Release Day- A Bit of Magic

    Today is May 31st, that means it's release day for my third publication in A Bit of Magic: A Collection of Fairy Tale Retellings. Get it now on Amazon!
    

    ~Allie

A Bit of Magic Blog Tour- Rebecca Mikkelson

    Welcome to my stop on the A Bit of Magic blog tour. My special guest of honor is Rebecca Mikkelson!

Rebecca Mikkelson has been writing fantasy stories since her early teens for fun and is thrilled to turn her dream into a reality. She currently lives in Hawaii with her husband of six years where they enjoy not going outside and avoiding the scare ball in the sky. In her spare time, she likes to cross stitch to relax.

Rebecca Mikkelson is Chief of Business Development at Authors 4 Authors Publishing - a publishing company run by authors, for authors, blending the best of traditional and independent publishing.

    Rebecca, I’m so excited to hear about your story, especially since this is your first publication. Let’s get right to it. 

Q- What inspired your retelling? 

Coming Soon: Cursed Winds

    It’s time to announce Secret Project #2! And yes, it’s another fairy tale retelling. I’m very excited to announce the publication of Cursed Winds, my Beauty and the Beast retelling.

    I’ve been holding onto this idea since Disney released their live-action Beauty and the Beast movie. It left me with a lot of questions that I wanted answered, so I decided to write my own version of the tale, which I never thought I would do. And yes, it involves pirates.
    Cursed Winds will be released on May 31st in the fifth JL Anthology, titled A Bit of Magic. Stay tuned for a cover reveal, coming very soon!
    ~Allie

New Years Resolutions

    Normally I laugh at people who make New Years Resolutions because I'm the kind of person who makes changes whenever I realize I need to make a change, not just once a year. Plus, resolutions without dates are just dreams, not actual goals. And because these are things I really want to accomplish, I'm planning on giving myself an end date for each one.

• Finish draft 3 of Powerful. I'm currently doing another pass through where I'm implementing feedback chapter by chapter and making notes. I'm on chapter 9 out of 36. That's 1/4th of the way through! I plan on reviewing one chapter a day, which means this pass through will be done on January 27th. After that, I plan on actually implementing the edits (which are mostly minor, mainly description because that is my nemesis), which I'll do one chapter a day again. That means I'll finish the third draft by March 4th. I'll regularly update my progress here, and once I start actually writing the third draft, I'll update the word count on the sidebar!

Rose & Thorn Coming Soon!

    Back when I started this blog, I was working on a novel that was supposed to be part of a trilogy. That novel was called Rose. It was a retelling of Sleeping Beauty set in modern-day France because I love France.
    Unfortunately, the story didn't end up panning out. There wasn't enough content to it to fill up a whole novel. I decided that since it was going to be part of a trilogy where the characters interact, that I would combine all three of my story ideas as novellas into one novel. But I put it off because something wasn't right.

    My other ideas, my retellings of Cinderella and Snow White, also were not panning out. The stories didn't quite make sense and their plots were also seriously lacking in depth. Eventually, I was inspired with other ideas for retellings for both those tales, but they didn't fit along with Rose, because they both took place in medieval times and were set up to be more traditional fantasy stories. So what was I going to do?

Query Letters

    First, a quick announcement- I was interviewed by my good friend, Krisna, as part of the Blog World Tour. You can see that interview here!
    Now, as I mentioned last week, I started working on writing my first query letter for Powerful and I've received a lot of feedback from my writing group. It's really been an interesting learning experience for me. 

    There are a few different parts of a query letter, and it can change between different agents and publishers. The most important thing is to Look carefully at submission guidelines.