TAKEN releases, Edgefest, and Dusting Off Old Projects

I have been taken by TAKEN. Now it's YOUR turn!

I’m sure many of you noticed that on Tuesday, Erin Bowman’s Taken released. Erin is a dear, dear friend of mine, and it feels like forever that we’ve been twiddling our thumbs and waiting for her book to launch. I mean, I read an almost finalized version back in January of 2012, and I’ve had to bite my tongue to NOT spoil this awesome story for new readers. (BECAUSE THE HEIST IS JUST SO COOL!)

But now Taken is out. Now Erin’s fabulous hero, Gray, can entertain the rest of the world as much as he entertained me.

Erin (a.k.a. Ders, a.k.a. Donatello, a.k.a. Black Bandanna Badass): I just KNOW Taken will captivate the world, and I am so honored and pleased to be your friend. I’m so glad we could share this seemingly long and epic journey to publication–and it’s only the beginning!

For those of you who haven’t yet entered in my Taken giveaway over on the Pub(lishing) Crawl blog, be sure to head over there and sign up–and to also wish Erin a happy book birthday (though now it’s more like the book birth-week). And there’s also a sneaky second giveaway for Taken happening on MY website, but you’ll have to find it to enter. 😉

Also, Erin is hosting a pretty rockstar giveaway herself. It’s called the #TakenWithTAKEN giveaway, and you can read about here and enter until 4/30/2013.

Authors that will be at Dallas's Edgefest on 4/27!

Plus, if you’re in the Dallas area next weekend (4/27/2013), Erin and I will be doing a signing TOGETHER! Along with 8 other authors, we’ll be selling and signing books at Edgefest. I seriously cannot express how excited I am about this event.

Now, to quickly answer a reader question before I sign off:

Are there any stories you’ve written in the past, unpublished ones, that you’ve thought about dusting off and working with again?

YES! Actually, my YA mystery (with the horrible working title, Purely Platonic) came from a TERRIBLE short story I wrote with the same name! It was about two best friends who fall for each other. Of course, almost nothing else is similar…except maybe the age of the hero and heroine. Otherwise, names and settings and situations have all changed. Still–the initial spark came from that old (and I mean oooollllldddd, like early high school) story.

As for other old projects (i.e. written prior to Something Strange and Deadly), I might one day go back to them. There are  one or two WIPs that weren’t so bad…Of course, what’s bad about them is the genre. Two were dystopian/post-apocalyptics (one that I wrote in 2003 and another in 2007), and that market is totally over-saturated now. I also had a few bad epic fantasies and then a contemporary romance (adult). The romance actually has potential, but since that isn’t really a market I want to crack into, I’ll probably never go back to it. Oh, and then there’s all my fan fiction. But that’s definitely not gonna ever be used. 😉

To be honest, most of my writing prior to Something Strange and Deadly was bad and self-indulgent. I wrote purely for my own pleasure and escapism–I never tried to learn craft or write for publication until 2008. I feel like that was when my writing actually became something of quality, and I have so many current WIPs (how many did I list last week? 7? Plus an eighth I started last Friday…) that I think I have more than enough to work on for the time being.

But who knows? Maybe like Purely Platonic, one of my old stories will spark something new. 😉

You tell me: have you ever dusted off an ancient project or used an old WIP to start something new?