See Dot Shine

💜🖤🩶🤍❤️

Heads up! Photosensitive viewers may wish to skip the video. It’s pretty flashy. Everyone else … speakers up!

Show and tell.

Yesterday was a big day for self-published books. A very big day for MY book.¹ And a long-awaited day for me. I’ve known about this award win since Halloween but was instructed not to tell anyone until the official announcement was made. It’s been very hard to keep it under wraps, especially since it was such a beautiful thing to have happened to me and my book. I didn’t want to keep all the beauty to myself. I wanted to tell everyone. And now I FINALLY can.

And so can you!

Please share this huge win for me in the places you share things. Please share my book with the YA enthusiasts in your life. Please high-five me in whatever virtual way you see fit. Please high-five yourself for being so supportive and patient with me over the last year as I viciously satirized the traditional publishing industry over how it would never pay me any attention because I refused to write “best sellers.”  Because I insisted on writing stories that made me happy. Stories I wanted to read and share and talk about with other people.

But I forged a way around all that noise. I published my best and biggest book on Wattpad and aimed it at their best and biggest contest.

Winning this award means my book is going to be read widely. It’s going to be shared freely (because it’s FREE). It’s going to make people happy and it’s going to be loved. Because I love it and that’s how the transitive love property works.

❤️➕❤️➕❤️➕❤️➕❤️➕❤️🟰❤️

For a dreamy-eyed YA novelist, a Watty win is a chance to follow in the enviable footsteps of breakout successes like Anna Todd and Beth Reekles. These very young Wattpad starlets are now crushing it professionally (socially, economically, and egomaniacally) in the world of YA fiction.

For a pragmatic, somewhat embittered, middle-aged author, who’s been burned by the capricious spark of mid-level notoriety in the past, winning a Watty is a chance to jump the line, summit the slush, and get loads more eyeballs on my heart’s work.

Either way, it’s cool AF. 😎

On a personal note …

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

While strolling through Staples the other day, an impulse buy serendipitously screamed at me from a display table. A journal titled, Healing Burnout. It had a lavender motif that I dug, so I opened it up to the first page and proceeded to score 100% on the fourteen-point burnout symptoms checklist. It was like having fourteen pointy, red flags shoved in my perpetually tear-stained face.

The writing is on the wall, friends.

I need to take a beat.

As a Christmas present to myself (and to the people who must live with me every day) I am lightening my workload significantly for the month of December, in the hope that I will regain some of my lost story-making mojo in time for the crashing of the New Year cymbals. I also want to spend more time with my family, make merry of Christmas, and get my victory laps in on Wattpad. Because I earned ‘em!

1. If you want to know more about my award-winning YA novel, I wrote about it here and here. And it lives here now and is free to read and free to love. 💜