Preternatura—Looking Forward, Looking Back

Holy cow—is it already 2013? Happy New Year!

Seems like the New Year is always a good time to look back—and to look forward. As I mentioned earlier this month, I wanted to make some changes to the blog and I appreciate everyone’s input. This week, you’ll start seeing some of those changes in place, and more will occur as the month goes on.

First, it was hard for folks (including me) to keep up with the book club idea, so the Preternatura Book Club has been officially laid to rest. You’ll also find a couple of new additions to the righthand sidebar. First, the blog will be offering up more book reviews thanks to a cast of reviewers—the ones currently listed have already submitted reviews, but there are several more of you who’ve expressed an interest in reviewing and I’ll add you as we go along. Thanks SO MUCH for everyone who volunteered! Finally, you’ll find a Blog Roll in the righthand column, containing some of my favorite blogs. If you are Preternatura follower and I’ve missed your blog (sorry), please shoot me an email and let me know so I can add it.

So the schedule will look like this, more or less:

Monday: New Releases and Reader’s Choice Contest

Tuesday and Thursday: Readers Write (reviews), with a weekly giveaway, author interview, or guest post

Wednesday: Shop Talk (a topic about genre fiction, the publishing industry, or other discussions of interest to readers and writers)

Friday: Free-for-all Friday—this might be an author interview, guest post, a “retro review” of an older book, a multi-book contest, a special Readers Write review, or…sheesh…you never know!

Sunday: Scene snippets from a work in progress or recent release, and weekly winners.

Now, since it is the first day of 2013, let’s look back where Preternatura has come from since I began the blog on December 9, 2009 – 973 blog posts ago (OMG). The first-ever post was called A Nosedive Off the High-rise and I feel so jaded now as I read it now. LOL. 

I wasn’t sure what to blog about. I was navel-gazing while waiting (and waiting and waiting) to get the Sentinels series off the ground. I was struggling to begin an unruly paranormal romance novel called Stockholm, featuring a vampire named Galen in Stockholm, Alabama....Yeah, that eventually got renamed Redemption, Aidan, and Penton, respectively.

By March 2010, I was proclaiming that I would never ever ever want an eReader. I’m on my second Kindle now, and, while I still like to handle print books, I loooove my Kindle Fire.

In September 2010, I had my first author mini-interview, with steampunk author Cherie Priest. It took another year or so for this to become a regular feature.  Other early author interviews you might have missed: Jennifer Estep; Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim series); Sarah Beth Durst; and Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.

In November 2010, I officially went on record as saying I wouldn’t have a pseudonym. Hear that, Susannah Sandlin? Ha!.

The first Reader’s Choice Contest occurred on Monday, January 3, 2011. How time flies!

On August 23, 2011, I debuted the cover of Royal Street…almost two years after signing the contract and still eight months before release. Sigh.

On March 17, 2012, came the cover reveal for River Road. It had actually been revealed on a couple of websites earlier but my publisher forgot to show it to me, so I was kind of revealing it after the fact. And this situation is about to be a "deja vu all over again" with Elysian Fields, I think. 

In April, I was back in New Orleans for the launch of Royal Street, and the crazy roller coaster that was 2012 officially got underway.

Four book releases and a few hundred blog posts later, here we are. Thanks to all of you for your support, for reading the blog, for reading the books, for your love of reading. Here’s to 2013!