New Year's Resolutions

My blog about New Year's Resolutions at Tote Bags n' Blogs on December 30th whipped up the inspiration and forced me to plot out the following year's writing and writing-associated plans.

The latter, for me, means promotion. I'm not good at promotion and yet I've been marketing the family B&B in South Australia's Clare Valley - www.wutheringheights.com.au - for years.

No, I'd rather be writing the next book!

My big, blue-eyed girl as she earnestly told me
her New Year's Resolutions
 were to eat more vegetables and spend more time with mummy.

However, things change and with three e-releases in the next six months (including under my Beverley Oakley pseudonym) my books will become much more accessible to the public, both price-wise and physically.

Previously, my lovely UK-published hardcovers were primarily acquired by libraries with prices in Australia that made it difficult for them to compete with their cheaper counterparts.

Now my favourite book, Lady Farquhar's Butterfly, which came out last year in Large Print, is being published as an e-book by Hale. I just wish I had a link for it. Mysteriously, it's disappeared into the ether, though its release date was three days ago.

Hopefully, Rake's Honour, my debut erotic Regency Historical novella which is due for release on January 9th, will make its appearance smoothly, without the associated trauma. Yes, it is traumatic planning for a release, organising advertising and blogging, only to experience the fizzing disappointment of discovering one's book is a chimera which can't be explained until the editorial offices buzz back to life after the new year and there's someone to look into its mysterious disappearance for me.

Enough of grumbling. 2012 is set for being a fabulous year with lots of last year's groundwork coming to fruition. I have two erotic Regencies scheduled for release and am working to meet tomorrow's deadline for another one to be hopefully included in an anthology.

I also have a completed Regency Historical (called The Reluctant Wife and which is not erotic) which Musa has requested after seeing the partial but which got sidelined after Total-e-bound accepted Rake's Honour and Lady Lovett's Little Dilemma (due for release on July 2, 2012). My husband's careful critiquing of The Reluctant Wife has laid bare a major character flaw on the heroine's part - she's not sympathetic enough - so poor old Emily McCartney requires a lot of remedial work. Nevertheless, I'd say any woman forced to marry a man she doesn't know in order to legitimise the unborn child of her dead fiancé, only to lose the baby within weeks, has a big cross to bear and we should all cut her some slack.

Then there's the first draft of another Beverley Eikli Regency Historical as well as 30,000 words of my my 1960's-set illicit diamond smuggling story in the African Kingdom of Lesotho (where I spent my first years) written in collaboration with my 80-year-old father.

Anyway, I intend to blog every Monday, transferring my blog from my website to my Blogger site, here.

I'll talk about the books under my Beverley Eikli name as well as my Beverley Oakley name, though I'll have two separate websites (www.beverleyeikli.com and www.beverleyoakley.com) with excerpts of my forthcoming books on each respective site.

In the meantime, Happy New Year and may at least 50 per cent of your New Year's Resolutions be realised. If I'm needing inspiration I need look no further than my husband whose resolution last year was to lose weight. This year he tipped the scales at 23kg less than he weighed last New Year! So well done, Eivind (whose command slot on the 737 has just come up!!!).