Just Some Thoughts

It’s Smokey’s turn to help promote my books.

Next month my second book comes out, which means soon I won’t be reminding everyone about pre-orders for The Lady in Chains.

Instead, I’ll start reminding you about pre-orders for book three.

So if you haven’t pre-ordered, there’s links at the bottom of the newsletter!

We’ve got a bit over a month to go, so I’m not feeling too much about the release just yet. With The Man With No Shadow I started getting really excited about two weeks out. Right now I’m focused on books three and four and work on those is coming along pretty well! It helps that I have a lot more free time right now. I made a kind of scary decision recently to leave my programming job and take a few months off to write and rest. I’m very fortunate to be able to do this but it’s also a bit strange as I’ve been working pretty much non-stop since I finished college. I’m not sure what comes next, but I’ve got plenty of time to think about it. In the meantime, I’m enjoying catching up with friends and doing things around the house I’ve been putting off. Maybe I’ll finally get my garage organized.

I’ve been cooking more and played chicken with a double batch of navy bean soup.

Women’s History Month

If you’re not on Instagram, Saga Press is doing a series spotlighting some of their authors for Women’s History Month. You can find what I had to say here, but I wanted to talk a bit more about it since I have more words in which to do so with a newsletter.

I read a lot of fantasy books growing up, and in particular I loved everything by Barbara Hambly. Around the age when I was obsessively reading her books I also started writing and teaching myself programming. I know that her books were influential in inspiring me to write my own stories, but her books were also my earliest female role model for computer programming.

She wrote a series called The Windrose Chronicles and I read the first three (The Silent Tower, The Silicon Mage, and Dog Wizard) multiple times. The main character was Joanna, a female computer programmer who winds up in a magical world and teams up with a wizard to save it. I adored Joanna and while I couldn’t really go off and have an adventure with magic like her, I could certainly learn how to program. So that’s my writing and software development origin story.

A friend got me this signed copy. If you look close, Joanna is holding a 5.25-inch floppy disk.

Another woman I want to talk about is Grace Hopper. I learned about her from a coworker, who shared this video of her talking about nanoseconds. I wish I’d learned about her sooner in my life. If this is your first time hearing about her, I really encourage you to read up on her accomplishments, even if you’re not into programming. I’m sure you’ll recognize at least one of her contributions to the field. Whenever I hear the question of “who would you want to meet, living or dead”, Grace Hopper is my pick. From watching that video of her in the classroom, threatening everyone with a microsecond, I feel she’s be a really interesting person to talk to.