New host blues, but I got happy news too…

Well as I predicted, my efforts to move from Infinity Cloud to Dreamhost resulted in me blowing up the blog. I think I’ve got everything sorted out, but I had to use a new theme, so the main site will look a little different from now on. (Well, not for you mirror blog readers, but you know what I mean.) I honestly hope to be with Dreamhost for a few years, because this moving once a year gag is getting old fast. It’s a small comfort that this time I moved because Infinity Cloud is going out of business. At least I can say they were a good host, and I will miss them. As it is, when I switched to them, they volunteered to move my blog for me, preventing a similar explosion from my prior moves.

So, remember how I said I was going to read before I had a new writing project? Didn’t happen. The muse gave me two days off, and then started me on In the Mouth of the Wolf, book three in the Alice the Wolf series. As I make my way through this series, it occurs to me that my muse is often very cruel to main characters. By the point we’re at, Alice has a lot of scars, both physical and emotional, and she’s bed-ridden due to the FBI trying to solve her problems with the wrong choice of medical treatment. She’s lost loved ones and been forced to take on responsibilities that shouldn’t be hers to bear.

And yet…for all this suffering, Alice has come out of the ordeal a stronger person than Peter did at the conclusion of his series. In book three, she’s just turned eighteen, and yet she’s already a veteran of war, a capable alpha who’s earned the respect of her packmates, and a loving den mother. (By way of adoption, in case you were wondering.)

Alice’s story is very emotional for me, and the last few chapters, I’ve had tears and sniffles while trying to write about Alice’s losses and setbacks. It’s been a great series up to now, and I’m really happy at how vastly different it is from Peter’s books. Alice and Peter do have some things in common, which reflects his influence on her during her formative years. But aside from a few superficial similarities, Alice is stronger than Peter, and I’m happy to say his prediction about her was right. She’s a better wolf than him in almost every respect.

So, moving along, I said on Twitter at the start of the month that I hoped to get a few more reviews. As of tonight, I’ve had six new reviews, all of them positive. Three are on Amazon for The Campaign Trilogy, including my first review for Redemption Lost. I also got a review for Saving Gabriel from Bisky Scribbles, and a review for Peter the Wolf from Frodo’s Blog of Randomness, both of them glowing. I’ve also been told to expect another review soon, so this month has been really good for reviews. Sales haven’t been nearly as good, but I think I’m hitting a summer slump, and there’s not much I can do about that. I haven’t sold anything at all in the Amazon UK store, and that’s a bit frustrating after they were one of my better sales sources the last few months. Hopefully they’ll be back in the fall to pick up my new books.

As much as I want to put out a book in August, I will need to take time to edit some of my past releases. Typos and mistakes have been brought to my attention, and I’m not the kind of writer to fire and forget and leave those mistakes in my work. On the positive side, this is one thing I really like about ebooks. If I was still doing print releases with ISBN numbers, correcting mistakes would end up being expensive, and would result in multiple editions on Amazon and other vendors. But I can just fix the errors and upload a new version. And despite there being these mistakes in my work, reviews rarely mention them. I like to think that means the strength of my stories is high enough that readers can overlook the occasional missing letter or punctuation mark. Which doesn’t forgive the mistakes, of course, but it does feel nice to see my readers reacting to my work in positive ways.

I’m still trying to read and get out more reviews, but I think the problem is, my current reads aren’t drawing me in as much as I’d hope for. I hope to get past this slump soon, and maybe I can get out at least two more reviews this month.

And that’s it for now. I do want to thank the folks who bought books this month, and to the folks who took the time to write reviews. Your constant support has kept me motivated, and I’ve been able to write a LOT more in the last few months without needing more than a few breaks between novels. This means that once I can get back to releasing new stuff, you’ll have a lot of new books to look forward to. Once again, thanks for giving my stuff a chance, for your continued support, and for reading my blog.