Life in a Northern Town

There was a great review of Freebird in yesterday’s News-Miner (our local paper) – you can read it here!

Lawlor spins out a slice-of-life tale of the minor mishaps and small triumphs that [protagonist] Karen experiences as she settles into life amid a collection of mostly lovable losers who are in Fox because they’re so cantankerous they can’t even hack it in Fairbanks proper. It isn’t a deep read, but it is a sweet account of a group of people with exceedingly strong and usually clashing personalities trying to find some semblance of tranquility despite their close proximity to one another as neighbors or family members.

Also, I think I forgot to link to this at the time, but SL Huang had a really fantastic rec/review of Freebird at her blog recently:

It can be hard to write flawed characters without losing the audience, but somehow all of the characters in Freebird manage to be human and still keep us rooting for them.  Or perhaps we root for them because they are so human. … They have all different views (politically, morally, and philosophically they’re all over the map) and all different relationships with each other (some hate each other, some love each other, some tolerate each other, and everything in between) and they’re still all people we like.  Three-dimensionality at its finest.

Full reviews at both links. Thank you very much to both reviewers!

I had two local book signings last week, at Gulliver’s and Forget-Me-Not Books, both of which went well! I sold some books and saw some friends, and had a lot of fun.

Today I’m feeling accomplished because I just finished a draft of a story for an anthology called Big Damn Heroines from Storm Moon Press (here’s their open anthology call page). The open call describes the anthology as “plus-sized women kicking ass”, and I really wanted to write something for it, so I’ve been working on that story over the last couple of weeks. (The rough draft clocks in at about 19,000 words, which is a leeeeetle longer than I was aiming for, but the maximum for the anthology is 20K, so I’m still under!) I also finished the rough draft of a 35K novella in November, which I’ve been calling the “lesbian werewolves in Alaska story”. It’s going to need a pretty major rewrite because the villain essentially comes out of nowhere 2/3 of the way through the story, so I need to figure out how to bring him in earlier, and some sort of plausible motivation other than (as it currently stands) apparently just being evil. So now I have both of those to rewrite, and I have my urban fantasy novel to edit and hopefully send out to agents in the next couple of months; I’m definitely keeping busy.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.