Of Ice and Men

Game On is now live on Amazon's website! This is the end stage of work on an eBook. The story is finished and is uploaded to Amazon—just waiting for you to purchase and review (/shamelessplug). But now I have to switch modes from writing to marketing. It's time to get the word out! Announcements on Twitter and Facebook . Updating GoodReads . Blogging. Is there anything I'm missing? Probably. I'd like to relax a little bit after wrapping up a big project, but there's no time for that now. I still have to work on my story for the Hockey Fights Cancer anthology, which will be released in just a few months. Besides that, I have some other ideas to open my writings up to a bigger audience. And of course, I already have plenty of ideas about my fourth novel. There's a teaser at the end of Game On for this fourth book, which I'm already excited about. Check it out and let me know what you think! In other news, today's the last day to get a copy of Pl...

That's right, Play the Man is free right now on Amazon! And it will be until Friday, February 28, which is the release date of Game On. Want a free advance copy of Game On before Friday? Contact me, and I'll send you an ARC. Happy reading! Jay

I'm very happy to announce that I will be published in anthology of hockey romance compiled to raise money for Hockey Fights Cancer ! I'm really very happy to be included with the likes of Toni Aleo, Cassandra Carr, and V. L. Locey, (who you may have checked out during the Hottie Hockey Hunks Blog Hop), among others like Bianca Sommerland, Nicki Worrell and more ! The as yet unnamed anthology will be released in April, and proceeds will be donated to Hockey Fights Cancer, which I'm sure we can all agree is a great charity. My paternal grandfather succumbed to lung cancer, and my maternal grandfather is currently undergoing treatment for bladder cancer. Needless to say, this is a cause that is very important to me. My submission is the short story A Valuable Trade , a former Quickie, which will be adapted for publication in the anthology. Of course, I'll keep everyone in the loop once publication nears!

Last night, I finished the draft of Game On . Thirty chapters are written. For me, writing is the hardest part. Getting my ideas out of my head and into a tangible form takes a lot of time and effort. And tons of thinking, scheming, and daydreaming. I said in a previous Chronicle that I don't know how a story will end until after I write the ending. That's so true; I knew that my main character Audrey would return home for Christmas, and that's when the story would end in the timeline of events. But it wasn't until I got to the final scene that I felt the closure I needed to feel to know that the story was over. So, the writing's finished. But what does that mean for a story? It means there's more work to be done! A draft must be turned into a final copy suitable for publication (and for a publication date to be calculated), which requires the following steps: Editing Proofreading Formatting for eBook Publication Cover Designing For those of you...

As a story nears completion, and I finally have a clear idea of everything the story is supposed to tell, then it's time to start thinking about the "blurb." In publishing terms, this is called back cover copy , because it's the teaser that gets printed on the—you guessed it!—back cover. Writing this is so  hard! It's supposed to be a teaser. So this is what I typed up: Audrey Hunt hopes to make her mark on the world. Armed with her masters in broadcast journalism, she applies for a job that would allow her to do just that but instead finds herself in Columbus, Ohio, covering the NHL’s Blue Jackets. At first, she thinks that the job is a joke; however, she quickly discovers that there’s more to hockey than scoring goals and more to sports reporting than talking stats. With the support of the players on the team—including lots of help from the superstar captain Nathan Fox—Audrey searches for her niche as a sports journalist for Ohio Spots Net...

It's been about two months since I've updated on my progress of my latest novel, Game On . It's hard to talk about it when I don't exactly how the story is going to end, or when I'll actually wrap it up. Endings make the story. Endings are  the story; everything that happens is designed that way, solely to lead up to the end. The reader's satisfaction depends on how the story wraps up. Has this ever happened to you: you're reading a story or watching a movie, and everything's rolling on just fine, until you get to the ending and bam! The whole plot is ruined by a crappy ending, and instead of a feeling of resolve, you only feel disappointment. That's why endings are so hard for a writer. Beginnings are the fun part; you get to create a whole new world! Middles are the interesting part, because you get to know your characters and investigate their lives and personalities. But endings... Sometimes, I feel like I don't write the endings. They ha...