It’s launch day for The A-Zs of Worldbuilding! I can’t believe it’s already here!
If you’ve missed any of the blog tour stops this week, you can find all them here.
Today is THE last day to take advantage of the 99¢ offer on the ebook, and to get 25% off the paperback when you subscribe to my newsletter. Don’t miss out! This book won’t go on sale again until 2018.
Also, make sure to read to the end for some info on a Goodreads giveaway for The A-Zs of Worldbuilding! (US only, sorry folks. Sweepstakes laws were intimidating in my brief research. O.O)
I didn’t know this journey with The A-Zs of Worldbuilding would be 3 1/2 years in length. I hadn’t really planned for it to be more than a blog series, but as the A-Z Challenge started that year, people began saying how I world-build was really interesting and that the series would be a really handy reference… and somewhere along the way, the idea of a worldbuilding workbook was born.
Originally, I was just thinking, “Okay. I can just format these posts a little better, and add some more questions to them, and have something up by the end of the summer!” (This was back in 2014.)
Yeah, that didn’t happen. Life happened. In fact, I’m pretty sure I forgot about The A-Zs of Worldbuilding entirely for about a year.
But somewhere along the way, I picked it up again. I started refining my ideas and the content, and I realized that there was quite a bit of potential there. And while I didn’t work on it consistently, I did work on it more than any of my other projects (except building the chicken coop) for 2 years.
But it was really this year where I knew that I just needed to sit down and get it done. That’s always the hardest part of a project – finishing it, and letting it go.
Back in March, I got the opportunity to visit the Writer’s Colony @ Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas for a weekend, and I won’t lie – it’s changed my writing journey this year. Partly, the last writing retreat the Fictional Ferrets had was back in 2015. We’d tentatively planned on having another in 2017… but financial circumstances at the beginning of the year pretty much made that impossible for all of us.
I don’t think I would have found the momentum to finish The A-Zs of Worldbuilding this year without that trip. Even though it was just a couple of days. But I found my drive and my focus that weekend, and it’s carried me through all the impossibly hard times this summer.
So, as a newly-published author (even though it’s non-fiction, which is something I never thought I’d publish, especially as my first work), this is what I’d love to say to all my readers:
When you pick up this book, you’re not just picking up my worldbuilding process. You’re picking up heartache, and frustration, and tears. Because this book was started as I moved out of my grief for my childhood cat, Tabby.
It was in progress through not one, but two, job insecurity issues with my husband (one of which was a lay-off where he was unemployed for three months), through Winnie’s hyperthyroid diagnosis & us saving up for her radiation treatment that would cure it, and through multiple losses with my chickens, and then through Winnie’s cancer diagnosis and leg amputation.
Finally, it was finished as I grieved for Winnie. She died on June 17, 2017. Ten days before her 16th birthday.
There are two things authors must do: they write in spite of life, and they write in spite of death. Whenever you pick up a book, whether it’s short or long, know that the words on the page may have been written with the backdrop of joy, despair, contentment, and grief. All of them.
I hope that this book is as helpful to you for your own storytelling as it has been for me this summer, in helping me have purpose. Thank you!
So there’s a Goodreads giveaway! Unfortunately, I dropped the ball on getting it set up because I meant for it to start today, but alas. Tomorrow it shall be. So, enter tomorrow! At least if you live in the United States.
Goodreads Book Giveaway
The A-Zs of Worldbuilding
by Rebekah Loper
Giveaway ends October 08, 2017.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
