Category: Updates

Overworld, Serial, Updates

So What’s Next?

Becca Lusher

You may have noticed that the site has undergone a few changes just lately, gaining a distinctly cloudy tone. Well, this is why:

OWBanner 1

Now that Icarus Child is done and dusted, I’m taking a break from the Aekhartain for six months or so. While they’re gone, I thought I’d introduce a different world of mine, one that’s quite different from our own – The Overworld. A world covered by clouds, where the elite soldiers ride giant eagles and monsters fly out of the West.


Wingborn is the first in the series.

Wingborn_WP Cover 1Lady Mhysra Kilpapan was blessed from birth with a distinguished family, a glorious home and a giant eagle miryhl of her own. Fully aware of her luck, she wants for nothing in life – except a chance to become a Rift Rider. The elite force of the Overworld has been closed to women for over one hundred years and not even the legendary Wingborn are allowed to join. Until now.

Women are being admitted to the Riders again and Mhysra wants to be first in line. Except her parents have other ideas, and there are plenty of others who are less than pleased about the change. Yet if Mhysra can find a way to reach Aquila, she will let nothing stop her.

But the Overworld is in trouble and the vicious kaz-naghkt are destroying Rift Rider bases one by one. The Riders need help. Can Mhysra and her friends really be the difference between survival and destruction? Or will they fail before their first year of training is through?

Rather than release the complete novel, I’ve decided to serialise it for free instead. I’ll be posting it in installments of between 1000-1500 words at a time, breaking up chapters for ease of reading. It is already finished so you don’t have to worry I’ll lose interest halfway through and stop posting (not that I’ve done this before… much).

It all starts tomorrow with the prologue, followed by the complete first chapter over Saturday, Sunday and Monday, to kick things off in style. After that I’m aiming to update a chapter a week, on Fridays and Sundays, with the occasional Wednesday post thrown in for when larger chapters need to be split into three.

You can read along here, on Wattpad (starlightmagpie) or on my Livejournal (saiena). I’ll be including and updating link posts both here on the blog and on LJ if you’re following on those places, and I’m completely new to Wattpad, so we shall see how it goes.

I hope you’ll join me for the ride and that you’ll enjoy taking a look at this whole new world. Feel free to follow and friend me, and if I don’t add you back, throw me a comment to wake me up.

See you tomorrow!

Aekhartain, Updates

Release Updates!

Becca Lusher

Cover_3 Icarus ChildThe Icarus Child now has its own page and seems to be available almost everywhere except B&N. I’ll be adding that link as soon as I see it.

It’s also up on Goodreads now, so you can add it if you want to.

I’ll also be tinkering with this site over the next few days, so if you see any changes you hate, let me know ;)

Other than that I have one more Secrets of Icarus post to do, and then I’ll start talking about what’s next on the project list. I’m planning a hiatus from the Aekhartain for a few months, so expect a few changes around here…

There may also be a Photo Friday, depending on how much time I get and how quickly my next writing project sinks its claws in. How exciting!

Aekhartain, Books, Updates

Icarus Child is Out!

Becca Lusher

Well, I made it *collapse*

Cover_3 Icarus Child

Once there was an island and on that island there lived a boy…

 Britain 135 BC

Orphaned at birth and raised by his aunt on an isolated island, Icastar has led a far from normal life. His body is misshapen, his days are tormented by whispering winds and demanding ghosts, and he only has seals for friends.

But there is more to this boy than his physical hardships and lonely location. The island and his own body might try to hold him down, caging him inside a world of pain, but he is the Icarus Child.

One day he will fly – or die trying.

Available Now from Smashwords!

All other retailers are currently pending, but it should be available everywhere soon.

I’ll put up a proper book page soon as well as the appropriate links as and when they come in. For now, I don’t want to look at another keyboard for the next 12 hours – or more if I can swing it.

Why is it that every time I upload a book to Smashwords it finds a new and even more irritating bug to plague me with? Today it was the .EPUB version, which I’ve never had much bother with before. Ah well, such is life.

In other news – Merry Imbolc, to those in the Northern Hemisphere who celebrate such things! (And Merry Lammas/Lughnasa/Lughnasadh to those in the Southern half.)

Welcome back, Spring – and happy birthday, Icastar/Shaiel!

All right, so it might be a bit early to declare the return of spring just yet, but at least it’s been a beautiful day here. I might just find a patch of sunlight to curl up in and fall asleep. My brain hurts.

Merry Tuesday, everyone.

A Bit of Me, Updates, Writing

Icarus Child Edit Update

Becca Lusher

\(*O*)/  <– That feeling when you’ve finished the final edit on your new book.

/(~_~)\ <– Until you realise you need to go back and sort out one of the characters.

(@-@) <– And then you realise the character in question defies explanation and sorting it out won’t be easy.

/(-.-)\ <– Think. Think harder. Work it out.

|(*.*)| <– Oh, hey, that stupid idea might just work…

I’ll let you know how I get on. For now, though, I still have hope for a release next week. Please don’t burst my optimistic little bubble.

(And yes, I know, I probably could have found some gifs to explain it all better. But that would take work and my brain is back in lazy mode.)

Merry Tuesday, everyone!

Updates

So it Begins…

Becca Lusher

Happy 2016, everyone!

I hope you had a good holiday season, celebrating it in whichever way was most enjoyable for you. I saw lots of family, did quite a bit of reading and seem to have lost track of all time and so am still flailing around trying to catch up.

Nothing new really.

I have all kinds of plans for the new year, but since I’m still ironing out most of the creases and I always tend to have more ideas than I can ever put into practice, I’ll keep quiet about them until they’re ready to launch. Instead I shall say edits on The Icarus Child are in progress and I’m aiming for February 2nd as a release date. I could have gone for mid-January like the other books, but Feb 2nd is not only Imbolc, the start of Celtic spring, but it’s Icastar/Shaiel’s birthday so it appeals to me.

Thus far I’ve edited the first section of IC and I don’t hate it, so progress is good at the moment. Fingers crossed it’ll stay that way.

Elsewhere, the big end of year sale is now over, so prices will revert to normal over the next day or so. If you still want to grab a bargain, be quick because time is ticking.

Thanks to everyone who supported me last year, you’re all wonderful. Here’s for an even better 2016!

Brace yourselves for Shakespeare, lots of poetry (not mine, thankfully), loads of things with wings, giant talking eagles and something that may or may not contain Vikings. And if I have time I might even throw in a dragon or two. Sounds exhausting, but hopefully it’ll be fun and exciting too along the way.

In the meantime – Merry Wednesday, all!

Aekhartain, Updates, Writing

Icarus Child Update: Week Three

Becca Lusher

Week 3 Total Word Count: 74,000

I spoke way too soon last week. After two 10K writing days, I hit a wall. Hard. It was like pulling teeth trying to drag the story on for a while there. The trouble was I’d hit a point where the story would quite happily have reached an end. Which would have been fine, except nothing would have been resolved, it was way too soon and I still had too much to do. But try convincing my brain to go on when it said everything was done.

This is what happened with The Crying Child, a set of events leapt out of nowhere, twisted things around and suddenly, Ta-Dah! The End! Well, I could get away with it on that book because it was the second of three, but I couldn’t really let that happen here. Unless I wanted to write a fourth book *shudders*

Funnily enough it was sparked by the same character. I suspect if I’d written a completely unnecessary fourth book it would have happened again. With the same one. A born troublemaker that one. Never mind, I pulled through, finished Chapter Twenty Five then gave myself a few days off to think about it all.

Then came yesterday, when I sat down, flexed my fingers and finished the whole lot with a mammoth effort. I’m pretty sure the entire thing is a massive mess, nothing I wrote yesterday will make a lick of sense, but it’s fine because some of it will be salvageable and I now have an iron framework to hang the whole story on.

Phew!

Also, if I’m lucky, it won’t be quite as messy as I think it is. This has happened to me before, and in the best cases I didn’t need to change a thing. Even if it doesn’t happen here, I’m still happy because the hardest of the hard work is done!

Even better, I can finally get out of the Iron Age! And away from the historical stuff altogether (for a bit at least). My next Aekh tale is set in 2002. I cannot wait. Even if it does mean a lot of Shakespeare in my near future. If you’ve read Orion’s Kiss this is the story that will make sense out of just who Beatrice Winters is. Finally. Two years after I finished that one.

*ahem* Oh well, better late than never, right? 

Anyway, back to this book. No snippet this week, since everything is spoilery. Instead I’ll end with the final tally, since the last day was only just in Week 4.

Icarus Child Final Total: 86,700 words.

Woo – and indeed – Hoo! Now all I have to do is edit the thing.

A Bit of Me, Aekhartain, Updates, Writing

I Win!

Becca Lusher

I broke my brain, but I win! The Icarus Child is done!

I’ve written 13.5K words today. Starting at 8 ish. I broke off to watch Tim Peake rocket up to space, then had to break later on to drive my mum somewhere because of rain, but otherwise I powered through on a diet of Galaxy chocolate, copious amounts of water and Ori and the Blind Forest soundtrack (and a couple of others – I will have to talk music sometime).

It makes no sense. I don’t even care. It is done! Book is finished! I’m not even going to touch it until the new year.

Now I can catch up on my reading, put up decorations, wrap presents, see family and look after the dog who has an ear infection and a lip infection and all kinds of skin infections (apparently, though he seems fine, but the vet says, so *shrug* and he’s a foolish pedigree), and probably sleep a lot. Because it is December and it’s wet and we’re not quite halfway out of the dark yet.

Proper update tomorrow. For now – yay!

(Ow, my head)

Aekhartain, Updates, Writing

Icarus Child Update: Week Two

Becca Lusher

Week 2 Total Word Count: 46,000

Woo! This book is flying!

Well, sort of. Writing-wise I’m down to three days a week when I have enough free time to make it worth my while to sit down and get stuff done, but when I do I’m making it count. Which is lovely. If I get a chance to focus and have the right music on I can scribble out a chapter in an hour and a half, so I’m trying to get three chapters done a day – depending on how long they are, of course. If they’re short I might manage four.

There’s a reason why I don’t do NaNoWriMo, because once I establish a set routine and give myself a goal of getting the book done by This Day it all tends to snowball and I get very competitive with myself. Last time I did NaNo I started off aiming for two to three thousand words a day, then I realised I wouldn’t be able to write at all for the last week of November and it all went a bit crazy. By the end I think I was writing between ten and fifteen thousand words a day – and the little book that was supposed to be about 75K was heading for 90K and wasn’t anywhere near finished.

And it still isn’t, three years later, because if I try and touch the book my competitive instincts rise up and order to me to finish it now, now, now! Who cares about the pirates? Add in a ghost and some astral projection and everything will be fine! And kill that snooty kid while you’re at, no one will even notice. Then put in a race over the beach – that’ll be so cool. You can literally have rocks falling so everyone dies! 

Except that this is a multi-book series and I need some of those characters to survive. And I like them too much to kill them all.

Rocks fall. Everyone dies. Really cool!

But –

Rocks. Fall. Everyone. Dies. Dead.

Yeah, ‘kay, no… I’ll just put this one away for now then.

So. I don’t do that anymore. (Which is a shame, because there are some parts of that book I adore. I must head back to that world sometime. It’s the one where Tobi and Faron come from. I love that world.)

Anyway, yes, back to this book. Even though I’m only writing three days a week, my competitive instincts are rising (I’m only ever competitive with myself or as part of a team, which is why I was so relieved to break my arm when I was nine so I could quit gymnastics before they made me compete anymore). However, instead of a daily word count race – because I rarely have a completely free day to write in – I seem to be pushing for a weekly thing. The first week I hit 20K, the second I managed 25K. I’m now in week three and my first writing day went over 10K, so looks like it’s all on schedule to make my brain explode. Also, I should get the book finished before Christmas as I must be over halfway now. Seriously, I must, it’s over 50K words now.

Also all the major players seem to have finally arrived. Yay! There’s also a new lesson to be learned from this series – other than Keep Away from Talking Islands, They Will Possess You! The new one is Never Trust a Foundling, or other sundry washed up bodies that appears anywhere near you. Nothing good ever happens. Rocks might not fall (though I’m not ruling that out because there are cliffs everywhere) but someone will die. Or that might just be the island. Maybe I’ll stick with the first one and add They Will Kill You! after the bit about possessing people. I may need to put up signs. Those will totally work.

Ah well, another normal week in Ima-land. Have a completely non-spoilery snippet conversation between two children on a beach, and I’ll get back to wrestling this story into (ha!) submission.

Continue reading “Icarus Child Update: Week Two” →

Aekhartain, Updates, Writing

Icarus Child Update: Week One

Becca Lusher

Cover_3 Icarus ChildDespite numerous attempts by real life to sabotage my writing time in recent days, so far things are going reasonably well with The Icarus Child. The book has started much earlier than I expected (by about seven years), and seems to be enjoying itself meandering along while I tap my fingers and wait for the plot to show up.

Which is business as usual with the Aekhartain tales.

If you enjoyed Unbound and Free, the beginning of this one is very much in a similar vein. Except my boy Icastar has even more troubles than Demairo had, but they both live on the island, look after some sheep and only have seals for friends, while ghostly voices make demands of them. Poor boys. It’s no fun being born on the island.

But that was last week. This week I’ve moved forward four years (Ica’s gone from 7 to 11) and things may be about to happen in a vaguely sinister way. I’ll have to wait and see just what and when if I manage to write any more tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Nevertheless, Week 1 word count: 20.5K.

And now for a snippet. Spoilers are so mild as to be nonexistent. Just a cute and casual game of something (no idea what, don’t ask me) between a boy and a selkie. (See, he has some fun sometimes.)

 

Continue reading “Icarus Child Update: Week One” →

Updates

Freebies, Discounts and Updates

Becca Lusher

The Freebie:

Cover_1 Sisters of IcarusSisters of Icarus is now free!*

Smashwords || B&N || iBooks || Kobo

*Everywhere except Amazon. I don’t when or if they’ll drop the price (and even if they do, whether it’ll happen across all the stores). Unfortunately there’s not a lot I can do to make them. If you want a free mobi file, though, Smashwords has them.

The Discount:

Cover_2 Crying Child

The Crying Child is out and available everywhere it should be. It’s also available at a low introductory price – but only until December 15th. After that it will go up to match the other books.

Speaking of those other books, keep an eye out over the festive period, because I’ll be dropping a few of those around mid-December to mid-January too.

The Update:

Cover_3 Icarus ChildAs of tomorrow I’ll be working flat out on The Icarus Child. I’m a little bit worried about it because the last book didn’t end where I expected it to, so I have a lot more story to tell – and I’m not even sure yet how to begin. Which should prove fun.

I’ve also only given myself two months to get it done, which should add to the challenge. I know I managed with The Crying Child, but I already had half of that written when I released Sisters. This time I got nuthin’, so here’s hoping that the momentum will carry me through. I really hope it does, because my head is currently filling up with ideas for the next few books I want to tackle (Issie and Alamé, and Drae’s poking at poetry for attention too). But I don’t dare start working on any of them until this one is done, else I might not go back to it.

Wish me luck, and if you happen to see any magpies in passing, please ask them to come and give me a hand. I’m going to need it!