2017 – A New Year and Better Year!

I haven’t posted here in a long time. Work gets in the way of my writing sometimes. While the Oil & Gas industry has been hit with hard times, I’ve been as busy as a one armed paperhanger (to quote Annie Wilkes). As a drafter I’ve been working plenty, even gotten some overtime now and again. Then my son graduated college in December, which brought the parents for a visit. I hadn’t seen them in over years so it was a good visit! And of course Christmas and New Years were hectic as always. The holidays are over now so I’ve been trying to back into more writing.

December saw the publication of my first full length novel, “Salvation.” It’s a zombie post apoc based on a Collectable Card Game called Survive by Helheim Game Studios. It’s doing okay but not as well as I’d hoped. It’s $5 for the ebook and $14.99 for the paperback and free to read on Kindle Unlimited. The link is here:

https://www.amazon.com/Salvation-Survive-Book-Veronica-Smith-ebook/dp/B01N6IBUF7

January I tried something new. I self-published a short story, “Last One in the Chamber for You, My Love,” and it is not a love story. It’s on a whole other level of different. Right now it’s only $.0.99 for the book and free to read on Kindle Unlimited. You can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Last-One-Chamber-You-Love-ebook/dp/B01N6TGX2G

I’ve had six short stories accepted into anthologies since October that should be coming out soon. And I was just invited to submit a story into another anthology coming out this Spring. With the other two stories that were accepted earlier last year, I’m looking at eight new stories being published this year in either anthologies or magazines.

You can read my short stories that are already in published anthologies here:

https://www.amazon.com/author/veronicasmith

And in the UK!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Veronica-Smith/e/B014JCZQT4

I still have two more out for submissions so I’ll see how those go.

So what’s ahead for me for the rest of 2017?

I’m planning to get a vendor spot at a con with a couple other local writers (hoping there are spots available after they offer them to last year’s vendors first) at Trader’s Village in Houston in April.

I’ve been thinking of two or three different books and not sure which one to start first.

I already have the idea down and some summarization for “A Random Shooting: Chalk Outline II” but I’ve been highly encouraged by a friend to expand my short story, “The Treehouse,” into a novel. That story was my first Young Adult zombie story published in “Bite Sized Offerings.” That had to be kid friendly so it was harder in some ways than writing anything else I’ve done. I still have my own zombie book that I started before I did Salvation and it’s still sitting at 13K words. I’m just wondering if the zombie world is oversaturated already. Sure I have an original idea to the start of the zombie apocalypse but after that? I’m letting that one stew a bit.

I still plan to continue to write short stories to submit to anthologies and magazines. I still enjoy writing shorts a lot; they are pretty fun. I still have four that have no homes and I’ve been puttering around with the idea of publishing a collection of my stories. Again, I have to think on that.

Oh yeah, I got on the Twitter bandwagon! (https://twitter.com/Vee_L_Smith). I’m not sure about everything on it. (I got added to a couple “lists” the other day. What the hell is a “list” on Twitter?) I think it’s pretty fast paced and I’m trying to keep up with it but there is so much on the feeds. I’m not sure which is busier – Facebook or Twitter.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, New Year, or whatever you celebrated!

Until next time!