#Release Day! Blame it on the Moon #asmsg

It's such a great feeling to be able to announce the release of Blame it on the Moon, book 4 in my Storm Lake: Destiny Paramortals series. I'd begun to wonder if it was ever going to happen.

There I was in December, pleased with the six books I'd been able to publish in the last half of 2014 and illogically expecting things would continue in a similar fashion in 2015. My work plan included publishing a book in February, April and June. (I laugh now at my expectations.) I had the plan formed, how many words I needed to write per day, when I would revise, when the covers needed to be finished to accomplish that schedule. (This is where you hear that buzzer sound the game shows play when a contestant gives the wrong answer.) Unnnh! Wrong.

Reality set in when I realized the additional job I took on in January and February was going to mean fewer hours to write due to six or seven day workweeks, long hours and a long commute, a very uncreative atmosphere, and then it would bleed into my seasonal business which is a seven day a week commitment. This meant my writing process which had become so wonderfully habitual was going to come to a halt. And not just for a short time-- for seven months.

Having worked eighty hour weeks or two jobs most of my life, I'd come to treasure those six off months to give to my stories, especially since all of a sudden my characters seemed to be speaking to me constantly--no, I've never had a problem with schizophrenia ;) so it's satisfying that I was able to persevere and devise a plan to keep going even though it wasn't at the pace I'd hoped.

I felt I owed my readers this book more than the others, which gets Tempe and Jack to a place they've been headed to since Storm Crazy. So I postponed Dance of Desire, the prequel to Blood Opal, put the revisions on Storm Warning on hold, and devoted what little daily time I could to finishing Blame it on the Moon.

I discovered something wonderful in the process. Armed with my mini notebook and my favorite navy blue Sarasa pen for thirty minutes in the tub every morning , and another twenty on my long commute over country roads, I could get a good forty minutes worth of writing done. This amounted to around 600-1500 words per day, and that's how Blame it on the Moon got written. In the tub and on the road.

Unfortunately, revising isn't possible in the tub, or while driving, so that took much longer, nearly two months. At the start of that revision process, I wondered if it would ever be a book I'd like. That's the thing about revising. Some people say you should just write the book and spend very little time revising it but for me, it's a necessary evil that transforms the rough jumbled boring mess into a cohesive piece of work that I'm not ashamed to offer to anyone.

I hope you enjoy Blame it on the Moon and all the other Storm Lake books. If you're new to the series, you might want to check out the Storm Lake pages to see the difference in the communities. Destiny is where the supernatural creatures live. The farther east you go, the more 'normal' people are. Though if you were to ask Jack, he'd be the first to say, "What's so great about 'normal'?"

Here's the blurb: 
It’s the height of the Para-moon and Sheriff Jack Lang is up to his ‘6’ in alligators. Defending those weaker than himself is in his DNA which is what drove him to become a Navy pilot and a detective in Memphis. But who is he kidding? Alligators he could handle! Supernatural bad guys, well…

Ragtag doesn’t begin to describe his band of temporary ’heroes’. If he had to go to war with the supernatural with the group that showed up at dawn, he might as well start cutting up white sheets and attaching them to garden stakes.

With Tempe and the other Paramortals ill or incapacitated and the sudden appearance of beings he’s never heard of, will Jack be able to keep Destiny out of the hands of their enemies for the rest of the power down? After all, it’s only twenty-four hours. If he could find some real soldiers and get a strong defense together until the Paramortals get most of their power back, maybe they’d stand a chance.

He’s been told this was the strongest and most unpredictable Chaos ever, which is why Tempe, Aurora and Dylan have been hit so hard, but also, ironically, the reason there’d been no coordinated attack by hordes of bad guys  - yet.

He doesn’t have time to worry about the future he may not have with Tempe and his daughter because one crisis after another raises its head. They have to find a healer for Dylan, relocate a lost elemental, make a formal request for help from the Fae, figure out what the hell his crazy ex Georgeanne is up to, and - very important - keep the humans in the dark.

If worse comes to worse, he has a dragon on his side and a few surprises up his sleeve. “Yippe, ki, yi! Unfortunately a lot can happen in twenty four hours and things… don’t always go as planned.