I’m spending July in a writing residency in Galway, Ireland, a happy confluence of opportunity and a desire to begin a new writing project.
As a subscribers to my newsletter know, I’ve had three books come out in June 2022. The first was Righting Wrongs, 20 human rights heroes around the world. I’ve been posting about some of my heroes (and talking about them in interviews here and here). If you haven’t done so already, please leave an online review at Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews—and word of mouth!—are tremendously helpful to all book authors.
That same month, I re-released the first two books of The Bond Trilogy, The Bond and The Hive Queen. I’m so glad I was able to bring them out with special new content as well as absolutely spectacular covers. There’s a real magic when a designer as talented as Molly Phipps (at We Got You Covered book design) captures the essence of a story in visual form.
And she did it three times if you add in Book 3, The Mother’s Wheel, which comes out in September. You’ll see from her online portfolio that my covers are by no means an exception. She’s amazingly vibrant and versatile.
And again, a plea: if you’ve read The Bond Trilogy, please leave an online review (even some stars without text are a great help). And better yet—the first two books are on sale as e-books for the month of July (not just at Amazon). Please pass the word and recommend to fantasy-minded friends.
Another big help is to ask your public library to purchase books, so more people get to read them.
Finally, a bit of news: an audiobook of The Bond will be out this August. Once again, I seem to have struck gold, with Alexa Elmy as the narrator. She captures the spirit of Dinitra’s adventure beautifully. More on this release soon.
On my new project—well, we’ll see! Right now, I’m enjoying that wonderful honeymoon of fresh, blank pages, where anything seems possible and the story slowly reveals itself to me paragraph by paragraph. I know there will be hard moments (as there are with most books). But this adventure is giving me a new sense of possibility and of discovery.
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen some of the images I’ve collected on my afternoon rambles in Galway City (after I’ve completed my 2,000 words or so in the Galway City Library). Here are some of them to whet your appetite for perhaps someday visiting this lovely location. While often rainy, Galway can rightly boast a spirit of welcome, fun, and deep connection to Irish culture, both in the past and for whatever’s to come in the future.
This is a view of Inish Mor, the Big Island that’s part of the Aran Islands. These low, rocky spits of land protect Galway Bay from the North Atlantic.
And this is what’s called “sparching,” taking in the rare sunny day by the city’s Spanish Arch.
Finally, Galway is one of the most musical cities I’ve ever visited. The only thing close was Havana, where music of all sorts seemed to leak from every building. Here’s a quartet of young people I saw busking yesterday. Never fear: they were absolutely cleaning up with grateful donations from the crowds here for the Galway International Arts Festival (listen on Instagram here).
I hope you have some rest and adventures and good music planned for your July!