Nine Years Blogging

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

This week marks my blog’s ninth birthday!

Happy birthday little blog.

What a year it’s been. I finished my manuscript (after nine long years of work) in December of last year. I found myself a super awesome agent in January. In June he called to tell me that he sold the book. In July I got to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, still high on the news that my book would be published. And with any luck, I’ll be wrapping up a second draft of my second book by the end of this month. Whew.

It seems like a good time to thank you all for being with me on this journey. I have really come to love blogging, and have made some friends I hold in high regard despite the fact that I’ve never actually met them IRL. You know who you are. Because you rock.

What’s Next?

There are a few things on the horizon.

For starters, the book. My publisher wants it to be a spring book, and they already had their 2019 books lined up, so it won’t be coming out until spring of 2020, which feels like a LONG way off, but it will come. And I will be sure to tell you all about this crazy world of publishing as things progress.

Second, I’m going to be revamping the blog. The new design won’t go live until I have a book cover design (and I really don’t know when that will be), but it’s in the works. Stay tuned.

Third, if you’ve been reading along for a while, you know I’ve been blogging less than I used to. A couple years ago I was posting three times a week, but I cut way back because I needed to focus on finishing my novel. Well, now that the writing is on track, we’re gunna party like it’s 2016. Starting in 2019, I will, once again, be posting three times a week: Mondays I’ll share some fun California trivia I’ve picked up while researching stories, Wednesdays will be my usual thoughts on writing, and Fridays will be…

All Scrivener, all the time. I was looking at my analytics recently and I noticed that my scrivener posts get FAR more traffic than anything else I blog about. Just for fun, I made a list of Scrivener tips I could blog about and it’s 60 items long! So starting in 2019, I’ll be posting one Scrivener tip a week. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you don’t miss any of them! (And if you’re not a Scrivener user yet, click here and you can get 10% off if you use my name – just enter APRILDAVILA as your discount code when you check out).

Thank you!

I can’t say enough how grateful I am for the readers who visit my blog, those who leave comments, and those who hang out with me on Twitter. It’s been a pretty amazing journey so far… and I’m already thinking about some sort of epic giveaway I could do next year to celebrate year 10. ARC giveaway, maybe? IndieBound gift certificate? An all expenses paid trip to New York? Not unless my money tree starts flowering – I’m beginning to think that old gypsy lady lied.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.