email for half an hour.

Writing also went well. I usually write in sprints and can average at least 1,000 words in half an hour. While I can do up to 5k words a day, I try to avoid that outside of deadlines because it makes me crash the next day. My target for this experiment had been 2-3k a day and I achieved that on five days. One day I spent my writing time editing a finished book instead and another day was a no-creativity day thanks to a migraine. Still, my daily average was 2,021 words so still within my target.

I realised that two hours of straight writing was more than I need. Two hours of sitting and thinking about words, easy, but sprint writing for two hours would mean I’d write at least 4k, which is more than my brain can manage most days. I don’t plot my books and rarely have any idea what will happen in them. My subconscious needs time to process and come up with fun plot twists, so I’ve found that after ninety minutes of writing I usually end up slowing down. Splitting the two hours into one full hour and then two half hours spread across the day turned out to be the most productive schedule for me.

I’d already tried working less on weekends in the past few months, so in this experiment, I reduced the four hours to two, with complete freedom what to do within those two hours.

After a week of this, I’ve come to a few realisations:

I spend way too much unproductive time on social media. FOMO is real.
I check my emails all the time, but I rarely respond to them immediately because I get distracted by other things and then forget about it.
I have no idea what to do with my free time anymore. I need to revive my old hobbies and find new ones (and start being social again once the outside-is-evil-and-dangerous situation gets better).
Sprinting with other people is more motivating than doing it by myself. I already knew that but this experiment confirmed it once again.
It helps to spend an entire day on tasks for my other pen name, but planning that ahead isn’t useful because I can’t always predict when I need to do certain things for her.
My PA is an angel.

So, am I going to continue with this?

Yes, I am. This week, I didn’t keep track of what exactly I was doing because that actually took up time I could spend on other things, but I am still using my stop watch to make sure I stick to four hours. I even backed an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to get a TimeChi, a smart productivity tool that might help me use and track my time even more effectively.

What I will change is that I’ll be more flexible about how much of my four hours I’m spending on writing, admin, marketing etc. On days when I’m really creative, I want to be able to write for more than just two hours, and vice versa.

I might experiment with other productivity techniques in the future, but I’ll definitely stick with this for the month of September – minus a few days off for my birthday celebrations.
 
What do you think about this? Could you get all your work done in four hours? Are you willing to try?