When Do You Need #IWSG?

Alex CavanaughAwesome co-hosts today are Tamara Narayan, Tonja Drecker, Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor, Lauren @ Pensuasion, Stephen Tremp, and  Julie Flanders!  



When do you need #IWSG? Anytime. But during a book launch it's essential, so how lucky am I to have writers in my corner this very day when my next middle grade book, Sign of the Green Dragon is officially published.




Many of you have read and reviewed the story on Goodreads already, so I hope you'll post your reviews on Amazon as well. No one else knows better than you how important those reviews are for writers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.






Question of the Month
This month's question is interesting, and I look forward to reading the answers when I visit your blogs.

My very first piece of writing as an aspiring writer of fiction was called Bad Ass Attitude. While it's published, it didn't get to keep the title I wanted, and it came out as Sliding on the Edge. Here's a bit about it:


A teenager who cuts herself.  A doomed horse. And a grandmother with guilty secrets.
Shawna has spent the first sixteen years of her life in Las Vegas and learned to handle anything from a Las Vegas hustle to skipping out on the rent. Scarred inside and out, she's survived with a tough, hardened attitude. When her mother abandons her, with only a bus ticket and the name and number of stranger to call, this troubled, desperate teen finds herself on a California horse ranch with Kay Stone, the steely, youngish grandmother she's never known. 
Kay overwhelms Shawna with rules and daily barn chores, and Shawna baffles Kay with her foul-mouthed anger and shrugging indifference to everything--except the maltreated horse on the ranch next door. But it's worse than even Kay suspects: Shawna's driven to cut herself by Monster, that strange voice inside her head. Kay fears that unless she helps this girl, she could lose her last living family member.
As this unlikely pair struggles to co-exist, will they overcome their suffering and transcend the past?


I write in two very different categories because I need variety or I go stale. What do you write? Are you insecure when you first put a book out into the world? Besides #IWSG what do you do to manage it?Beware the White Rabbit (Anthology: They Call Me Alice), Leap Books, Summer '15
Sliding on the Edge, C. Lee McKenzie, WestSide Books, Spring '09
The Princess of Las Pulgas, WestSide Books, Fall '10
The First Time, Fall '11 (Anthology story: Premeditated Cat)
Alligators Overhead, Outskirts Press, Fall '12
Two and Twenty Dark Tales (Anthology story: Into the Sea of Dew