Happy July, everyone!
I’m back with another monthly writing update. Just like last month, I have quite a few things to announce in this one.
Cover of “Engagement To Die For” by Claris Lam“Engagement To Die For” Officially Published:
THANK YOU to everyone who purchased a copy of my newest amateur sleuth murder mystery book, “Engagement To Die For!” The book released on June 20th, 2023! I appreciate all the love and support you gave to this new novel of mine, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.
I’m still glad to put a second novel out there into the world for all of you to read, so you can look into another mystery that our heroine, Aubri, investigates. I look forward to publishing the third and final book in the series as well, eventually!
Also, “Engagement To Die For” and “Winner Takes All” have Goodreads pages, so you can mark them as to-read here and here respectively.
Poems Published In “We Have Food At Home:”
In addition to “Engagement To Die For” being published last month, I got the amazing opportunity to have three short poems, “Teatime,” “Cravings,” and “Spice,” published in We Have Food At Home!
We Have Food At Home is a very new online lit mag, and my poems were the first pieces published on the site! You can click here to go check out the poems!
Book Reviews:
If you missed last month’s book reviews, here they are listed below:
As you may have noticed, I posted less book reviews last month. This is because I spent much of last month promoting the release of “Engagement To Die For.” However, book review posts will be back to their normal biweekly schedule this month!
Original Fiction & Poetry In Progress:
Since I’ve wrapped up publishing “Engagement To Die For,” outside of promoting its recent release, I’ll be able to spend more time focusing on new projects. I’ve updated my WIP page to reflect this!
One of these projects is the third book in the Harlow Mystery series, “Bloody Fantasia.” This is not only just the third book, but also the final book. It’s a bit bittersweet to start editing this one for that reason. I hope to release this one sometime in 2024, but we’ll see how the process goes!
Another project is “Sadie’s Search For The Missing Necklace!” I tried submitting this to a traditional publisher earlier this year. Unfortunately, I never heard back from them after the allotted time period they said it would take to respond. Because of this, I’m finally putting some time into searching for another traditional publisher to pitch the book to. If this fails, I might start considering self-publishing…
I’ve also started drafting another book, inspired by games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom. (Yes, I bought Tears Of The Kingdom and put quite a few hours into playing this one.) As of writing and posting this blog post, I’m still writing the first draft. I hope to complete it by the end of the summer.
I also started dipping my toes into drafting more cozy fiction, inspired by games like Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, Stardew Valley, and similar games. It’s a nice change of pace from writing murder mysteries, for sure.
Fanfiction:
For those of you that missed the previous month’s writing update, I announced back in mid-May that I would stop posting on Archive Of Our Own until further notice. Instead, all future fanfics will be posted on Fanfiction.net. This was to protect my future work from being scraped by artificial intelligence (AI). I then took June off from posting any new fanfics. This is mainly because I wanted to take the time to figure out what to do with future fanfics that I wanted to post and share with all of you. I also took June off from posting fanfics because I was promoting the release of “Engagement To Die For.”
After taking this past one and a half months to figure out what this means for my future fanfics, I figured out the following:
Fanfics will still be posted on Fanfiction.net – but with caution. When I say ‘with caution,’ I mean until I heard about anything regarding the site being scraped by AI. Fanfiction.net is still just as vulnerable to Archive Of Our Own to getting its data and content scraped by AI. In the case that this happens, I’ll also be making backups to post elsewhere. This alternative is the best way I can think of sharing my fanfics with all of you without having to risk AI scraping by posting it on public sites.
What does this mean for me writing and posting fanfiction moving forward? I still do want to share fanworks in some capacity. However, I won’t be writing and posting at the same output as before. The likelihood of returning to writing long multichapter fanfics and posting chapters weekly as it goes isn’t as likely to happen. Instead, I’ll probably be posting more oneshots, shorter multichapter fics, or at least oneshots within a continuity such as what I did with the The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild/Yakitate!! Japan crossover series last year, “Trials of the Wild.”
I also will give an even greater focus to producing more original fiction and poetry. I knew that I wouldn’t be writing and posting fanfics forever at my previous output for many reasons. However, I didn’t think it was going to be this soon. I appreciate all the support you give to me and my work – both original fiction and fanfiction. It means a lot to me in my writer journey, and I hope to continue this growth. I also want to announce that I’ll be posting two oneshots this month:
- Bravely Second oneshot – “Peer Review!” This one will be posted on July 10th, 2023.
- Pokemon Scarlet/Violet oneshot – “Operation Leon.” This will be posted on July 24th, 2023.
I hope you look forward to reading them!
Thank you for supporting my work! I hope you look forward to reading more of my own works, especially my original fiction and poetry.
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