Moonshine’s 1st Birthday!

Today, Moonshine celebrates the 1st anniversary of its US release!

One year ago today, my little book about bisexual flapper wizards living in a volcanic hellscape full of gang violence, gentrification, and sexy fae monsters had its Stateside debut.

Haven’t picked it up yet? Let me make it easy, since I’m so very helpful:

Ebook : Angry Robot | Amazon | Kobo | B&N 
Paperback : 
Powell’s | Amazon | B&N
Accessible formats: Large Print, Braille & Synthesized Audio

(You can also try checking your local library! I know quite a few have bought copies or have the ebook available.)

If I can get raw for a second, my debut year was, um, hard. Turns out full-time grad school and part-time day job/full-time day job and part-time grad school really eat up a lot of the hours that a debut author needs to work on editing and book promotion and writing more books. There were also a couple of walls hit that didn’t have anything to do with my non-writing life, and rolling with those punches has been a challenge. (You wouldn’t think that an author would forget what rejection feels like from the querying process, and yet here I am like, “Who could have predicted how disappointing this would be?”) And of course there’s forces outside of my life entirely that have impacted my debut experience for the worse–remember when a violent fascist rally in Seattle took place on the same day and a block away from my first author reading ever? Because I do.

I’ll remember that one into my grave.

But! Overall it’s been a delight to have Moonshine out in the world (and to not have to worry about editing it anymore, whew!), and I’ve been so glad to see people connecting with it, even all across the globe. (There are people buying it in Iceland, what!) People have expressed so much passion for Soot City and Daisy and Vicks and even Andre Swarz, and it’s just been so cool. Maybe that sounds a weak descriptor of how it feels to know that my story is resonating with people, but it’s true. And besides, what do you want from me? Powerful, impactful descriptions? Like I’m some kind of writer or something?

As for what’s next, there’s a lot up in the air right now, so it’s hard to say. My main focus is graduating, which is coming up in June, so hopefully once that gets cleared out of the way I’ll have more concrete writing updates. I can say that at the moment that there is no more Moonshine content on the horizon. If that changes, trust me, I will be shouting about it as soon as I can, but for now, I’m working on a few new projects–my current draft, which is still in its infant stages so much so that I don’t even have a working title yet, and good ol’ Hellslayer (if you’ve been following my writing pre-Moonshine, you might recognize the name), which is still… what it is. I don’t even know what to say about Hellslayer anymore. I’m hoping as I hammer things out with my new book, I’ll have more content-wise to chat about here, but it’ll mostly be word count updates for a while.

But, this post is about Moonshine, and there’s plenty of Moonshine content to keep you, uh… content. Sorry, it just occurred to me that “content” (n.) and “content” (adj.) are spelled the same. Distracting. Anyway, enjoy all these links for Moonshine miscellanea:

Another brief update on the progress of things

I’ve emerged from my Kingdom Hearts III seclusion and all I have to say is: Woody the toy cowboy didn’t have to throw down as hard as he did.

I basically took the week off from writing, too, but my draft is just over 20K right now, which is a solid start. I’m feeling good about how things are going so far, and now that I’m not desperately chasing that bizarre Kingdom Hearts plot revelation bliss, I can focus back on my work. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to figure out how to restore everything from my website breaking, and while all the basics are back online, I’d really rather not lose all of my old blog posts if I can save them, but that will eat up some of my precious spare time if I try to untangle that knot.

So I think instead I’ll make an effort to update here more and rebuild my blog backlog (my backblog, if you will) from scratch. I have a notion for repackaging some of the blog content I wanted to save as part of Moonshine’s 1st birthday celebration.

Oh, and Moonshine’s 1st birthday of the US release is coming up tomorrow! So expect another update here for that.

Up and running again!

Thanks for your patience, everyone (and thanks again to Anne for tipping me off my that site was down). I’ve managed to recreate my site layout and all of the key pages (I think?), and all of the links should be fixed, as well. I may still try to re-post my old blog entries for the SEO value alone, but at the moment I’m a little pressed for spare time to work on this and I may just have to leave it at the fundamentals for now. I’m especially glad that I was able to recover the text of the content warning page, because that was a wordy one that I wasn’t looking forward to trying to recreate from memory.

Hopefully I can get the ball rolling again with the blog when Moonshine’s 1-year birthday hits, but for the time being, my site’s necessities should all be functional again.

Rebuilding jasminegower.com

I’m unclear what happened, exactly, but my website vanished! And my backups and restore options are failing me. So, I appear to be stuck starting over until I’m able to figure out how to get those backups to work–unless I can’t, in which case I suppose this is the budding start of my new website.

Thanks for your patience as I deal with this.

-Jasmine