Vanessa (V.P.) Eboneigh

On Twitter an author I know Jodi Meadows was talking about a small challenge for writers. It's called #10kByLaborDay Basically you have to get that many words down by Labor Day. Use the hashtag on twitter  #10KByLaborDay

Dystopia author Elana Johnson has a new book releasing September 15! About SOMETHING ABOUT LOVE: High school senior Olivia Winging gave up her love of photography when she gave up her boyfriend, Trevor Youngblood, a year and a half ago. She broke things off with Trevor because her mom married his dad, and dating your step-brother? Creepy. Livvy hasn’t been on good terms with her mother since, and one of her stipulations for staying at the Youngblood’s every other weekend is that Trevor can’t be there. When she gets nominated for the Junior Photography in Excellence award, Trevor insists she enter. She agrees—only if every photo in the portfolio can be of him. Knowing that Livvy can capture a person’s deepest secrets through her lens, Trevor hesitates before accepting the deal. As Livvy gets behind the lens of her camera again, her love of photography is rekindled. Unfortunately, the time she spends with Trevor also re-ignites the old flame for him she’s kept smothered for so long. In ...

I bought this book a while ago during the New Adult hype phase. It sat on my bookcase for a couple of  months so I decided to crack it open to read. Since I'm writing New Adult hoping to publish it under another name, depending on if I land an agent or not, I wanted to see what was the deal with this book. During the beginning of the book Ella is a shy person who keeps referring to that night on the bridge. She doesn't want her roommate Ella to find out the truth about her past. Ella even ignored the calls from her best friend Micha. Ella disappeared fMicha is the other person that the point of view is told from. He spent the past eight months of his life looking for his best friend Ella. He leaves her messages, and texts and she never responds back. Ella returns home with Lila for the summer and she is stunned to see Micha and Ethan her childhood friends. Micha keeps trying to talk to her but he sees Ella is trying to hide who she really is. Micha keep trying to get Ella to o...

I went to see IF I STAY today! Holy crap that movie was so good! The need to make the sequel ASAP! I need to find out what happens next so I'm off to the bookstore to read the books. Here's the movie trailer

Those of you who know me as a gymnastics nut! I'm so happy for Simone Biles, she got her second US National Title! Good luck at World's Simone!

I found an advice article on world-building on a blog called Freshman Fifteen, it's columns written by authors who are having their debut books released in 2015, and one of them has a fantasy novel releasing. Victoria Aveyard author of the Red Queen coming out in 2015 wrote about world-building for books, and I thought I would share it. (I found a lot of the material in this helpful since the first book I wrote was YA urban fantasy and I mostly made it all up as I went along).  Source: http://freshmanfifteens.com/freshman-fifteen-author-victoria-aveyard-talks-worldbuilding/ I’m lucky in a lot of ways. 1) I got my hair ombré-d last September and haven’t had to touch it up since and 2) I can pinpoint the exact moment when I discovered my great love of creating stories. I was eight years old, flipping through a Legend of Zelda guidebook while my brother navigated through that god-awful Water Temple. Even back then, I was obsessed with maps, but I’d only had atlases to look at. Now I h...

I finished fixing my manuscript! THIS makes me very happy. There were a couple of spots that were bugging me, and I couldn't put my finger on it on how to make it better. So I had to keep brainstorming to see how to make it better. Now one thing I am worried about is the word count. I feel it's just right, but then a little bit too low. When Asked Veronica Roth on twitter about word count she said 55,000 was a good range. She told me when she started submitting Divergent that it was exactly 55,000 words. Then when she under went revisions with her agent the word count went up to around 78,000. Then when Harper Collins bought Divergent and she did revisions from her editor the final word count went up to 105,000. So I hope I am in an okay range. I like stories that get right into the action and don't mess around adding unnecessary background stories. Now to decide if I will submit to #PitchWars or not.

This morning I woke to find this letter in my email Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author Geor...

Now that I am done with summer school I am taking the time to revise the couple of spots manuscript that were bugging me. I would sit in class thinking how can I change this? How can I make the plot twist more realistic? Then in the middle of the night the idea hit me, and I didn't care that my class started at 7am, I had to put that in before I forget. So I sat down Plus #PitchWars is starting again. I don't know if I will submit again this year. Depending on how fixing the couple of scenes goes I'll decide then.

I'm done with my summer classes. All I have to do is finish editing a few scenes in my manuscript then I can start submitting it places!