Heart Trouble

I wrote, edited, and self-publishing my first six novels without much consideration to submitting them to a publisher.  And I may never know if this was a sound idea, but it did allow me to create in a vacuum—deadlines were my own, additions and deletions were at my whim, and word count generally fell where it wanted. I would set goals and exceed them.  I always vow to take sabbaticals upon a book’s completion, but I rarely follow through.  Upon finishing my longest novel yet, I set out to create something a little more, well, manageable.  I strived to write something standard and commercial.  There was no switching of perspectives, and the supporting characters became just that—support.  In no more than four weeks I had completed Heart Trouble, edited it, and then set about offering it to a publisher.  Crimson Romance liked my query and asked for both a synopsis and manuscript, neither of which was hard to submit.  Thankfully they liked the novel, and I am now on the verge of my first release through a real-life publisher.  It’s been an adjustment, of course, but I am grateful to have had both an editor and a cover designer that wasn’t me. 

So here I am, putting the novel out there for the rest of the world to see.  I’ll be available for the first time in a place that isn’t Amazon, although I will be there as well.  This deal includes much more promotion than I could have ever accomplished alone, and will be distributed through Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and the Crimson Romance webpage as well.  If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll find myself on a library shelf here and there.  I will include the relevant links as they become available.  I am already excited to share the high-resolution cover image.

And now for some background on the novel itself, Heart Trouble.  My hero and heroine are only children, much like myself.  The hero, Brandt, lives at home with his parents; the heroine, Marissa, has never met her father and had to move away from her mother in order to find work.  I stuck with the time-tested and familiar cowboy theme in this novel, although I moved it closer to home—I invented a fictional region of Kentucky in order to play fast and loose with the settings.  The town wound up not being as large a character—we mainly stick to the ranch, a typical-enough rural setting.  Like I’ve said before, I’m far more comfortable with rural backdrops.  The novel is a shade under 62,000 words, shorter than all of my previous novels save for Windswept.  I think of it as an efficient story—I tried to focus on the two main characters and allow the story to take place strictly through their eyes.

I’ll keep you up-to-date as things progress—and thanks, once again, to everyone for their support.